First of all, thanks to everyone who has submitted their input thus far - we really do appreciate the responses.
Just putting my own input here on top Lissy's.

From the responses in this thread, I can get a general idea of some of the main concerns and ideas:

• Mining for iron/gold is the most profitable thing, but there should be other methods for doing so.
• Increasing the sell prices for several items.
• Decreasing the sell prices for several items.
• Player-to-player trading and interaction over using the shops.
• Prefer not having shops all together.

This is a pretty diverse list if you think about it, and while it's hard to please everyone, we will do the best we can to accommodate a few of these things, as Lissy has already made a start on.

As for my opinion, kinda in a response to the first point in the list, which seems to be the most mentioned.
When I first released the shops, my intention was to give players an alternative method to obtaining resources as a last resort. If you had a large project or you simply didn't want to go mining for something, you could invest some money through several ways (voting, donating, etc) and buy the things you needed from the shops. This was back in 2012 if I recall correctly.

I admit this could have gone better on my end. I don't think I ever really enforced the idea that the shops should be used so sparingly, and the prices of the items probably told players otherwise. If I were to go back, I would probably have a lot less items for sale (which I did bring down a lot from version 1 of the shops to version 2 in our first world), and I would have the prices a lot higher. I think this would encourage player trading and interaction, which I value a whole lot more than the shops.

However, I realise I don't play on the server, and the people who do actively play will create their own lore in a sense, and create their own definition of the server and what it's all about. This is a good thing, I encourage things like this. However, when it comes to my intention for the shops, there's some aspects of it I would like to keep from my original intention. That is that I don't want it, along with the economy, to define our server. I want things like trading/bartering to be looked at more than how much money you have in your account, or where you sit on /baltop.

Like I said though, we will try to accommodate some of your guys ideas, because it is you all who play on the server, not me.

I hope this at least helped broaden your thoughts a little, and please do keep up the replies.

I've fixed the issue with not being able to allow players to the fields, it was something to do with the flags.
As for the donation store, we might look into adding them soon.

I'm just suggesting that we improve the balance of the shop so that exploitations can't be made outside of the shop as well.

Pretty much what Matt and yourself pointed out, since there's no way to use the shops alone to make any profit, it's not a huge concern. Again, as Matt mentioned, there have always been ways to gain a tiny profit by selling things in different ways, and I've always seen it as a fair way to gain a little bit more for the extra work that goes into needing to smelt sand, or smelt the cobblestone.

If it does become a concern, or if any major exploits do arise, we will patch them right away.

Just another tiny update on votes that I thought I'd mention, the Games Top 100 site now supports votifier and therefor rewards you for your vote.

...so, like, Tobie was never actually accepted for the moderator position.

...so, like, that's the idea of a trial application.

By voting offline, are we able to get the vote points because recently I noticed that we do not.

I'll be looking into this, seems to be an ongoing issue people are having.

On the topic of donation rewards, I'd like to mention that there are also 3 new Mob Disguise packs available.
They contain the new mobs such as Horse, Witch, Rabbit, Guardian, Wither Skeleton, and Endermite.

Check 'em out.

congrats to everyone in these lists. DeeKay, what about April?

Done, thanks for the reminder!