I think the Wildercraft economy is facing some underlying issues that require a lot of thought and balancing to fix. Seeing as Wilder is experiencing a lot of other important technical bugs and adding awesome monthly content, I would not expect this to be a priority for the staff team to address. 

With this being said. . . .

The shop economy for wilder needs to be reworked. Although I have only been on this server since December of 2020, I can already see a lot of issues with the shops.

Prices drastically drop throughout the season as a result of inflation. Players mass-produce way more resources than the public are demanding, and farms do not cost anything to maintain. As a result, the prices for commodities such as wither skulls, iron blocks, gunpowder, and other resources drop from a reasonable price to the player to absolute dirt cheap prices. 64 iron blocks for a single diamond is an undeniable bargain, and 3 wither skulls for a diamond is outrageous. 

Players are simply unable to compete with each other in new ways other than producing more materials.

Some suggestions to fix this:

• Enable and encourage reselling of resources. By reselling, players are discouraged from producing more and more resources that are not consumed. This can potentially stabilize the average price of a resource and allow it to remain at a reasonable price throughout the season.
• Consider land value. Land and location are extremely valuable at Wildercraft spawn. Obviously being closer to other shops and the warp locations bring more traffic to your shop and thus increasing sales. These spots are currently given out on a first come first serve basis in the season from my understanding. There is a lot of potential to add to the shop experience in terms of land value. A price could be attached to each block in value.
• Taxes can be a viable solution to reducing the quantity of production by players. By charging players to produce materials, this can be a re-route around the concept of material and production costs.

A lot of possible ideas here to improve the Wilder shop experience, please add on to this thread!

-Fruuty :)

Yes!!! Someone finally took the time to right a economy suggestion, and a great one at that! Reselling is probably the easiest, simplest, and best things that could be implemented for the economy. Allowing reselling would not only slow deflation rates (The rate at which the prices for items specifically ones within demand drop) because people would be more hesitant to sell things for super cheap prices like beacons for 1 diamond because then they could easily be resold, but it would also re-stabilize prices that have already dropped. For example someone is selling beacons for 1 diamond, so someone else decides to resell them for more and then the price for things steadily increases. 

A lot of people might not think that low prices are a problem but Many people including myself feel that having the prices unreasonably low with the single intent to undercut other shops just forms monopolys that nobody can compete with, discouraging newer players who want to make a shop. Since there is no real punishment for selling something at a unreasonably low price then it will just be done with the intent to "break the market" like what was done with beacons last season and has still affected beacon selling this season.

Another thing That was mentioned was a possible shop tax Which is a really good idea in my opinion, Lets say shop team charges 1 - 5 dbs per month that your shop is open, other factors could determine the cost of the tax but that might get hard to keep track of. The benefit to having taxes and possibly a fee to get a shop is that it could limit the amount of players who get shops unless they are actually going to stock and make a effort to sell things at a reasonable price, and it would discourage people from having a shop and just restocking every month or so to avoid the shop removal, because if people arent making any diamonds but still have to pay to own the shop then they are more likely to remove the shop making room for new people.

Reselling won't necessarily bring the price of items up, but it does have benefits. Prices that are lower outliers will be eaten up more quickly, which will encourage more translations and a more lively trade market, but things that are already mass produced won't suddenly see their prices increase unless someone wants to create an artificial shortage by purchasing and hoarding a key material. Considering how efficient farms are, don't expect reselling to result in high prices for any farmable items. 

Personally, reselling doesn't feel like something that should need to be policed by staff anyway, since it's entirely on the player to determine a price they would be happy with for the item. It would reduce random shop violations and staff overhead if it were allowed. 

Understandably, it can cause some players to feel cheated if someone resells their items, but it's a lesson that most would learn once or twice, and then they would find it leads to a better understanding of the economy and market. 

In-games economics is a really cool topic. There's a lot written about it by actual economist gamers.

