Great questions, xAckie. And lots of interest by lots of peeps too. What we've seen so far is only the bare bones of DUST, just enough to beta test the core mechanics, the game balance, and a few other things - the important foundations, for sure, but NOT what DUST will be about at all.

Firstly, the market is a wild beast, it has no rules. It is the same market that exists in the real world, but with NO regulation, NO domestic or international law, NO recourse, NO justice. This is New Eden's market, subject only to the vagaries of her immortal pod pilots. The market is blind and heartless, and plays no favorites.

But raw resource distribution in New Eden is rigged. Right now it's only the mega-alliances who hold moon minerals, especially technetium, who can afford the supercapital fleet composition required to hold the moons and engage in nullsec manufacturing. This is not by accident, it's classic positive feedback, a self-perpetuating dynamic that won't change until CCP changes it. This dynamic has led inexorably to the stagnation of nullsec in EVE.

For us Mercs, that means a couple of things. If CCP changes nothing, we will be relegated to hisec pubmatches and losec faction warfare. In the long run, we may get hired to affect sov timers in nullsec, but we will forever be the employees of EVE alliances.

If CCP does decide to shake things up(and they have been thinking long and hard about how to accomplish this), it will mean that we Mercs somehow gain access to the existing moon minerals in meaningful quantities, or some other equally valuable resource, or that we control some vital part of the prospecting/mining/refining/production chain. My hope is that top-end resource extraction/refining/manufacturing will require Pilots and Mercs to work together in several Prisoner's Dilemma scenarios to maximize profits.

There is only one market in New Eden, so the question for Mercs comes down to: How much wealth will we control? And the answer depends solely on CCP, and the ideas and feedback we give them.

There's a lot more that could be said, but it's all secondary to the preceding. We will have access to resources, we will manufacture, some important things we will co-manufacture with Eve Pilots. But it all comes down to who's got the bigger iskies.

If the EVE alliances are smart, they'll keep us mercs uneducated, poor and starved for resources. If some of us get some gumption they should eliminate and/or co-opt our leadership. Then they can use us as cheap labor to extract our OWN resources from our OWN territories to fuel their military-industrial machine. I know this sounds like crazy-talk, but i've heard such a thing is possible.