Coin just needs to pass hands more often.
Devs don’t need to do anything to encourage that. It’s the players that need to maintain their shops, update prices to stay competitive, and market their in-game stores accordingly. But to maintain a shop and keep it updated with competitive pricing requires hours of playing the game to keep backlogs of inventory levels, attending community hunts, checking other shops for price adjustments, and even making Discord or Forum posts about any changes in your shop. That kind of time commitment isn’t possible for a lot of people. Being competitive isn’t possible for them. That’s an okay thing.
I think a lot of that has to do with people not wanting to put the time in “farming” up stuff. After all, we did just get a content patch that injected a massive amount of new base crafting materials into the game.
The leveling of new characters and footfall coin is why there’s so much coin in the game and the more active players there are the more this increase in the money supply is going to happen. If you don’t want this inflation, then ask for no footfall coin generation. Footfall coin generation is pretty high IMO right now. It shouldn’t be okay for me to be away from the game for 2 or 3 days and come back to my Aquatopia shop to collect 20k+ coin.
I do think the way tax works in the game is pretty dumb. It should be a setting the settlements can place and there shouldn’t be a planet tax. Planet tax just sounds really dumb.
Right now we don’t really have that many active shops even worth visiting let alone buy from. There really isn’t much competition between shops because of that from what I’ve been able to see. Only way that’s going to change is if people put in the time to maintain their shops or build one to put the time into maintaining. That requires simply playing the game more each day. After all, doesn’t matter how much wealth you have in Boundless, everyone has the same amount of hours in the day but not the same amount of hours for playing the game.