I'm not sure that prices dropping is inherently a bad thing that needs to be corrected. Here is why.

When I was new and found diamonds, someone quickly told me that I could buy an entire diamond pick for one diamond whereas it would cost me three to make the pick. Newbies can buy pretty good gear quickly. If they could not, there would be fewer diamonds in circulation for use as currency because people would make stuff out of diamonds instead of buying stuff. People would have to spend a lot more time equiping themselves and less time building, exploring, and making art.

Also, maybe part of the problem is using diamonds as a currency. Instead the game could have a fiat currency (the dollar is a fiat currency, for instance) that can be bought with diamonds at an exchange rate controlled by player demand. I'm not saying that this is the right solution or that it could be done. I'm just bringing it up as a different way to think about the the shops. They're a cool minigame that deserves further development.

So.. having been here since season 4 and seen the economy change over time, I'm gonna weigh in with my $0.02

In earlier seasons, making books and stacks of iron to sell took time. Currently people zombify villagers and get their trades down to 1 emerald and a book.. ridiculously op compared to previous seasons where it would take me a while of farming crops, trading with villagers, then trading with librarians for books that could be 10 to 40/50 emeralds for example. Raid farms weren't a thing and good luck mining for those emeralds.

Also all it takes is 3 villagers and a zombie to start an iron farm as opposed to quite a lot of villagers and doors in previous seasons. With the new system expanding on that setup allows for iron in crazy quantities. Having several people with large iron farms means that flooding the market with iron (and books) is relatively easy.

One of the main problems imo is that getting items like this to sell is really easy nowadays. Changing game mechanics such as eliminating zombifying villagers for discounts or nerfing iron farms would fix items being so cheap, but I doubt these ideas would be popular.

Also, one of the reasons reselling rules were added was that in previous seasons I and others would spend a couple of hours or more gathering wither skull heads and then sell a handful in shops for around 10 dbs each to give everyone a chance to get them. What ended up happening is someone would buy them then sell them on for 40 - 50 dbs each. They did practically no work for a massive markup, which I found frustrating.

I think if reselling was allowed, it would lead to players being frustrated about people profiting off their hard work. It could also lead to one person ar a team of people obtaining a monopoly on some items, then jacking the price up. It would essentially reward greed and laziness imo.

Using Richy's example though, it's a fairly over-simplified view of how the economy works. Here's a number of points:

1) If you could ensure that you'd be able to sell it for 40-50 db and found someone selling it for 10db, then you'd definitely want to buy it. But the cases where you know you can sell it, and sell it relatively quickly for a profit like that are not common. It's only around very rare items, like either non-vanilla items or non-renewable rares. For these, you can't really gauge what it's worth, since that value is going to be based upon who finds it useful or interesting at the time. It's like rare art. To me, it may just be a cool painting, but to a collector, it's worth billions because it's some rare, famous artist's lost painting or something. If you're the art hunter who can find those and can get it to the person who will pay billions, that's basically your cut for knowing the market.

2) If you chose to sell it for 10db, you likely had a reason. You may be looking to sell it quickly because you want the diamonds quickly, so you sell it for a low price. You may not know what the market would be like, but you don't really care and think 10db is a decent price. Or you don't care at all and picked a price. In any of these scenarios, you either deliberately sold it for cheap, or didn't do any checking to see what people would actually pay for it. If someone can turn it around and sell it for 4x to 5x the price, you likely could have asked around and found someone at least partway between those two prices very easily. OR it's a very rare item and we're back to point 1.

3) No one can force you to sell for less than you want to. If you put it up for a price that's lower than you think it's worth, that's your fault. You're more than able to put a higher price, wait, and re-adjust, or to do some market research by asking and looking around. It's what YOU want to do with your time. If I decide to spend a day hunting down Hearts of the Sea and sell them for 3d each, and someone re-sells them at 6d each, that's because they are doing what they find fun. Them reselling doesn't change the fact that I put them up for 3d each and that's how I valued the results of my time. Someone else determined that other people would value my time more highly for that activity and effectively made that adjustment. If we reverse the concept, it would be like telling people "you have to buy the Hearts of the Sea at 9d because that's what the person thinks they're worth", which is obviously not something we can enforce.

