"The 'me too' approach to development won't work," added Butts. "Any game that hopes to compete with WoW has to do so by offering a substantially different setting or game design."Weathers agreed. "The Next Big Thing will come out of a studio that tries to build a wind powered car."Being part of the first generation of MMOs meant that Asheron's Call was forging into unknown territory. One of the things it never fully accounted for was the natural market that would emerge. AC didn't have any methodologies to deal with the demands of a player economy. The currency of the game was nearly valueless with the only things worth buying being cast-off high grade equipment at Ayan Baqur vendors. There were no leveling costs and no mounts. It had a few basic trade skills which required minor expenses and later introduced housing with only small monetary costs. In the early days of the game, money had weight and that limited player wealth as well. The natural outgrowth of this society was a flourishing barter economy. It centered around coveted objects such as pyreal motes, crystal shards, singularity keys and other similar items used to create high quality arms and armor. Yet the market remained highly limited with gamers having to shout their wares locally. There was no long distance trade channel or auction house. But the economy went through a revolution when plug-ins were developed and a resourceful individual came up with the "Trade-Bot." In basic terms, the Trade-Bot was an avatar that was turned on when a player wasn't actually playing the game. Their account remained logged in but the bot behaved in an automated fashion. The player assigned point values to certain barter items. For example, a pyreal mote might be worth 1 point while a singularity key was worth 5. Depending on what the trader wanted, he could shift the values around to his own liking and then assign point values to items he sold. If he valued a certain sword at 10 points, another player could purchase it for 10 motes, or for 2 keys, or for 5 motes and 1 key. Of course, this system had two major weaknesses. First, the trader had to be logged in to use his bot and couldn't actually play the game while the bot was active. Second, buyers had to peruse each bot one-by-one to look for items they wanted to buy and only one buyer could interact with one seller at a time.