[MUD-Dev] [DESIGN] Economy goals (was: Broken currencies)

[Freeman]

> From: Vincent Archer [mailto:archer at nevrax.com]

> Someone mentioned that using a player-run vendor regularly, you end
> up meeting the vendor's owner one day. Sure, but that wasn't my
> point. My point was: "in what way does the vendor increase the
> opportunity for meeting someone", and the answer, for that
> particular purpose, is none. It doesn't add to player-player
> interaction anything that a NPC vendor (which has no player manager)
> wouldn't. If you frequent a specific NPC vendor, you still end up
> meeting one day the other regular customers of said vendor.
 
> A player-run vendor is a way to get more customers, but not a way to
> meet more customers. It sure is better than nothing :)

Just seeing someone doesn't count as "meeting them".  There's not any
meaningful interaction there.

I met vendors' owners and got to know them and interacted with them.
I *never* met anyone at the reagent shop or the bank (and not because
there weren't a heck of a lot of people there, either).

The vendor would stock "stuff", say, but often not precisely the exact
stuff or amount of stuff that I would want.  The vendor established a
meeting place for me to run into the guy that could make precisely the
exact stuff in the amount I wanted.  So, by having a player owned
vendor, I talked to the guy, and got to know him - and in a setting
that allowed us to talk to each other without being interrupted by
other players, or for that matter robbed.

Shopping without player-owned vendors: Go to the bank, spam "WTB
widgets" until someone sells me some widgets or steals all my gold.
Leave, because the bank is crowded and it's hard to have a
conversation there.

Player-owned vendors provided a mechanism for getting two people
together in an intimate setting where they COULD have a conversation
and get to know each other.  Spamming "wtb: whatever" never lead to
forming any relationships with any of the people I was buying from.

Your experience might have been different, but for me player owned
vendors were all plus.  I met more people by buying from their vendors
than I met, in any meaningful way, by purchasing stuff from players
directly.

And that doesn't speak to the people that had their ICQ#'s on their
vendors for special orders...
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