Will reputation affect selling prices or taxes on trading or selling loot at some point in the future?
TL;DRReputation is planned to affect buying and selling, including prices, taxes and access to items, and is described as fundamental to progression; losing standing won't remove items but may block repairs or replacements.
Absolutely, absolutely. That is one of the core... There's a portion of reputation that is one of our very public, very core plans for it. There's perks. You've seen a very small amount of that with the bounty hunter reputations, where you get a little bit more in mission rewards as you rank up with certain organizations. This would fold under the expansion of that into many more varieties and much more interesting perks. That's actually one of the simpler ones, frankly. It might be a specific shop, if it's a little mom-and-pop store, where you've got a really good reputation with that specific person, or it might be company-wide, if there's like Garrity Defense, then you can get all of those various stores. But yes, absolutely, when you're selling, taxes and all of that could be affected by reputation in certain areas.
Yeah, buying and selling. We talked about hiding things behind reputation, so you've got to be X reputation, you've got to be a private with us in order to buy our weapons. It also ties into subscriber flair as well, right? We've always talked about wanting to put a subscriber shop in there. So guess what? Subscriber is just a reputation that is a boolean, on or off.
When we say, oh, this thing will give you X item, it generally will more give you access to X item, and that's why when you fall below that rank, we aren't going to take that out of your inventory, because that's just rude, frankly. It's that the item might decay to a point where it is broken or needs to be repaired or something. You won't be able to get it back in working order until you are above certain reputations, or get a replacement until you're above that.
As we move forward with the game, obviously, wear and tear is going to become a much bigger influence on your gameplay. Right now, we do a lot of things with ships where we basically just give you all brand new stuff when you claim insurance. Eventually, the intent is that your parts are wearing out. So if you lose your rep to have access to it, you may not be able to get it repaired by them, or you may not be able to get another one. I can't express enough how fundamental reputation is to our progression system. It is huge, and it's going to be tied into as many things as make sense, but in most of the stuff that we work on, it's going to be a factor.