Benezetta said:Banker! Technically not a merchant - but I loved going to the bank in EQ. There were always others there and it felt so alive.
In EQ one day I was hanging out at the bank and decided to pretend to be a teller, Asking people if they would like to make a deposit. One person gave me some gold (just playing a long, which was nice).
I'm not quite sure what the intent of the question posed in the title means, but a couple things regarding the general topic:
The economy is an extremely central part of a game like this, arguably more important than the actual gameplay itself to many people. (An economy that is players buying/selling to other players, not some economy where everything can be bought from and is regulated by NPC merchants whose prices are fixed.)
The vast majority of end-game "domination" and progression for guilds and individuals alike should and could be made by accumulating the largest fortunes. Not all items or gear should be able to be purchased with gold, and certainly not character or quest progression, but there should be certain extremely stupidly expensive things that require enourmous fortunes of gold for people and guilds to aim for.
While there were many valid criticisms of it, FFXI's "auction house" system was a great system for the most part. A brief description of it is people puts an item up for sale for a price they choose, and players purchase the item by scrolling through a grand database of items for sale, finding the item they wanna buy, and then placing a "bid". If the "bid" is greater than or equal to a sale price of one for sale, then the purchase if succesful, otherwise a message saying the bid was not enough is returned. If multiple items are for sale, as is virtually always the case, the item that actually gets sold is the lowest priced item listed. Also, the price that the seller receives is the bid the buyer put up for it, NOT the price they listed it for.
The only information the seller or buyer gets about the item is how many items are currently for sale(if any), and a Price History of the last 20 transactions, which just says the sold price, the names of the buyer and the seller, and a timestamp. This means buyers do not get to actually see the listing price of items currently for sale, they only get to see the previous succesful bids.
As long it's a real player-controlled economy, I don't think it really matters how the actual trading is implemented. What's important are the actual items/gear, and the type of activities tied to acquiring them.