I really don't know how to reply to this. Certainly Ulver is not suggesting
something that would _reduce_ player-to-player interaction? That doesn't seem
to be the direction this mud is going.

The rule about BC (and other) store/shop/services appears to be fairly simple.
They are open 24/7, but what they offer is often much worse than what players
offer. For example:
-- the luxury armour/weapon stores buy just about any "eq" you want, but at a
small fraction of the price a willing player would offer (an eckma or asmo
ring would sell for under 20k to the luxury armour shop, for example).
-- You can use the mineral/reagent/potion/auction to sell goods, but you lose
a cut of the money in the process, which you would keep if you handled the
sale personally.
-- the bank is a convinient place to store money, but it charges you for
withdraws and it tends to get robbed. Muahaha.

And so on. With NPC services, you sacrifice quality for convinience. Getting a
shop ID might be erratic, costly, and inaccurate, but you aren't advertising
on channels that you need something (possibly an item nobody has found before
that would raise a lot of questions), you don't have to wait for an unidle
player (which is rather useful in certain time zones), and don't have to hand
the item over to anyone.

In the end, you can always do what you do with the repair store: pretend the
service doesn't even exist. If you remain unconvinced that the shop ID has any
useful features at all...simply don't use it. We won't mind.

Shinarae Lluminus