As far as I can see, all this will do is get rid of almost all diamonds from the market and will increase even more the divide between rich and poor players.
At the moment all the noobs are trying their best to NOT spend money, in order to gather reasources to found towns, build their homes and stuff.
With fewer diamonds around, people with the most money will buy all in stock and cause the price to skyrocket even more.
To kickstart the economy you don't want to increase the price for a particular resource, because that will cause a stagnation (or worse, a thrust) for that particular market.
You want to give people the power to BUY more, not to SELL more.
To accomplish that, selling different types of junk items to the server (and not to the players) is the optimal way.
Saplings and seeds are a good example since they can be farmed, but they don't give a tremendous yeld like logs and wheat do (oak saplings are ~15-20% of the logs yeld and seeds have 33% of the wheat).
Something like 24 noobs per stack will give people something more to get money from, without taking away resources from the open market.
Nothing so substantial to cause inflation but at the same notable enough to give a hand to the people who can't grind all day or simply prefer to do other things in the game instead of mining.
Just my 2 very accurately ponderated cents.
I respectfully disagree with your assessment here; you assume that the economy operates in a vacuum when in fact a more accurate analogy would be that of a system utilizing a central bank - in this case, the server.
Money does not enter the economy but through ways the server allows. As of now, they are thus:
1) The /shop command
2) The Casino
3) Killing Mobs
Money only leaves the economy through ways the server allows as well. Since we don't yet have the full picture of towns, take everything with question marks with a grain of salt.
1) Taxes on Auctions
2) The Casino
3) Town and Nation Purchases
4) Town Chunk Claims (?)
5) Town Upkeep (?)
6) Wilderness Chunk Claims
7) Chest Shop Creation Tax (?)
It should be fairly obvious that if the flow of money into the economy exceeds the flow out, the size (amount of money) of the economy will increase, and vice versa if more money is flowing out than in. For all intents and purposes there are no restrictions on the amount that can potentially enter or exit - the server can give infinite money to the players, theoretically speaking.
The basic idea of any economy server is that labor within the game should be able to be translated into money, which functions as a "neutral" source of value that everyone can agree upon and thus use to interact in social ways. In the case of Minecraft, that's exchange of blocks and commodities - the only "pure" sources of capital. While money entering the economy via mobs and the Casino is significant, it is largely irrelevant given that the vast majority of money in the economy comes from sale of items to the global shop. As such, we'll consider the /shop and its impact as the sole focus of this analysis.
The current problem with the economy has been that town creation prices have been incredibly daunting in comparison to the money supply. When you look at the prices in the shop it makes sense - a player wanting to maximize the money he's receiving would logically focus on gathering the
most efficient money generator.
Prior to introducing diamonds, unit prices were of two classes - Cobblestone and End Stone sold for 3nz each, whereas Gravel, Rotten Flesh, Netherrack, and Sand sold for 2nz each. Given the relative ease and abundance of Cobblestone and End Stone, these were hitherto the most efficient means of making money, so most savvy players went the route of gathering these en masse and selling to the shop for money.
If you think about it, gathering a stack of either of these probably takes somewhere in the range of one to two minutes - this assuming a good pickaxe of course. To get good pickaxes, one must have an efficient means of getting diamonds and getting xp for enchanting, which formed a bit of an entry barrier to even starting to make money. Finding diamonds isn't easy, and finding a spawner or building a mob grinder isn't easy either.
If we take a mid-line assessment of 90 seconds to gather a stack, we have a peak monetary efficiency of 192nz/90sec = 2.13nz per second.
Dividing the town creation price of 850000nz by 2.13 nz/sec, we get 398437.5 seconds.
That is 110.68 straight hours, or 4.61 straight DAYS, of time it would take of playing Noobscraft at maximal monetary efficiency if you wanted to start a town.
Also note that in practice, you absolutely CANNOT operate at that max efficiency constantly - it's broken up by the process of getting new picks (finding new diamonds, getting sticks, getting xp, enchanting), by going through and clicking the sell buttons when you max your inventory, and by dealing with other externalities (like accidentally digging over lava and having to reorient yourself). It gets a bit hand-wavey here, but I think it's fair to say that all of this overhead adds at least three times the amount of time to the process of making money.
So in a slightly-realistic but still highly optimistic scenario, it would take 13.83 straight days of playing Noobscraft to start a town on your own.
Naturally, that means people are going to have to work together to achieve township in a decent timeframe. There are already groups of members working together to make money, and the consolidation trend was accelerating as more people realized just how much work it would be to get a town.
Now, diamonds have been added to the shop for 1k sales. And at that price, they're far and away the most efficient way of making money.
Probability is certainly involved, but by mining intelligently it's realistic to assume that you can get a stack of diamonds with a Fortune III pick in roughly an hour. With some quick calculations we justify our assertion that they're a better way of moneymaking:
64diamond*1000nz/diamond = 64000nz
1 hour * 60 min/hr * 60 sec/min = 3600 seconds
64000nz/3600sec = 17.78nz/sec
That's an 8.3x increase in efficiency of moneymaking over the previous best method, which will proportionally decrease the amount of time it takes for people to make a town. Way, WAY more money will flow into the economy due to this change, so naturally as you said, Darkwings, inflation will occur. Prices will go up. But keep in mind that prices are two sided - the rich people will buy things, but the originators of things will be better compensated for them if they're smart about pricing them on the auction.
Smart players will win - buying out auctions that are cheaper than they should be, and ignoring things that are overpriced. The auction will be rolling out statistics soon, so it'll be easier for an average joe to estimate the market price for a given commodity and price their wares appropriately given the push and pull of supply & demand.
The server admins WANT inflation because they want prices to be roughly tenfold from what they were in v5, so things like selling cobble for .5nz cease to happen and broader price differentiation can be achieved.