Back in 2017, Dave Haddock said he'd get back to us on a question about the lore behind the economies of the UEE, Xi'an, Banu and Vanduul: does any part of the UEE, Banu or Xi'an have a guaranteed basic income, from a lore perspective, not from a gameplay perspective?

I might have to get back to you on it. Check back in in 2021? Yeah, I mean, again, this would purely be from the lore fiction perspective, not reflective of gameplay or player experience and stuff like that, so I'm going to caveat that. But it makes sense to me, the idea that the UEE, because they have the Common Law thing, which is the basic rules that every planet in the UEE has to abide by, whether it's represented or not. These are the foundational rights and services that the public can and should expect. And it makes sense to me that they would have organized a kind of basic income level.

It might come out more in the form of public services, though, rather than giving you credits per se, like providing basic levels of health care, shelter and food that you can have access to. Because gameplay-wise, we don't want you to not be able to respawn because you're broke. So there's a certain level of health care that you can expect. But, as Dave was caveating on this, don't expect, if we do have basic income levels, for players to be able to get free 500 credits every day.

Well, actually, I read that as minimum wage, that there was a minimum that everyone would have to be paid if they worked at a job.

Oh, I interpreted it as that thing of everyone gets $5,000.

Yeah, we read that totally differently. I was thinking of minimum wage, that they would establish basically an empire-wide minimum wage.

That might tie into our BLA certification for jobs. We have this certification process that legal jobs go through, which means they meet the safety requirements and the company is legit, and it might also be that they meet a minimum payment requirement for the job, and those are the up-and-up jobs when you see that contract. You know it's safe, it's good, and then of course the more interesting jobs will not be certified.

So it took me two years, but...

And lore-wise, we have some lore on the Xi'an, Banu and Vanduul economies. That is still very much a question up in the air, because all those species, well, not the Vanduul, but the Banu and Xi'an deal with humans in UEC, so that might be the way that you end up interacting with them for the entirety of the game. It's hard enough doing one good economy. So we'll see how it turns out. There's definitely been talk and interest in it, but it's definitely a down-the-road kind of, wouldn't that be great to have?

And it also might be, again, a disparity between the fictional universe versus the player experience. Yes, the Xi'an probably have their own economy, but will the players see it? Like Will said, probably they'll all accept UEC.