[MUD-Dev] Blog about GDC implies changes to MMORPG population

[John Buehler]

Allan Hill writes:
> --- Damion Schubert <ubiq at austin.rr.com> wrote:

>> The actual act of crafting was, for me, merely the middle step.
>> The fun was getting the goods, and then selling it.

> That might make you a merchant, not a crafter, in a game that
> supported both...  ;-) You hire out the crafting step.

Be sure to give him and the crafters other options.  Assuming that
crafters are the source of his goods and that crafters must sell
goods might impair the ability of the game to provide players with
the experience that they're really after.  Crafters might well just
forage to obtain raw materials and then give away what they make.
As a merchant, Damion might use some black box manufacturing
technique (e.g. NPCs) in order to produce the items that he sells.
And the sets of goods in each pool may be disjoint.  Factories may
only produce practical items, while crafters may only produce vanity
items.

Merchants may be the only ones who build up personal estates, while
crafters are destined to be happy-go-lucky types.  It all depends on
what merchant and crafter enthusiasts are typically after.  There's
a whole world of investigation yet to take place to determine what
careers are really interesting to players.  They may be a taxonomy
as structured as Bartle's "types" waiting to be discovered.

JB
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