Putting too much emphasis on items and loot creates opportunity for chinese gold farmers/item farmers to ruin your game by selling resources and items very cheaply. As any real economy, there is a demand for better items and resources - player online have a surplus of items they don't want and lack of items they need.
Some ideas to discourage item farming:
1.Preventing the creating of uber-items: simply resist the temptation to add incredibly powerful items and item attributes.
Instead gradual "upgrade/crafting" of mundane items to boost their powers to predictable, but not overpowered state.
It doesn't fix much, since gradations of power still exists within the item hierarchy, making top items valuable.
2.Binding anything remotely powerful to the finder account, so selling the item is impossible.(This is NOT bind-on-equip, its bind-to-account inventory, allowing you to move it to another character you own, but once you find it you can't sell it).
3.Making all uber-items ridiculously easy to obtain thus ruining the item farming profits. This just shifts attention to rarer and more hard to get items/resources: unless everything is easy to get, there will exist a market for shortcuts.
4.Removing currency(like Path of Exile) and forcing barter trading: This eliminates gold farming, but doesn't alter the fundamental problem - it just transforms prices into commodity "pseudo-currencies"(like SoJs in Diablo2).
5.Bind-on-equip: basically if you use it once, can't sell it. Doesn't fix anything, item farmers will not be bothered(since they don't equip it).
6.Removing unique items: making top items have random attributes eliminates stable commodity of item supply, forcing the farmers to be more inventive. Ultimately, they adapt to selling attributes of items.
7.Providing cash shop vendors to buy the items: Blatant Pay2win solution that makes item farmers compete with the company.
8.Not having rare items at all: all items are mundane and sold by vendors. This actually works to some degree, but upgraded/crafted items will be sold instead of found items.
9.Not having items/resources/crafting/upgrades:
The ultimate solution, though not as popular as anything else. This requires re-balancing the system towards skill-only progression, where experience (see #7
>>12) is gained to upgrade stats and skill components.
RPGs in principle don't require equipment(class-fixed weapons/armor also reduce art assets),loot or item-based economy:
It just appears for e.g. archer has bow and arrows, but they don't have to tradeable or touchable by player at all.
In fact RPGs can exist without "Experience" at all: the method by which skill/stat points points are gained could be tied to furthest location of hero(i.e. if you reach Map #4, you gain X points to upgrade your skills/stats like #7 in
>>12).
Alternatively, a pure-skill RPG can abandon the concept of player progression and distribute skill/stat points to allocate at the beginning: it meshes well with level-less class-less systems without equip/items, but it doesn't resemble a RPG anymore.