@danderson thanks for the storytelling! No Man's Sky had something a bit similar to this, back when you couldn't just travel to anywhere in the galaxy with portals. and the practice remained for a while longer, because there's a particular galaxy (Odyalutai, galaxy 256) that you can only get to by joining the session of another player already there. but the Elite thing is way cooler and more in-fiction and socially emergent.