Will reputation expand into purchasing power for shops and vendors? What are the benefits [of reputation]?

That's the plan. In essence, if you think of frequent flyer miles or anything like that in real life, you use it, you get perks. It might be that you get an item for free. It might be that you get 10% off. It might be that now it allows you to access it or load quicker, or you get moved to the front of the line, per se. There's multiple ways for us to go through and do this and make sure that this, to me, is kind of gifting or unlocking stuff for the players and unlocking benefits for them one way or the other. So it could be that that benefit goes from 10% to 15% to 20%, or it could be that you did so well with a certain... oh my gosh, I'm blanking on the word... a certain corporation, now you get to fly their ships or you get to fly one of their ships or something like that. So let's say you're a delivery person. You move up to, let's say, a small delivery van, and then from there in the future, maybe you get to drive a Caterpillar or something like that that's branded Covalex or any other kind of thing. So that's the idea behind it: based off of what they do and what they're geared towards, the mission givers or even the corporations, that's the way that we'll be looking at gifting things and unlocking certain tiers.

And especially if you think about the ship progression in the game, the ship progression is very much driven economically. Obviously, you will have potential other ways, like Todd says, in terms of reputation, to be able to unlock different ships. But from an actor or FPS side of things, if you own an Idris, the choice of which armor or which weapons or which food you should buy is obviously minuscule. You just buy the best that you can get, because the pricing is never going to be the same as an Idris. It's like saying to Jeff Bezos, hey, which island do you want? And then in the same conversation going, which packet of crisps do you want? It doesn't tie up in terms of progression. So reputation is definitely going to be the underpinning of the vertical progression of weapons and armor and all of the gadgets that you'll get access to. Because right now, for example, we have, I think, 30-plus weapons in Star Citizen that are live, and a lot of them provide different play styles, or what I'd classify as horizontal progression. So you could pick the P6-LR, or you could pick the Atzkav. Now, the Atzkav has more of an area-of-effect damage, whereas the P6-LR is more about single strike. But it's a choice about playstyle rather than a choice about one being better than the other. And we do want to offer that vertical progression where you can get better-performing weapons, whether the barrel's been changed or different materials are used to go into making the gun or different innards, so that they are direct upgrades. And those things are things that you shouldn't just be able to go to a store and say, oh, look, it's an extra 10,000 credits or whatever. Those things should be locked behind missions. And then that will give players a bit more clear objectives, like, oh, I want to get that thing, I have to do X, Y and Z. It gives reason or purpose to the play, because obviously we have this giant sandbox environment, and we're making a sandbox game, but it's nice to have objectives inside that sandbox, so you can decide, okay, I want to go and do this, or my goal is to get a bigger ship, so I'm going to go do trading or mining because I need to get credits. Or, oh, I want to get this particular item or gear, so I'm going to do these specific missions. And then you can work towards your own personal goals. So reputation is a fundamental addition to the game.

I think there's a ton of opportunity for other teams, mission teams, content teams, feature teams, to all look at the reputation system when it's fully going and firing on all thrusters and ask how they could integrate this into their new content.

Like Rich said before, or maybe it was you that said it, I do view this as a linchpin, a fundamental building block for the way that we unlock things and move the game forward for the players.