Will we be able to trade aUEC with other players?
TL;DRPlayer-to-player aUEC trading isn't in the game yet; the initial design is to evolve service beacons into contracts, and group payment sharing would come later.
Now, some variation of this question comes up quite a bit. There's a notion that the trading system is somehow linked to the grouping system, and I don't believe that's the case. Trading system would be more a service beacon kind of thing.
Not quite. It sounds like you have an answer. I'll let you go first.
A little bit. I guess they're only linked in the sense that sending people money and other items and stuff, in my opinion, should be handled using similar aspects of the shop code, which is something else that I wrote. So they're only linked in the fact that I would work on both features. But I do want to see that, because right now there's not an easy way to send aUEC to your friends outside of service beacons. So I want to see a design on my desk to get more shop stuff for trading and sending money and things.
I can already add that we've actually touched on this question on the aforementioned Calling All Devs. And while trading is not actively in the game right now, the initial design step is for it to be an evolution of the service beacon system. I don't remember what episode that was, but you can find all episodes of Calling All Devs available now on YouTube.
It's part of the whole contract concept of: I'm going to create a job and send it out to a particular person and they'll accept that. And then when things conclude, you'll transfer money. That seems to be the core element of it. We had wanted to get mission sharing, reward sharing, all these aspects into the group system. But those, again, start to balloon out into whole systems that are, A, not already set up to think about the party and groups and influence moving around in that way, and B, have a lot of things to test. So it was very much not safe to get that in in the timeline for tier zero, particularly because just getting everything built over to the new system took a fair amount of the time that we had. So I imagine that you'll be setting up essentially a contract and rules for how payment gets distributed among your party, among your group if you have any org dues or something like that. Those would all be individual things that get set up. And the party would just have an umbrella of rules for how to handle most situations that you can then deviate from, to make it as easy to use as possible and also give you the customization that you need.