[Feature Discussion] Empire Shop Update v2

In case you haven't heard the entire thread... A simpler layman's termed version will be made with the release of this update. The OP doesn't necessarily explain in detail HOW to do everything yet, but it explains what the updated system will be like...

OP stands for Original Post.

This hasn't been released yet, so this is the only place you can find details about the new features

Correct. Though, I'm sure the vault could theoretically be made to have a "queue", so we could just send it to the vault and always work.

We've actually stated numerous times we are not solving a problem, we are preventing one.

We are not comparing to the real world economy... We are comparing to the every other online game with an economy.

I've been playing MMO's for 10 years now, and I'm that "has to know it all" programmer type that needs to understand how everything works on the inside... I study this stuff. I understand WHY it works these ways.

In the real world, there is a fixed amount of money for the most part. We don't print money every day (Except for when we do print money every once in a while but were not turning this into a political debate). However thats essentially what happens in video games... You print money every day.

You MUST have money sinks, something to then destroy the money and keep the economy in check.

The only reason it hasn't hurt us yet is because the rich players have nothing to spend the money on, so they hoard it..
Some players have over 2 million rupees.

If we "redistributed the wealth" of the top players to say the top 5000 most active players, we could be looking at over 10k rupees to each of those people

10k may not sound a lot to any shop owner, but there's tons of free players who think that is "rich". Immediately prices would go up if this was the case, as 100 rupees per diamond doesn't start to seem as bad.
This is "Why" it is needed. The more money you have, the less you care about prices. This is a psychological thing.

The money has to be circulated. Its not a problem now, but what if we added some uber awesome update tomorrow that random players find stuff that rich players want a lot of? Now you have free players selling expensive items to rich people, circulating that hoarded money back into the lower end of the bracket. Now those free players are using that money to buy and sell items to other players. The money is now "Evening" out, and overall players are "richer". Prices rise.

This is also not true. The real world economy is too complicated to make such a blanket statement. That 1$ cheeseburger from McDonalds 10 years ago is still 1$.

Also, today the daily income for a free player is 100 rupees. That's barely enough for 2 diamonds. If prices rise, they would only be able to buy 1 diamond. As prices rise, it becomes harder and harder for a new player to get started. They get frustrated and quit. We can not allow this.

The problem will grow unless it is put in check.

As EMC grows the problem grows faster. What if we had 100k people logging in per day? That's 10 million rupees per day.

It is naive to think an economy can survive in the long run without any money sinks. The economy will change with this update, and you will have to adapt to it. This includes figuring out how to price your items based on the fees. (We will prevent people from creating prices that will end up making them lose money btw)

If you go check out some other MMO's, you will see EVERY SINGLE ONE has these same kind of fees. It is required to keep the game good. Those games economies have not crashed because of it.

He didn't necessarily say they were copying, just said he studies in game economies. (more or less)

Your really making way more fuss than there needs to be over the fees...

Many of the transactions are too small to even put a fee on.. So if you sell 1 cobble for 1r, you're not going to receive a fee!

The fee/taxes what ever you want to call it, will never destroy your profits. so many things wont incur fees at all.

Believe us.. The fees are no big deal. Most people won't even notice them...

I've already considered things like transaction being so small the fees are less than 1 rupee, and the possibility of fees eating up the price difference between your buy and sell prices.

These will be accounted for... resulting in less fee charges overall, but were talking micro implementation details, which my post is ALREADY confusing many players so i've intentionally left out tinier details like that.

We've got other ideas on the plate for additional money sinks too, but the basis of any economy needs fees as part of the core economic activity: transactions.

and I disagree that copying another games economy would crash here. The only reason the economy is different here now from other games is because of how the economy is currently designed around the shop system. There is no reason why a system like WoW's would crash here...

The reason economies work is because players are lazy and enjoy buying the resources from others instead of collecting them themselves. The same applies here. Just our current toolset makes it inconvenient to buy so the economy has shaped quite differently. But the same ideology and methods behind economies all drive the same way here, and that is where I want to see us go towards: The economy is a tool to help you.

For example... The other day max was building something and needed green wool. We went to a few main malls we know, cheap one was out of stock, others were higher priced but had some stock. We got some, but ended up raising more sheep and shearing them to complete goals.

Were both "well off" money wise (please don't beg me or ill ignore you), so we would of preferred to just buy it real quick and saved us time.. But the current toolset made that difficult and time consuming so we just farmed it.

Now with the new system, we could of just /shop quickbuy greenwool 330 and been done with it, and some players received a good chunk of money.

This all is exactly the same in WoW and other games. You have the choice of spending money or just going out and farming it on your own. The economies are really the same...