First tier of guilds and associations: the Wayfarers Club from the Aegis Vulcan promotion isn't just sales copy or lore, it's actually a guild or association that's going into the game as a functional organization?
TL;DRRoberts says guilds and associations like the Wayfarers Club are meant to be real in-game organisations offering paid membership perks, with only the very beginning of the infrastructure planned for the next release and more built up later.
Yeah, so we've always had a plan, and this was true in Privateer or things like Freelancer, that you have non-player organizations or guilds, like the classic ones of the Merchant Guild or the Mercenary Guild. And so we have those, and we also want to have a level of associations, like the Wayfarers Club, almost like AAA in space. And like you have here in America with AAA, they have services that come out and they'll tow you or whatever. And also if you go to certain places, they'll give you discounts, because they pre-negotiate a discount. And so we actually want to start to put the infrastructure in for the various guilds and associations. So in 3.2, it will be the very beginning of that. But as we go through, we'd build much more of it up. And so what you would do is you would essentially earn some money or pay with your UEC to be a member of this guild that you would pay your dues to. But you get benefits for it, like for instance, jobs or missions that maybe you couldn't get somewhere else, or you could get help in a way that you wouldn't normally get it. Or you get discounts in areas. That's sort of what we were talking about for the Wayfarers Club. So it's the beginning of that. And there will definitely be quite a lot of these that would be focused on different... like I'm sure there'll be a salvagers organization. Various different ones in the world that you can... there's an ex-military one you could join or whatever it would be. So we want to start to put that in to lay that infrastructure, because it's quite important for, I think, the long-term gameplay.
So yeah, that stuff we were talking about in the Aegis Vulcan promotion wasn't just flavor copy.
Yeah, nothing's just flavor copy. If you read it in the fiction stuff, we're usually thinking that at some point that would actually exist in the world. That's the whole point. So the writers do really nice fiction stuff, but a lot of that fiction stuff is specifically seeding what we want to do long term. So don't just view it as fiction. It is highlighting where the game will go.