End game and crafting: a topic for discussion

[Stihllodeing]

...snip (post#10) ...and the economy were controlled by the crafters back then.....

While I liked the entire post, this is what I thought was most relevant to the thread. I immediately thought about what Hyrist eluded to in post #20. If you were to have the class players dependent on disciple players, you would create an environment directly manipulated by those with access. You would essentially influence players to become segregated and recluse to the population as a whole.

When you create an environment that gives one particular group of individuals the power/means to directly hold another group hostage, when the sample group is large enough, they will. You will have players who feel the game is social, when in fact they are disillusioned to the fact they are only social within their small demographic and antisocial to the player base as a whole. It's not intentional for the most part but people tend to mistake their experiences with 10-20 (or so) individuals in an mmo as an accurate measure to judge the social activities as a whole for that mmo, which is of course unknowingly ignorant and bias but understandable as it is natural.

The following quote is an example of the aforementioned misconception:

Yeah sure did suck when people had to be social in a MMO.

post #11 in response to a post by Enis