How will new players perceive this game? (A pessimistic outlook)

[darkstarpoet1]

that is true. but at the same time that ruins gathering jobs for a fairly long period by making them unprofitable. And from what i gathered, gathering jobs are meant to be a "main" job in the game. Further vendor items for crafting and use only create an inflationary cap. Like once the prices of goods exceeds the price at NPCs people will buy from NPC vendors, some money will exit the economy, and it will be viable for players to sell goods just under the NPC prices once again, in which case money will stop exiting. As a result the economy would average out at that point.
Put another way, 1 week you would be buying stuff from NPCs, then the next week from the wards, then the next week from NPCs, then the next week from wards, etc. NPC prices will determine the "limits" of monetary expansion, but it will not fix an inflated currency.

And that will still make it very difficult for new players to catch up because NPC items are overpriced on purpose.

One solution i can think of would be to release really good items that are sold by vendors, or have a dynamis-weapon type thing and sell the currency at vendors. But the problem still remains that a lot of people who got like 10-20 mil at the start and quit temporarily will come back and constantly cause inflationary spikes.

Also on a note: I think SE attempted to drain gil from FFXI via NPCs in CoP for end game gear. It didn't seem to work well and again, the economy didn't fix itself until there were mass bans. Doesn't mean its impossible to do, just probably difficult.

i do see what you mean by it will not fix inflation, but it would level it out. i'll use the cost of buffalo skins on my server for example.

a few months ago a buffalo skin you could purchase in wards for 8k. by the time you bought the dye and chips you could make sell them for 8k each for dyed buffalo leather. you would make a decent profit and the next crafter would make a decent profit off it when they resold the next item in wards.

now the same skin sells for 20k. that increased 12k per skin or 3k per leather however you want to look at it now has the cost of what was 8k for a buffalo leather gone up to around 12k. this also turns around to an increase for the crafter that was buying the skin to make the next item.

if the npc has the skin for a reasonable price say 8-10k which is what the skin was and it is an easy item to get then it would cut the cost of that item in wards by half. we mention the gathering classes, but in most cases alot of the inflation and price gouging has came from the gathering class and as long as raw materials continue to increase the crafting classes will have to continue to raise prices to match.