Buying and Selling from Merchants (Question Inside)

No, the crafts can be given to the players, but if you don't specialize in a certain skill, then you could alternatively have an NPC make the item at the cost of coin (with materials of course). This could eliminate having to create any alts just to get the crafts. Though if we go in this direction, I vote for the cost to be medium-high.

Ok, so you're looking at it as a way to bypass having to deal with other crafters? I was thinking more like enchantments. Why not just do away with separate professions then altogether (actually the topic of another thread here in the forums)?

I am not saying to get rid of the crafting fields. If you have played World of Warcraft, you would know that creating an alt, and mastering its two professions, takes WAY too much time just to get a few items available to you that could alternatively be bought from other players. And no, I don't want the whole trade idea to go to waste: NPC crafters should be slightly overpriced to encourage you to find other players to do the crafting instead. If there are no available crafters, then you can use the NPC's if you want.

Yes! Maybe make some exceptions for junk stuff though. Actually, depends how you define the "junk".
If the junk in EQN will be similar to the traditional MMO junk items, then the merchants shouldn't sell it to other players.
However, if by junk you mean something that your character doesn't use but the other characters might find useful, then yes, absolutely. One man's thrash is another man's treasure, right?

So in the video response to this question, one of the primary reasons given for "not" including NPC buyback was that it decreased player to player interaction.

I'm going to throw the bull(*&% flag on that one.

In EQ2, we didn't have merchant buyback. The only way to get items was to get it from the player to player broker. I played EQ2 for six years and not one time did I have any "meaningful social interaction" with another player over buying or selling an item from the player to player broker.

In fact, more often than not, we as players would sell items in global channels specifically to avoid the player to player broker. In some cases the items were not trade-able once looted, in other cases it was specifically to avoid the broker tax. In any event, the player to player broker was rarely used to trade the most valuable items in the game.

Frankly, without a really radical change in the SOE mindset, the economy is going to be a mess rather quickly.

Nothing was more rewarding then finding useful items off a vendor that some other player had discarded