Officially speaking we do not want to get involved in any real world money transactions. We reserve the right to change our mind later if the world turns into that direction, but for now we do not want to endorse using Starbase in anything involving real world money. We will not allow it in the Terms of Service. The main purpose is preventing any 3rd party websites selling ingame stuff for real world money.
Some background:
At present we do not have any plans to sell e.g. "ingame credits" or other such items. Starbase is not built around players using virtual cash or anything of the sort. If the game ever comes to other platforms than Steam, then we may be forced to itemize credits to enable multi-platform gameplay (helps with refunds etc), but currently we do not have such plans.
Currently the game does not offer any "real" commission system for ships for ingame credits, or other commitments either, so any player-to-player commitments and offers should be made with caution. The game does have trading, and once we have better blueprint chips working you could more easily buy (trade) a blueprint chip from another player (instead of using Mail and trusting another player to reciprocate their part).
In the Terms of Service (coming soon) we will do our best to prevent any use of real world money in connection with Starbase. If we are made aware of any such use, we'll look at it case-by-case and see what makes sense (we reserve the right to e.g. discontinue access to Starbase of the accounts taking part).
I would like to add that this is a free world (hopefully for everyone reading this, anyway) and nothing stops two people from making an agreement between themselves, but from our perspective we have to treat all our players fairly, and making too many exceptions here or turning a blind eye on "innocent" cases might fail that fair treatment.
We're aware of the "service" argument (e.g. commissioning a ship designer to design a ship specifically for you and paying real world money) being different from other goods, but at the moment it feels a little difficult to define. We also don't want to end up in the middle of any failed commission arguments, it's not our place to begin with but would eventually turn against the game. So it would be infinitely better to keep real world money out of the equation altogether and not risk us being alerted to it, and just use ingame credits for ship commissions.
This is a topic that will surely get more thoughts from us as we go further in our development journey, but here's the initial thoughts.
