I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me.
But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...
Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted.
If anyone knows of a good economy based server, I'd love to hear about it.
The same happened everywhere in the Minecraft community. Be it in the english-speaking world, or Germany, everywhere the economy-based servers closed down over time, by now almost none of them are left anymore. Dominating now are the minigame hubs, dozens of servers full of minigames, raking in cash.
And many of the players that used to play the economy bad in the day, are now playing modded servers.
Actually part of me thinks it may have been the same server, the sky mall sounds familiar.
Given this...
I think you're right, the playerbase shifted. No one does it because the vast majority of the playerbase is in 3 camps:
1. Heavily modded servers. Lots of these servers revolve around gimmicks that ultimately produce a lot of materials, be they Botania and Mekanism or some kind of explicitly something-from-air premise like Sky Factory 3. The audience here is all 20+
2. Specialist modded servers that accept vanila clients. These are very showy and vary in complexity from modest story driven affairs (see Lyinginbedmon on youtube for good examples) up to the absurdly complex game-driven Hypixel world. Lots of kids play here, and to them this IS minecraft. Survival-style play in vanilla is no longer the norm.
3. The very youngest end of the audience has almost no exposure to the game as it was originally played, instead playing the subtly different mobile & iPad editions. These folks may have multiplayer, but it's their parents paying for a realms server.
I'm sure economy servers exist, but they're quite hard to find and they are nowhere near they were back in the older 2013 (and earlier) days when that sort of modest bukkit mods were THE way folks engaged the scene.
That there even is something like a possible, viable economy in that game is a news I haven't even considered realizable. And now you come and tell me that is old news from 4 years ago. Jesus.
But try something like All the Mods 3 or Sky Factory. Here's a quick video where I describe my mid-to-lategame custom power system to get a feel for what kind of tasks we do in modded: https://youtu.be/5ztDvQan99Q
Not that I play very much. Learning Idris scratches the same itch as working through the combinations of mods, so...
Really neat game that I wouldn’t have considered because of its weak original branding (Oort Online ring a bell?)...
Just beware everything gets wiped on the 1.0 release.
Also, it will not be wiped as in deleted forever, devs are pondering ideas about making those [archived] planets public or including builds in some way into new planets.
If anyone is interested in Boundless economy, it's a budding one. For serious traders this should be a prime time to start.
There's also a reference implementation, which you can download and play without getting into programming. It doesn't have all too much content by itself, but you can extend it with mods or use it to connect to multiplayer servers which can have their own collection of mods (sort of Modpack-as-a-Service).
So, you should also quite easily find a multiplayer server which has some form of currency and economy.