And of course, older bots are all of a sudden going to become very, very vulnerable to having their eyes messed with. Can even something fearsome like the top tie feeder beat a bunch of T. Preservans which has been modified to shoot, say, -4 into .eyef?
The marco point is well taken but in the name of nit picking clarity, I think you mean shoot -4 into .focuseye, not .eyef.
Presumedly, the top feeder does not (yet) use any of the new eye features and thus never bothers to check the value of .eyef, which for bots that never change their focus eye, will always be the same as the vaule of .eye5. Shooting a -4 into .eyef will therefor not have any effect on bots that never read from that sysvar.
Sooting -4 into .focuseye on the otherhad can really screw up a bot since presumedly it has no DNA to change .focuseye back, it's refvars will from then on represent what is in .eye1, not .eye5.
Again however, the marco point is very well taken. There are many sysvars which if mucked with by another bot or by waste build up can really screw up a bot. And now there are 20 (well, 19) more.