Why can't we delete or sell ships earned in-game?asked by Mvoo

It's ultimately a design question. There's a big design and creative element to this as a feature. But we did dig out some interesting information to talk about from the tech perspective.

I asked Benoit the question: can we do it, technically? If someone came to us and said this needs to happen, could we do this?

The answer is yes, we can do it. And I can add some color to some of the elements here. So in 4.8, there was a major change to the game, the back end specifically, where we introduced a new entitlement system. Now, for those who don't know, the entitlement system tracks what you own. This used to only track your actual platform entitlements, which are either elements you've received through Subscriber flair or actual real-money purchases or things like that. Now, since 4.8, the system tracks everything that you own, whether you bought it in an in-game shop or through any other acquisition method except stealing. That's the only one that's not covered by this.

You're essentially the legal owner of this. You've been identified as having legal rights to this item. So when we go back to the give, when you give it to another player, you would legally give them the rights. So we'd have to tell the entitlement service about that.

Correct. And the entitlement system also tracks your insurance loadouts. And so through this, the ability to sell a deed like this would involve the entitlement system, and that system can do it. Obviously, we already have wallets for transactions and other things like that. Maybe some color commentary here: there's also active work in consolidating a lot of the economy-adjacent systems together. So we have the wallet system, which is called the ledger service, that actually drives all of your monetary currencies. And there's all different systems that attach to that. So we're bringing all those into a single economy system, which will include, at some point, marketplace features, reactive scenario features and other elements of the economy. If we did build a system where you could sell an existing ship, then those systems would be involved in making the transaction. We already have the ability to do that right now.

Yeah, so deleting a ship could actually be a zero-cost transaction and maybe even be recoverable in that case, in case you've done it in a moment of weakness.

Deleter's remorse.

Yeah, exactly. And now the advantage of the new system too is that it persists cross-patch. So your entitlements are completely persistent cross-patch. We don't recover them from the previous patch. They are just there. And so that's why we no longer have issues like, oh, I lost my ships between patches, or things like that. Those are completely persisted by the entitlement system now.