That is why Server Owners/Admins should make the Admin Shop be EXTREMELY over priced. This would push for other players setting up their own shops that would blow the Admin shop out of competition and would boost a player based economy system. Also try to achieve to allow players to build shops near spawn and easily accessible to help with the Economy.
You want to simulate a real life Economy system, so the price of an item increases and decreases because of the 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% 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 reason why Economy servers seem like they are dying out is because... well... they don't really have an economy on the server. It's more like there is money on the server and that's it.
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.
Congratulations for reading all of that! If I wrote any more I would have to put it all into a book .
