I suspect what Himmel meant was that there isn't really an economy on test right now.
There are just too few of us to provide much of a flow, and a large part of the exchange of goods is done directly via the global /test channel. I'll put stuff up for sale when nobody around wants/needs it, but it's fairly infrequent.
If and when the test population rises on a more permanent level (aside from these time-limited copies) I'm sure the economy will grow with it. It's not that test players don't want one, more that with a few dozen regulars, there's far more direct barter than there is selling through the broker. (And another reason folks need to "/join test" or better yet "/autojoin add test" - if you need something or want rid of something, that's the place to be. It's /guild, /worldsay and /ooc all rolled into one on a tiny server.
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That said... if these copies are time limited, it makes little sense to dump stuff on the broker since the goods may not sell before those chars are deleted; and even if that happens, we're not forced to buy anything. Test broker prices vary from a few coppers to live-like prices to the frankly-laughable prices one sees everywhere (live or test). The coppers-only prices may vanish - every time there's been an influx of people, I've seen the coppers-only stuff (brokered effectively as a courtesy in a sparse economy) be snapped up and immediately rebrokered much more expensively -- I find that a little irritating, but I also know buy low/sell high is a perfectly valid tactic on live servers, and folks coming in to Test aren't telepathically informed that copper pricing is a courtesy and not broker-idiocy.
Anyway thanks for the extra info, Himmel. I was dreading the contortions I might have to go through soon, since my live chars are on Shidreth and I believe it's one of the first to get copied over.