What mechanism will prevent abuse from the person putting out a service beacon? For example, I ask for an escort through an area where I have friends setting up an ambush for us. They, not me, disable him and salvage his ship for profit. Now I don't have to pay for a successful escort attempt, the person who took up the contract is out money and his ship, and my friends have a ship and spare parts to sell. Is that working as intended?
TL;DRThe speakers don't see a way to program against collaborative abuse like a staged ambush, relying instead on the rating system to weed out offenders, and one thinks the remaining risk is a desirable part of dealing with real people.
That's a collaborative effort that I don't know how you protect against. There is a rating system that is part of this. So if this is a consistent thing that keeps happening, eventually these people will get weeded out. And if you only want a four-star rated or a five-star rated person to escort you, then clearly they have a reputation for getting you to the other side safely or performing the service that you're asking for to a high level of completion. So I think that the rating system will be a big part of filtering that out. It's hard to imagine a rule set that we could program to prevent something like that, although we're definitely going to try and do our best to catch as many of these edge cases as possible. But that's a really complex situation.
I think what I would give as a counterargument is, yes, I think that the rating system does help weed that out and smooth out those experiences, but I think it's actually important that we don't remove them, because I think it's actually a very interesting part of it, that you're not guaranteed. You're dealing with actual people, and in space, when you're dealing with actual people, there's always that little bit of danger. How much do you know this person? Can you trust them? If you just get picked up by a random person, yeah, there's a little bit of a social contract there, but that's not a guarantee. And I think that's actually an interesting part of the experience. You have those guarantees whenever you engage with the mission content. Now, yeah, you might get ambushed, but it'll be part of the mission. With this, yes, you know that the person has a particular rating, so more than likely you're going to get an experience that you expect. But you will have times when you'll be surprised. And I think that's actually a good thing.
It also allows you to build up the idea of this economy aspect to it, because if you're known for being reliable for escorting people, you can charge a little extra for that, because, hey, you know I'm going to be good for this, versus, oh, I'm kind of broke and I need help, well, I'll take someone that might be a risk. So you kind of build this. The longer you do it as a provider, you start going, okay, I'm proving I can do this. I'm building a reputation, and that reputation can have monetary impact.