From the end of RED [1] to the summer of 2014, I tracked the Bellocan economy using the maple.fm and MWLR tools [2]. Despite the decrease in players, as shown by MWLR, and increase in supply, as shown by maple.fm, the price of the Fafnir Claire Ciel [4] has stayed roughly constant. This defies all economic theory.
While there may be other explanations [5], Occam's Razor suggests that botters flooding money into the system is what's stabilizing the price. Yes, people buying mesos from botters and then buying Fafnirs. I can't give a number as to how significant it is, but it's significant. I think one can safely extrapolate this behaviour to the pre-BB era. In fact, I believe it was even worse back then. Some of the actions Nexon took, such as the tax system, suggests this. All in all, I think pay to win was already slowly becoming the norm, even then, in the pre-BB era. In my view, when Nexon started with micro-transactions, it allowed funded players to sell mesos. This would be okay if these mesos were taken out of the system (e.g., the MTS), but no, this did not happen.
I think the people it really hurt were new players. Many people quit Maplestory because many things were billions of mesos when most mobs dropped a few thousand at max. For a new Mapler, earning a few million mesos is hard. Then you go into the Free Market and everything is ludicrously expensive. Even essential things like Mastery Books were expensive. This really discourages new players from the game and I think it shows. Most players are veterans from 2005/6/7. A much smaller portion started MS post-BB [6].
I have tried to be as factual and unbiased as possible, but I guess I should stress this is my view. There's not much hard evidence, only rumour and hearsay.
tl;dr: too much artificial demand from people buying NX with mesos, raising prices, hurts newer players.
[1] This choice because that's when instanced drops happened. [2] I understand this is hacking discussion, but where else do I get evidence? [3] The world I used to play in. [4] In my view, a staple equip since so many funded players are Phantoms. However, just from memory, I do remember that the Fafnir Split Edge went all over the place during this period, but I think it can be attributed to other factors. For example, Fafnirs tend to have a yo-yo effect where the prices are high every Thursday and low every Wednesday. [5] Sweetwater prices did not follow this behaviour and the theory I present does not explain this discrepancy. But Sweetwater equips were subject to heavy Nexon meddling. [6] Just hearsay. I think a lot of people pretend to have started pre-BB, because apparently that's what's cool.