Are service beacons the intended way for us to find crewmates, recruit them and pay them at the end of a mission?
TL;DRService beacons weren't really intended as the way to hire crew; other mechanisms like recruitment agencies and the party system are being discussed, with beacons serving as a way to meet players and build lasting relationships.
It wasn't really intended to be that. We want you to, the same way that you would hire NPCs in the game, which obviously isn't there yet, but through some sort of recruitment agency, maybe if you're looking to be a crewmate on somebody's ship, you can go in and apply, put your information in, and then you can get hired alongside any other NPCs. Or that's part of the networking and social aspect of the game too. We want people to engage with each other, like, oh, hey, you did a really good job hauling my stuff from here to there or providing this escort service. We're running a big ship. Do you want to be a part of it? It could absolutely be looked at as kind of the proving grounds of, yeah, this is what I'm capable of. And maybe that's how you get hired into some of these bigger organizations or something. But it definitely wasn't intended for, this is how I'm going to hire crew members, staff my ship up. They're talking about some other mechanisms of how you're going to hire crew members with the capital ship gameplay team and the multi-crew team.
And additionally, there's work going on right now actually on the party system in LA. And so that's another way that you can get players together, and they can do things like potentially start doing missions together, maybe even service beacon contracts. I don't know. It's still in development. We're still thinking about what all of it means. But I think the service beacons will be a good way to put players together. And then you'll have experiences, and maybe you'll have a really good experience with someone, and then you'll say, let's actually get in a party together and let's go multi-crew and go do this mission or go do something else. And now we have this more permanent relationship. So the service beacon is a contract that has a duration and a satisfaction. It gets satisfied. But then, if you want to have something that's a little bit longer lasting, maybe you join a party, and then maybe that gets bigger and you start an org or something like that. The service beacons [don't] solve all these problems, but I think it'll be an important part to make it all come together.