The Money Problem

[darthSaKi]

I'm new to Era. Sorta. I played Era on a trial before I had a P2P in 2002, then I moved on to Valikorlia, and I have about 3000 hours on that server. I've logged on to Era in passing since that time, but, all in all, I'm new to Era.

Being new, I see a problem. There seem to be two tiers of players, those who have things and those who don't. The people who have things participate in an active market of buying, selling and trading. These transactions take place, by and large, over mass messages. A market is a good thing, a commodity based game needs one. But this market has a problem. The problem is that the only people participating in the market are well-established players. Players who have things. The items on the market have monetary values of 70k, 100k, 1mil or more. New players earning money mining or at another profession cannot hope to earn this amount of money. Having upper tier items is not a problem, the problem is that there is no bridge between low-grade store-bought items and the upper tier items. Another forum member articulated on a related thread that players don't expect 1 mil cash for their items, they want similar-tier items to be traded. How are have-nots ever going to get in the club? The division is cemented, you are a have or a have not and there isn't much between.