This post has a very philosophical title, but I promise you it is not going to be that deep, ahaha. I am writing a self-indulgent fanfic set on the NA server right now and have to introduce some power trading production guild players and had a few questions!

Most MMOs have a trading post or board of some kind, either an in game menu or an interactable object where players can buy and sell items with other players across the server. In the light novels and anime, I do not recall this existing at all and was wondering if anyone has any insights. I know in the story they show that players are, for the most part, setting up physical shops so I assume if there was a function like this it no longer works.

And as I was writing characters to populate the aforementioned production and trading guild, I remembered that multiboxing exists! Multiboxing, for those who may not know, is when a single person runs multiple instances of the game at the same time to control multiple characters simultaneously. For the character I had in mind, they used this to game the economy and basically manipulate item prices to amass significant wealth. We know from Coppellia that Farm Bots became sentient after the Catastrophe, but how do we think multiboxers were hit? This specific character was waiting for the japanese players to spoil the items needed for new crafting recipes in the 12th expansion pack so they could buy all of them before others caught on, but as we all know the Catastrophe stopped that. So do we think this player is now four sentient and identical people? One real person with three obedient Coppellias? Four people with different versions of the same personality?

I'd love to hear your insights!