4) A monopoly wouldn't work on anything that's highly renewable. There's just... too much of it. You can fill and entire ancient plot of chests with every single enchanting book, stacks of iron and gold, and most common items. It COULD work on things like Elytra to an extent, but it'd still be difficult to pull off. You'd need a LOT of resource to do so. But it CAN be done... unless we make the other items more renewable. This is why I highly support things like "End Rush" to provide renewable Elytra, and why I proposed ideas before like the alternative Ruby Dragons to create renewable Hearts of the Sea, because if there's at least some kind of stable source for these (even if it's a very slow source), it'll help to balance out the market for those items. Monopolies would become even harder to hold, and it likely wouldn't be an issue.

In short, reselling isn't an issue for anyone who wants to spend a little time understanding the value of an item before putting it up for trade. OR just don't put anything up for sale at a price you will regret, regardless if someone resells it. Reselling isn't just a freebie where you buy low and sell high instantly, it's it's own risk. In a basically infinite resource game, I really don't see a need for reselling protection.

"One of the main problems imo is that getting items like this to sell is really easy nowadays."

Some people might think that's not a problem.

I do not undertand all the concern with changing the reselling rules. Allowing reselling will not stop items being listed for cheap. All it will do is raise prices. If I'm selling a chest full of Item X at 1 dia each, what do I care if 27 people buy 1 or 1 person buys all 27 and then relists them at 2 dia?  I got the exact amount of dia I wanted, and got them fast. Allowing reselling will not change this. What it will do is cause inflation. That's not good for buyers, which is most of the playerbase.

One of the big problems with modern real-world economics is that economists reflexively treat even small amount of inflation as a bad thing. This is largely a reaction to the double-digit inflation of the 1970's in the US. The government printed money to pay for stuff. That mean that there was so much money in circulation that you suddenly needed more of it to buy the same things. Double-digit inflation is no joke, and neither was the double-digit interests rates required to suck money out of the economy.

But inflation is not equally bad for all people, especially if the increase in prices is significantly out of proportion to the increase in the size of the ecomony. For instance, if you took out a mortgage at 10%, you had better hope that inflation means that you get to pay it back in dollars that are worth less. For much of US history farmers who had to borrow to plant in the spring and paid the loans off in the fall were all in favor of inflation.

The people who lose are those who have stockpiled currency of have currency-denominated investments, which become worth a bit less as time goes on. In Wildercraft terms, those people are the ones who have large stockpiles of diamonds that they aren't using for anything.

The thing is, inflation is inevitable in Minecraft as long as you use diamonds for currency. You can always mine more diamonds. Mining diamonds tends to be a way faster way to get them than trading for them (Except for buying dungeon keys for dollars and selling them in-game for diamonds, and I have seen people do that, and now willing big at Match-5.). Shopkeepers are in essence supported in their hobby by people who have the time and inclination to stripmine for hours.

If there were fewer diamonds available, deflation would happen. In WC, that looks like people making gear out of diamonds instead of trading diamonds for stuff they can't get as easily.  I'm not sure what the good of that is. If people wanted to just grind stuff and not trade, they could do that on a solo server by themselves.

The main price stabilizer in WC is the effects of stacking on a commodity. Most stuff ends up a stack for a diamond, because calculating prices in fraction is difficult, error-prone, and not fun for most people.

By the way, you could programmatically prevent people from buying something from a shop and selling it for twice as much by making it easy for someone to compare prices across shops. If a shopper knows that they can get the item for half as much elsewhere, they will. I'm happy to check out ten shops and get an idea of prices, but then I love eBay shopping too. Most people aren't shopping for the experience. They just want stuff quickly because they died and have to replace everything.