Balancing an MMO economy with a black market

Albion Online has a cool design constraint that sounds absurd when you say it out loud: every item in the game is player-crafted. There are no NPC vendors selling gear. The world produces nothing on its own except raw resources. The whole sandbox is built on top of that constraint. But Albion also has mobs that drop loot. You go fight a heretic, you sometimes get a T4 bag. So somebody has to have…