You are wanting to start up a new minecraft server, wanting it to be unique, fresh and inspiring for other servers to follow in your footsteps. However, nearly every possible idea for a new server has been taken up... nearly. So far, I haven't seen a server ever to do this and I would hope for one day for someone to come forth with a server with this idea. What is this idea you may ask? Well it is an Economy Server, a PROPER Economy Server. You are probably thinking, "But there are hundreds of Economy Servers out there". Yes that is true, but I honestly believe that the category of those servers should be renamed to "WE HAVE MONEY" Servers. There is no feeling of a true Economy within those types of servers.

First off let's define what economy means,

"the state of a country or region in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services and the supply of money."

Now the issue with all of the current Economy servers are that their is an Admin Shop on every single one of these servers. And what Admin Shops do is that they create an infinite supply of goods that would never drop, rise or change at all. The production of items would remain infinite and would then create no need for a real life Economy system on the server, just a 'buy it from the Admin Store' economical system.

You want to simulate a real life Economy system, so the price of an item increases and decreases because of thryone e supply and demand of an item (this is why Bacon prices rise and fall, because of the supply of Bacon increases and decreases). The more of an item is being supplied, the cheaper the price. The cheaper the price, the higher the demand. However, Admin Shops completely ruin this effect by having an Infinite Supply at a fixed price, so there becomes no demand for a product because it is always there.

An example of this is if a player is wanting to buy 1 diamond, but because of the supply of diamonds are extremely low, the cost for each diamond is extremely expensive. However, if the supply of diamonds is equivalent to the supply of dirt (which would never happen), the price of 1 diamond would be the same as 1 dirt block. So people stop buying diamonds because there is a massive supply of diamonds and nobody needs them because there is so many of them. But then, 99% of all of the Diamonds suddenly disintegrated and Diamonds become extremely rare again, meaning the price for 1 Diamond would sky rocket. What this example is trying to say is, people won't buy what they don't want/need.

Economy is very confusing to understand, but if you understand the examples above and apply it on an economy Minecraft server. It would be AMAZING and would encourage players to be competitive against each other.

The current concept of Minecraft Economy Servers Need To Change! They are not simulating or representing any real life scenario of an Economy System. 

If you are planning to make an Economy Server or running an Economy Server, read the tips bellow and try to put them on your server.

1. Avoid having an Admin Shop (since it creates an infinite supply of the items it sells), or make all of the items being sold in the admin shop to be extremely overpriced to enable competition for player owned shops. Eg. 1 dirt block would cost $50, which would equal roughly 15 mins of playing to achieve that amount of money to buy the dirt block.

2. Allow player's to build shops where they are easily accessible by all players (eg. at spawn or in a town).

3. Have a board, area or command where player's can request for a certain item and offer a certain amount of money for it, so that the suppliers of the server know what is in demand (not entirely sure there is a plugin for this. If their isn't, I can code a bukkit plugin that would allow this if a lot of people want me too).

4. If you want to, include professions so that people can pay money for people to do a profession, and restrict it to only that profession can do it. Eg. Blacksmiths can make Swords and Metal Armour, Craftsmen can make leather armour and bows and arrows, Enchanters can enchant items, Soldiers can use diamond armour and tools, Miners can mine diamond gold and redstone ore, etc.

5. Please don't make it 'OP' (I mean by giving out ridiculously over powered, end game items when people join). It would completely ruin the point of having an economy, and in general, ruin the point of playing on Server. The only reason why people want to play on OP servers is to get end game items easily and be a dick with it (as you can probably tell, I don't like OP servers). To further support why 'OP' economy servers would never work is because (for an example) you would get given a full set of Diamond Gear when you type /kit starter. Because Minecraft has made Diamond extremely rare to get in the wild, the supply of Diamond itself is high and the price for it is high. However, you can get full diamond gear for just typing /kit starter, which means all of those items in the starter kit are nearly worth $0 because of the infinite and easy supply of it. But the items in the Diamond Kit are made from Diamonds which are expensive. This would completely break the economy system of the server, you could drop the price of Diamonds, but that is stupid because of the really low supply of Diamonds. It wouldn't simulate any economy ever and would completely crap (sorry about the language) if their is an attempted economy system on the server. If you can prove me wrong, and argue how OP Economy Server's could simulate an actual Economy. Please reply to me, I would be happy to talk about it and I am interested to hear the other side of the argument.

6. Never give out free items, it might cause a crash in the Economy :P.

Congratulations for reading all of that! You now know how to make a good Economy server and you had a little Economy lesson at the same time :P. 

Side Note: Most of this blog here I have copied from my own post that I posted on another forum post which I posted not long ago (proof: http://www.planetminecraft.com/forums/post2942675.html#p2942675)


Sources: Image: dev.bukkit.org/media/images/47/505/goblin-new-scaled.jpg