Can I crew my tanker with NPCs and order them to harvest gas from a nearby gas giant and sell it on the market, even while I'm not online?asked by Loot Fisk
TL;DRProbably not: players will likely have to fly along with any hired NPCs rather than letting them harvest while offline, because of griefing risks and the AI not knowing how to react, though this may change.
Oh, you have pushed Rob's big red button. Rob does not like earning money when you're not online. Now, that doesn't mean you're not going to be able to, because things change. But anything I have a say in, I try to push away from that. You will probably have to fly with any NPCs you hire. They don't just go off and do their own thing and then come back.
Think about that from the griefing or the other side of that. It sounds really cool, like I'm going to go set my guy's thing, I'm going to go to bed, make some money. But what happens if you get blown up while you're in bed and you didn't have a chance? The NPCs are still AI. They don't know to fly away. They don't know what you want them to do. There's just too much there that could happen on the negative side to warrant that. And I think that's probably a good reason not to allow that to happen. But again, we've got to get to that point and see how that works.