Will we eventually be able to write or add our own text to the service beacon to describe the mission we're offering in greater detail, with some personalized background?
TL;DRCustom text on service beacons isn't currently part of the end goal, because of profanity and moderation problems, localization, and the aim of making player and NPC beacons look alike.
That's a double-edged sword right there. It's not currently being talked about, but it's been talked about in the past. It's not currently part of the end goal, just for the sake of trying to keep the universe a little clean for some of the kids out there. That just opens up a real Pandora's box of expletives and things like that thrown into text boxes.
I can already see a number of challenges there. One, it's a localization issue. Two, you said earlier in this show, you want the service beacons from players to look just like the service beacons from NPCs. So the very first line in any custom field is going to be, "This is a player request." That will be the first line, to help folks determine whether this is a player. It allows folks to bypass that effort that we're trying to do to make everybody seem like they're all one.
A couple things there. One, funnily enough, we actually had a bug at one point where you could actually type into the money thing. So it actually existed at a point in time that you could do this. But we fixed that. Also, I worked on Elder Scrolls Online, and there you could do mail. You can message other players. The file where you filtered out language was one of the most offensive things in the world. Just imagine all the bad things in the world all in one file to try to filter out language.