First off, hello!
I'm a player on Nasomi's server. I decided to try to help out the project after hitting level 75. I'm new to programming; in fact, I picked it up just for this. I'm learning C++, and supplementing with lua and SQL.
For my first project, I've written an alternative to the default crafting guild shop values. The retail values were written for servers that never go down, but private servers go down all the time. When they go down, the inventory of guild shops is reset - quite a few items become totally empty. When they become empty, the NPC buying price for these items skyrockets - for example, Spider Webs sell to the guild for 11519 gil each, Firesand sells for 7287 each, Holy Water sells for 4433 each. This means that immediately after a server crash, players can dump stacks of easily obtainable items for massive amounts of gil, causing inflation.
The worst part of this is that players do not even have to farm or craft the items they dump to the guilds themselves. They can buy them off the auction house. They can either do so immediately after a crash, or buy them before a crash, sit on their inventory, and wait for (or in particularly nefarious cases, create) the next crash.
With this loophole, anyone can easily become a multimillionaire, but the store shelves are empty. No crafting items are available on the auction house for use by the crafters, nor do the crafters have any incentive to create anything or skillup in the first place, for they can more easily get money by guildselling themselves.
The dissonance between retail values and the realities of a private server destroys any chance of a private server having a functioning economy.
The new values I've written strongly discourage this. They bring the maximum price closer to the minimum price. In some cases, they raise the daily increase or decrease the maximum quantity too. This way, players have more incentive to make gil by buying and selling from each other, and creating items. It also puts a stopper on runaway inflation.
If this is something you want for your server, they can be found in my forked github repository here.
The alternative values currently cover the Bone, Cloth, Leather, Alchemy, and Goldsmith guilds. Changed lines are marked with comments at the end. Equipment, like Raptor Ledelsens, are partially done. In the not-immediate future, I plan to finish the equipment and take a look at the fishing guilds too.
I do not own my own server, so I cannot test this. Though the guild_shops.sql has values for what the guild sells to players at, I could not find values for determining what price the guilds buy items at from the player. I did notice that this buying price was always one-third of the guild's max_price, so I am hoping that by changing max_price the guild's buying prices will change in proportion. If someone could test this and let me know if it does or doesn't change the prices the guilds buy at from players, I'd be much obliged.