Hire bots to:

* Haul cargo behind you. Basically tail you thru wormholes, go into the same station you go in, fill up cargos with the first thing you buy or sell the things you sell.

* Act as wingmen. Tail an assigned ship thru wormholes, and protect it, defaulting to you if you die.

Once you die, the hire should be ceased. They should be payed each minute? Once credits are used up, they leave.

There should be a limit on how many hires you can have. (Ten max maybe at a time?)

I would like it better if they were just bot and paid for. 50k for the bot.

I agree for the 'bought and paid for' idea. however, isn't 50k a bit much for a bot? bots are too easy to kill; someone might just take your wingman bot out for fun, and then you will end up having to defend your bot

or somebody like me with 10mil could buy an army of bots and havoc a sector.

/me dreams

No no, there would be a max number of escorts, like in EV/O/N.

/me hires node 0....

/me hires 12 [NPC] Gentu's (12 was the EVN limit of hired escorts; you could have many more fighterbay craft in formation)

node 0 is dead now :( but his replacement goes by the name of "extreme prejudice" :D

But whats If people don't use them to trade? and would the bots kills count as your PKs?

correction, Celkan:

the limit to hired and/or captured escorts is 6 (six).

Oh, I'd really rather not have bots hired. I'd prefer having bulletin boards in stations where you can post requests, though no actual text input areas for public bulletins. Just having contextual menus to chose which type of work you are hiring for, and an input for how much you are willing to pay for the job complete. This way actual players can be hired and further developing the economy system.

I'm completely with Xorbital, AI escorts are really important in a SINGLE player game but have no place in a MMO game. The AI should be used for tasks that humans don't want to do, or won't do consistently. Like protecting newbs in a home sector, enforcing 'laws', making a given sector harder to travel through, etc. An escort by is helping a player. Therefore the task they're doing is obviously one that at least one player is interested in.

I would like to see bots that trade, and bots that protect the bots that trade. That would keep the dynamic economy fairly active everywhere, and would help mining stations/miners greatly.