"Human NPCs serve an extremely important role within the economy of UO because they are permanent. That is, real players disconnect to go to bed or (heaven forbid) to go to work and are therefore not online the majority of the time"
Other insights:
"An interesting economic phenomenon occurred concerning the fee charged by vendors. When they were first implemented, vendors charged a fee based on the resource price of their inventory regardless of their sales. With this in mind, clever players realized that they could set the price for the goods to be extraordinarily high and thus prevent anyone from buying them. This, it turned out, was a very effective way of creating a safety-deposit box since the vendors can not be robbed. Players started buying vendors for the sole purpose of increasing their hoarding space. This exacerbated hoarding problems and also resulted in a form of suburban sprawl where people built tents and attached vendors consuming valuable land. The designers ultimately fixed these problems with an elegant economic solution: the vendors now charge a fee based on the value of the goods assigned by the player. Thus, players can still set the values too high, but they will be charged rent proportionately thus deterring this practice dramatically."
And another
"...almost all characters are forced to be entrepreneurs of some type, a fact which doesn’t correspond well to these player’s real life. In other words, most people in real life generate their incomes from employment contracts and thus they understand these arrangements. Unfortunately, such employment contracts are not implemented in UO. Therefore, there is naturally disappointment when players are forced into being entrepreneurs and find that this job is not effortless."
Never played UO, but I saw this material given as a talk at GDC.
When they set their designs on a closed-loop material economy, they didn't account for extravagant hoarding behavior such as building houses from stacks of leather boots. Occasionally, they couldn't spawn new monsters because the world had ran out of the raw materials the monsters were supposed to drop as loot! They had to inflate the economy several times while trying to find yet another policy fix.
"Human NPCs serve an extremely important role within the economy of UO because they are permanent. That is, real players disconnect to go to bed or (heaven forbid) to go to work and are therefore not online the majority of the time"
Other insights:
"An interesting economic phenomenon occurred concerning the fee charged by vendors. When they were first implemented, vendors charged a fee based on the resource price of their inventory regardless of their sales. With this in mind, clever players realized that they could set the price for the goods to be extraordinarily high and thus prevent anyone from buying them. This, it turned out, was a very effective way of creating a safety-deposit box since the vendors can not be robbed. Players started buying vendors for the sole purpose of increasing their hoarding space. This exacerbated hoarding problems and also resulted in a form of suburban sprawl where people built tents and attached vendors consuming valuable land. The designers ultimately fixed these problems with an elegant economic solution: the vendors now charge a fee based on the value of the goods assigned by the player. Thus, players can still set the values too high, but they will be charged rent proportionately thus deterring this practice dramatically."
And another
"...almost all characters are forced to be entrepreneurs of some type, a fact which doesn’t correspond well to these player’s real life. In other words, most people in real life generate their incomes from employment contracts and thus they understand these arrangements. Unfortunately, such employment contracts are not implemented in UO. Therefore, there is naturally disappointment when players are forced into being entrepreneurs and find that this job is not effortless."