I thought of a solution today to the economy problem that plagues MMORPG's with a player-based economy. You know the one I'm talking about... the one where it actually costs you money to produce items instead of making money. Why don't they just make the buy price of the items higher for NPC's? If say you had an item that costs you 6s to make, that item would sell to an NPC for 6s or more. Surely this would keep the prices at AH from plummeting far below this sell price.
Now I can see 1 arguement against this and that is this: Surely there would be a surplus of gold then in the economy because there is an unlimited supply of gp comming from monsters. This is going to eliminate the AH!
I believe that this would actually ENCOURAGE the use of the AH. Not only are crafters more comfortable with crafting, but it would increase demand for items that are unique to crafting. This puts more demand at the AH because if you don't get the price you want for it, you would sell it to the NPC... which is taking that item out of the game. Also, when an NPC is out of stock on the item, players would HAVE to go to the AH, thus increasing demand.
I actually don't play World of Warcraft... yet. I played FFXI for a long time and the only reason I stopped was due to the broken economy. It seems WoW is a far superior game, but it is still plagued with a flawed economy. I think that it may even cross the line to perfection if it was fixed.
-Aaron