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I've been reading a lot of the discussions held on MMO economics and crafting here on the forums. I want to share the (extremely positive) experience I had in another MMO where a crafter was a class of its own:
Ragnarok Online
I played RO in its early years. I played the international localization between 2002 and 2004, and witnessed one of the most stable economies I have ever seen in an MMO.
First off, the Blacksmith class. Blacksmiths had two sides to them: crafting and combat. To level your Blacksmith, you needed to invest permanent attribute points into combat stats and skills. However, as a crafter, your success rate was influenced by your lesser stats (dex and luck). So the player could level a Blacksmith relatively easily and cheaply by going the combat route, but the trade off would be that they would have a lower success rate on crafting than someone who leveled as a pure forger. It typically took a guild effort to level a blacksmith to a high level on pure crafting stats.
Although PFO uses a completely different skill system, I find common ground in the way players will skill up their craft; do they devote ALL of their skills into crafting? or do they deviate to give their character the ability to do other things like fight and have more utility? The latter being the easier route on the individual as they become more self-sufficient.
Having established the crafting class and the difficulty or dedication of having a 'pure crafter', I'll go into the crafting system:
Every craft has a chance to fail. A fail is a loss of all materials used in the recipe. This has a few implications. One being that the players who put in the most effort to get the highest success rates possible were renowned within the community - something most crafters want in an MMO. The second implication was that there was a constant destruction of supply in the market. Making demand always high, and prices relatively immune to deflation due to surplus. Nobody likes crafting an item that is worth less than the cost of materials.
To give you an idea, Most of the sought after player-made weapons had roughly a 35% chance of success when made by a forge smith, and maybe as low as 15-25% for a battle smith (depending largely on stats and level). That is A LOT of loss of materials with not a lot items floating around on the market. In my opinion, this is ideal.
On top of the crafting system was the upgrade system. In RO, this was handled by NPCs at a fixed percentage of success, but again, a failure would be a complete loss of that item. The higher an item was upgraded, the higher the chance of failure.
Much like the sandbox nature of leveling a character (to which there is no real end), player crafted gear had almost no end. To craft an item and upgrade it to a maximum of +10 was virtually unheard of. Amour could also be upgraded in the same way. This lead to a continual destruction of high priced items; once rich players had their ideal set of gear and set their sights on upgrading each piece to higher levels.
so what was the outcome of such a system?
-It promoted the idea that there was no 'max gear set'. No matter how rich someone was, they would never obtain +10 on all their gear... in fact for the 3 years I played, I can't recall anyone having 1 piece of gear at +10. Although I'm sure some uber rich person may have had one.
-Crafters had a distinct role in the community. Most people knew all the good crafters, as the people who devoted the most time ended up with their name on most of the items on the market. If you were a high level pure forge smith everybody wanted to be your friend :)
-Virtually all of the materials that went into crafting items, and the crafted items themselves were subject to destruction; leaving supply low even over long periods of time.
A lot of people criticize such systems. Many call them casinos as they're just random luck for the individual. When I look at the end result however, I like what I see. EVE had a system wherein your death meant a loss of a ship, its mods, and its cargo. I'm not sure how PFO will handle player death, but unless you lose all your gear and inventory, something else needs to be in place to serve as the balancing mechanism for item saturation.
I know we have a diverse community with backgrounds in all other MMORPGs. What are your thoughts on systems that combat over-saturation of items and gold? Which have worked best in other games? And can they be adopted to fit in PFO?