Game economies are tricky. It is easy to trivialise the role of players as you try to avoid massive inflation or collapse.

If you want a player driven economy, the best way is to avoid having item drops and instead have the raw materials from from enemies )or be able to be collected near by). Then allow the players the ability to craft any and all items in the game.

What you also want to do is to have the quality of the items dependent on the character's skill and choices of the player. This could be though higher or lower quality materials for crafting and even allowing the player to change the stats of the items (within limits) by trading one stat for another.

As an example:
A player wants to make a sword.

They can gather iron ore and smelt that into steel. But the quality (or perhaps amount) of iron ore is based on their gathering skill and the quality of the steel is based on their smelting skill.

The quality of the steel and the characters forging(sword) skill then sets the base value of the stats of sword.

Lastly, given these base values, the character has the option to tweak the sword stats a bit. So they might drop the damage value to increase the attack rate, or they might drop the durability to increase the damage. Or any such modifications. This could also be extended to the gathering of raw materials. The player can set their gathering for speed, amount or for quality, thus giving the players more control over the end results.

You could then allow players to combine skills to make the more powerful items. And, if the skills needed for certain items could not be learned by a single character this will encourage players to co-operate to forge the more powerful items.

Using these ideas, you can encourage social interactions (players working together), and you can develop a better player economy. Also, by having the player's skills and choices affect the stats of items, this give players who make good choices and put in the time to develop their skills more valuable to the community, but by having lower quality items easer to get (as more people will have lower skills), they cater for new characters.

you can copy what elona did.
you can have all skills in the game, but using skills lowers the skill xp rate.
You can spend hard to find coins to increase their xp rate.

if you didnt improve minining it would cap to level 20 since it gained only 0.3% xp.
if you put all your xp into singing it would have 200% xp gain rate which allowed you to go to level 200 singing.

I decided to go with what Edtharan said. I already thought this was the best way in my opinion to do them, but what he said helped me decide.