I understand that the economy is/has been a major problem in most mmorpg's along with crafting.

In most games why bother crafting anything because the items you can loot off mobs are usually better then anything you can craft --  I personally would like to see a crafting system not only be highly complex, but profitable as well.  Besides crafting stuff for your own toon, wouldnt it be nice to actually make a profit?   Example in WoW 95% of crafted items bite - you can buy better drops from the auction house -- if you try and sell your crafted items in the action house you either have to sell them for a really low price or not bother with it.

In my opinion crafting should be highly complex and items in the game should be crafted items -- ya loot items are great! but lets give it a reason to craft....  Id say 70% of all items should be crafted, and vendors should consign items for a small fee... the Auction house idea was cool but its mainly a rip off.  This leads me to the economy; All money in the game should be circulated with in the games - the game... not like in WoW you buy a mount for 90 gold and suddenly that 90 gold is poof* and gone.  If i was a dev for WoW I would make it that players buy mounts from other players, and someone had to breed the mounts and sell them - buy the land, build the stable and breed the mounts.  But Ill save the rest of that idea for the mmorpg I want to develop.   NPC Venders can help keep prices were they should be as a base -- also if you sell something to a vendor, that same item should be sold by that vendor.  If items stay in his inventory too long they are scrapped for market value, so the vendor doesnt go broke. or just give him unlimted money.. but i like the idea of him going broke from time to time.

To sum it all up,   the majority of items should be by crafters - and crafting should be complex.

The economy should be player driven and all money should by circulating. (no i paid 90 gold for a mount and the money is no longer in circulation)

My suggestions

Tatsit

The crafting system has been mentioned a few times in interviews - and I think it will fulfill your desire for complexity. Rather than creating endless nearly identical items, you will take the time to improve and customize an item, truly crafting it into a piece worthy of a master. Instead of manufacturing in bulk, you will create special pieces that reflect you as their creator. The potential there is pretty exciting, I think.

I was involved in the weapon crafting in thier MUD DragonRealms. If they can bring into the graphics world the complexities they had there people will be blown away! Also if they trat crafting here as they do there ethen a master craftsman's wares will be superior to anything they can buy from a vendor.

My big hope is they will allow the crafter the decision on what color will be used when and if an item calls for Dye.

The best crafting I have ever experienced was in DragonRealms.  As a ranger you "foraged" a stick, you "whittled" the stick.  When you got good enough you 'foraged" a branch, and whittled an arrow, or if the branch was of good enough quality, you made a bow.

I dispise having to kill something just to get a peice of wood to drop in all the MMO's out there today.  Crafting should involve, well you know, crafting.  If I have to kill for leather, well that makes sense.  Having to kill something to get a lump of iron to work, that just doesnt make much sense to me.  I am looking forward to the crafting system, and I do hope it is as complex and realistic as it was in DR.

That being said I will just toss this on the fire.  I played a console game called "Dark Cloud".  The most fun I ever had in any game was crafting my weapon in "Dark Cloud".  Why?  Because every drop could be useful.  You could status break weapons and add them to your main weapon to improve it.  You had to use the weapon and get it up a few levels, then you would status break it, giving you a magic orb that contained 75% of the stats from the weapon, you added this to your main weapon in the slots, and when that weapon was leveled up again, the orb and all the crystals in the slots were absorbed and made permanent.  That meant that in the game, the final "perfect" weapon was not a drop, it was a carefully thought out buildup of almost all the weapons in the game, added together to give you the ultimate weapon.  Took a lot of work and a lot of thought, something most MMO crafting systems dont require.

The problem with a lot of the Economies of games is they try to have a partial economy.

If I buy X sword from X merchant, that merchant should take X amount of time to make a replacement sword. If he ever gets sold out of a sword, the price would naturally go up. There would be a "too high" function to it where the 'government' would step in and tell him to stop monopolizing players... Also in order to make a new one, he would have to buy items from people, other merchants, etc. Each merchant should have a dynamic. You should see shipments of iron ore or something bobbling down the road. Then players ambush the shipments, and a price gets put on their head...

If I sell X item to X merchant, he would only buy it if he needed it, and the more he needed it, the more he would buy it. But he can't buy it if he doesn't have any money. If you want an econemy, make an econemy! If a goblin has 10 gold, where did he get it from? Did he ambush a shipment and steal all the gold?

Every single peice of silver, copper, gold, whatever should be present and accounted for. Only new currency could come from the 'government' (EG GMs and such)