Taken inspiration from this post: Postal drones could be a useful addition to the eve landscape. I know many in this forum would complain about the idea due to it not being a human flying the freight around, but this concept actually has opportunity to create more player interaction, instead of less.
- Postal drones would be operated by interbus (and potentially some other orgs as well - to create the illusion of market place competition.)
- Postal drones would be a viable target for cargo scanning.
- Shooting an interbus postal drone would give the player a suspect flag.
- Postal drone warp speed would be much slower than the slowest ships in the game… .5au - 1au /s and would use autopilot routes.
- Postal drone transportation would create a voluntary isk sink for the game.
Some potential benefits for player interaction:
- Many people just leave a bunch of trash in random stations, while those people may not bother moving that material themselves, they may consider using an npc service to move it for them.
This creates potential player interaction when the drone is destroyed and the player involved becomes a suspect. (If the drone was hackable, this could also happen on a failed hack.)
- The interface for npc hauling could also be used to advertise player hauling services such as red frog for high value assets that wouldn’t be trusted to the npc haulers. (This would also be another opportunity for an isk sink.)