Maybe have it so that all you can really do remotely is arrange to meet x person at y place.
Chalk it up to paranoia about the Space NSA.
Agreed, that'd be a fair compromise.
@chrismdp do you want to make a balanced game, or one people will enjoy playing? Start with the fun and you can balance it later. Of course, not the conversation to be having AFTER your game has gone on sale. And if I sound obnoxious... I bought the game day one on Steam - never even heard about the Kickstarter - and have played, let's see, 11 hours over the course of that first week or so, seeing my save games get knocked out by incompatible updates and then once I got to play further just hitting a wall of frustration. I am legit pissed off with your game. Not you. You seem lovely.
And it's not just me. I see you did a podcast with Brian Rubin, who is my go to guy to follow for space games, and his YT LP series on Sol Trader made me laugh out loud, for all the wrong reasons.
The USP of the game is the ability to foster and grow relationships. The early conversation system that I played made it pretty trivial to make people like you, though I never pushed much past that level due to the tedious missions. I was curious whether the NPCs are also making and breaking relationships or are they all set in stone? Or I should say, is it only player interaction that changes NPC relationships to each other? As conversation choices do affect this.