Adventure
In theory one is supposed to design for maximum traffic which is probably a coy way to say monetization. There are other goals,
dana9610> But there's a difference between "free markets are good
way to do commerce and distribute resources" and "all of
society should be oriented toward making money and
nothing else matters"as not everyone is an Excel¹ jockey seeking to majorly maximize Mammon. For example a common way to play EVE Online runs towards accumulating ever increasing amounts of ISK (that is, Mammon) and the expectation—worse, demand—is that everyone is engaged in this pursuit. Have a billion ISK? Go for a trillion! There is never not enough!
In other cultures the riches to rags story is celebrated; see for example the Buddha. Speaking of rags to riches, why is social mobility a.k.a. "the American dream" so low in America these days? Others have such concepts as "lagom" though I'll leave it to the Norse to explain that term better. "Timon of Athens" may also be relevant.
The very model of a modern Mammon maximizer may have their life charted out in Excel, the details of which being more or less unknown to me as I generally do not think that way. For instance one might be getting into mining in EVE Online, and probably the best thing to do would be to buy a pair of "Strip Miner I" for some sort of mining barge at a trade hub, Jita 4-4 in particular, as that saves time on shopping, and the price is not too bad (5,869,000 ISK). However, there are other lines of thought:
- Buy a strip miner blueprint and manufacture the strip miners. Presumably some do this with the intent to make lots of strip miners and sell them for profit, but others may have no such goal: they might be living off somewhere far away from a trade hub, and making things locally suits them better, or they simply do not care about profits.
- Find a strip miner for sale in some dangerous place and have an adventure getting there (and back again). There's apparently two for sale at 4,500,000 ISK way out in Syndicate (nullsec) and other low prices to be had in various lowsec systems of dubious reachability: pirates may sell low-cost goods somewhere beyond their gatecamp. Any ISK savings here is ruined by the time and risk involved, but to some the wandering and exploration is where the fun² is, and who cares about the money?
- Anything else I haven't thought of or put down here.
¹ A dreadful spreadsheet software produced by Microsoft and known for corrupting gene names, though after a few decades the genes got renamed.
² It involved a trip through Aridia with a sudden side-quest through a nullsec wormhole, Solitude, which was unaccountably busy due to some wormhole, another wormhole off to Tash-Murkon with some blue loot at a combat site, and then yet another wormhole to Metropolis and from there back to the home station. There are much more efficient ways to buy a brace of strip miners, and much better ways to make ISK. Subsequent adventures were an opportunity to learn about "electric storms" which prevent cloaking, the inability to do so being somewhat problematic for squishy ships that want to stay cloaked in hostile nullsec territory. Maybe I should socialize more so at least some portion of the player base is presumably less hostile.
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