I just read about "agent-smithing", which appears to be a way to assume control of an npc on a friend's ship. This should not be in the game in any form, not even when the npc that is used can not work towards your main character's goals. And here is why: Being far away from your friends in a distant system, not being able to meet them without tens of minutes or even hours of travel is a feature. The remoteness and vastness of being alone in space can only work, if you are consistently in one place, and only with your own character. Allowing to control NPCS would allow players to work towards your real character's benefit, even if the NPCS don't get any money. An example: You are stranded, so you warp to a friend's ship and prepare spare parts so when your friend comes to repair your ship, you have it all prepared in advance. And this should not be allowed. Many gameplay systems that rely on being "lost and alone", require the player to be "stuck" with his main character. Examples: You are crashlanded, you got some life support left and some food. But it won't last for hours. So send a distress signal and then try to survive in or around your ship. If warping into an NPC would be allowed, your character would probably despawn and be in a perfectly safe "logout stasis" field, and all the survival gameplay is skipped. The same for medical gameplay, you get killed an wake up on some stranger's medical ship. Then you get emergent fun of meeting the doctor that fixes you up and drives you to a drop off point. That too would be skipped if players would go into logout stasis and the medical doctor player (who is invested into medical gameplay) is screwed out of his job because the patient that respawned in his ship is an AFK corpse of a player. Escape pod gameplay, your ship is destroyed and you float through space waiting for help. Emergent fun by contacting other players. And the player responding to your call gets to be the savior. Clans with 20 players can abuse it because warping in as npcs on large ships and then they are borg cube ships that can allocate their crew and warp whereever they want. Agent-smithing would ruin many professions in the game that relate around helping or saving other players, because the player who needs help could skip it all and pass the time with being NPC on a friends ship. And lastly, only the remoteness of space would make it fun to meet friends again, after days or weeks in distant systems. Players could meet in bars and exchange stories, instead of an npc version warping in on the friend's ship telling him exactly what happened 1 minute ago akazillion star systems away.