This topic is something I began to notice a little bit before I left the game, and moreso now that I've returned to it.
I understand the desire to create a dynamic economy within the game: It promotes RP like nobodies business, leads to some interesting situations, all that. I'd like to clarify that I'm not against this at all. I'm all for the dynamic economy.
The only issue here is that at a certain point, the game achieves this state where certain items that would be easily obtainable were this a real marketplace or location, cease to exist for all the luck a player would have in finding them.
The easiest, and perhaps most amusing example of this phenomenon is the fact/joke that there are no letters in the Mix.
However, I don't see this as an amusing trend. I see this as a detriment to RP, and potentially very harmful to a new player experience. To elaborate: The lack of these items does encourage RP. This has been established as a good thing. However, the often times more valuable RP comes out of whatever a person decides to DO with that item. When these items become unavailable, that RP cannot be achieved. This might be menial when it comes to smaller things like letters, but the seeming impossibility or mythic rarity of bigger ticket items can be severely discouraging. Why would I want to play a musician if I do not know if I'll ever see a guitar I could buy in game? Why would I take that, or any other kind of RP risk if I have no guarantee what I need to play my desired role will ever show up?
In addition, the game and the players know these items exist. They tell other players these items exist, because they do. And so the player-in-need begins to hunt, all over the place, for these items. Now, not to seem overly analytical, but most of the time the streets of Sindome are not thronged with people. On the hunt from store to store or place to place, a player on the hunt for an item will probably move through a great many empty rooms, which is more time lost from valuable RP.
One of the counterpoints given, when I brought this up in game chat, is there are often other means or ways to achieve something, without certain items, or with the use of others. That true. In the case of letters, there are numerous ways to get around this barrier. However, I do not feel this is an excuse for the lack of an item, or it's hyper-rarity, especially when it comes to items that are easy or moderately easy to find. If I could provide a lore-friendly argument, and not just a game design one: Withmore is a city run by corporations. They all want to sell you things. Wouldn't it make sense, then, that these corporations would continually supply these items, if there was a demand? Companies often produce massive quantities of an item, more sometimes than they intend to sell.
This doesn't seem to be the case in Withmore.
At any rate, food for thought. I look forward to seeing where this discussion goes.