Rebalancing the Empire Economy [slow induce]

I would be scared to things like this, but its only my opinion

I thought this, but after what Aikar said is that people's money won't be x10'ed, but the money they're given is increased. That way shop owners know people have more money per day, and may be willing to spend more per day. While their money remains the same.

idk if this has been mentioned yet, im sry but im not reading 102 posts, but what about ppl with money alrdy, will everyones rupee balance be multiplied by the scale factor too?

Before all, there is one big thing that needs to be really clearly conscious about:

Rule 1: You can not take without giving.

(And if you forcibly take - then it's disappropriation, it's stealing.)

There are several issues that need separate discussion here:
1) "New Rupees" / Redenomination: the new rupees would be worth (for eample) 1/10th of current rupees, everything gets multiplied by (in this example) 10: balances, prices, fees, free rupees. Basically nothing changes, but there is finer granularity of rupees.
1.a) This is not really needed. Iron is not a good example, and even if you take it as an example, you can sell/buy 10 ingots for 19, 20 or 21 r. Not really a problem. If you need Iron, you'll need 10s of ingots anyway.
1.b) It would be inconvenient. People are used to current prices which have been more or less stable during the last few months, after long instability period with increasing prices caused primarily by inflation (free rupees). I've written long posts about it in the past... Changing value of rupees would cause confusion especially among younger players.
1.c) Problems with shop signs. People would have to be warned not to change them manually, they would need to be changed automatically to avoid people losing their goods - selling at 1/10th of the price unintentionally - which is considered abusing shop-sign mistake...

2) Increasing inflation: increasing the money supply by increasing login and daily supporter bonuses. This is a bad idea. Free rupees /inflation is the main cause of the instability of EMC economy. I remember explaining this in the past ... consider this: I could give $1000 to Aikar and get 10M rupees, then start a long shopping spree through all player shops. I would take their stuff while giving them only very little in return: the prices would rise very fast and they would not be able to buy that (or other) items with the ruppees I've paid them. Perhaps some other players would follow. The shops would be empty and the prices rise higher and higher. Aikar would have few thousands $ more, but EMC economy and possibly EMC overall would be ruined. Remember Rule 1 again. This is what "free rupees" do. High inflation wouldn't cure any problem, it would only make it worse.
2.a) Owners of good shops are industrious and intelligent people. They wouldn't let their work go ruined and would increase the prices immediately, or even before the change. Also, while speculating when and how the inflation might punch in, they would a) try to get rid of rupees and b) increase their sell-prices, but wait with the buy-prices. I guess I don't need to explain further how this would hurt the economy.
2.b) It would neither help new or poor players. The easiest way for new players to get needed amount of rupees is to go out, collect materials and sell in the big shops. One can easily make 4k per hour. Instability caused by high inflation will reduce this opportunity, because shop owners will increase the margin to protect themselves.
2.c) High inflation is stealing from almost everyone who has rupees. Because their rupees lose value. Calling people who would not get rid of rupees in time or who sit on rupees dumb is, well, ultra hypocritical. It is simply not possible to get rid of rupees in time for the majority, because there is simply not enough to buy in the player shops - and the shops would either stop selling or increase the prices up to the "Empire /shop" level. I guess it is obvious: if you have nowhere to go with your rupees but to the /shop, you won't be happy - while buying one diamond for the rupees you've got by selling 10 diamonds.
2.d) Communism? Yes, that's right, communism! I guess most of people here look at communism as some obscure idea that failed who knows why. But the real communism that really did exists and really did fail hard did this one thing among other bad things: High inflation, while giving higher and higher income and bonuses to party nomenclature - party officials and supporters according to their rank - until the economy was ruined beyond any hope.

3) Improving EMC economy. It is important to see that the economy is a tool, not a goal. Economy happens when people exchange goods and services. On EMC, economy thrives when people don't bore themselves, but play and enjoy playing, when then have goals, when they build. If you want to improve economy: motivate people, introduce new challenges, don't make the game easier: make it harder. Don't take away from people without giving! Rule 1! Don't manipulate economy, leave it natural and fair. No griefing, no stealing. Happy players = good economy.

4) Getting more supporters and more income for EMC / Starlis: I would personally like Starlis and EMC to be very successful. And I'm convinced that any artificial manipulation and "tweaking" of EMC economy will only destabilize it in the end, and that making the EMC economy more natural will improve it and make EMC even more interesting server. I really believe that fair and natural play is the best motivation for supporting and donations.

Really, what are the problems with current EMC economy again?
Price of around 2r per iron ingot isn't really a problem.
Instability due to inflation / free rupees and fluctuations in player counts?
Anything else?

After all, please remember:

You can not take without giving.

Seven posts down.

I miss having 20k being considered extremely rich

However, after reading 2 pages of posts I actually enjoy some of the key points. Such as stone for instance.

Stone is a resource easily obtainable with haste II beacon, I used to run a stone shop and made decent profit at 3k per DC. Over time the price went down (ALOT), to where a DC of stone is worth about 1500r. That made stew extremely sad.

Iron however used to be worth what? 6-10r an ingot before iron farms? Diamonds, 35r each? I actually enjoyed that balance because alot more players were mining than AFKing. (back then we didn't even know what afk farms were , well we did but they weren't so exploitable)

An IRL example is gasoline. THIS chart shows that gasoline was $1.43 in 2003, over time there was inflation and drops but is now around $3.30 a gallon in 2014. Did people complain about the price changes? Yes. Does just about every American need gasoline? Yes. With a price inflation the people gathering the oil (the miners) would get paid more and the gas station operators (store owners) would make more profit as well as the buyers (the buyers) getting exactly what they need with a little more of a price increase.

Inflating 10x right away isn't gonna be fun, but gradually inflating the price over time would be a better option IMO. I enjoy playing on EMC and with a chance to get more $ i'm super happy

I highly doubt anyone will be able to balance out dirt
Assuming the reses are 30 blocks deep (I know they are deeper than that, just an example) that's 108k blocks of dirt
This sounds good though.
+1

It's always relative

That's a too complicated example because crude oil and gasoline prices are manipulated on many levels. They do not follow (just) simple rules of supply and demand.

The thing is that you could end having 10x the amount of rupees than now, but actually being only half as rich than now.

If you pump too many items into the system, people are gonna start selling them so much. To the point that people wont want/need to buy that item.

its like with the iron, yes the price per ingot does drop ever often. Its cause there is so much out there.

I personally dont want a 10x inflation, I want it to gradually INCREASE. Right now on EMC it seems like item prices are constantly DECREASING. Have you (as a shop owner) noticed the price of an item such as wood? Back in the days wood costed about 220r a stack for logs (correct me if I'm wrong). Now it is as low as 80r a stack (the lowest i have seen so far). I would enjoy prices for raw materials like wood and stone to go up over time instead of going down.

I believe this system of will just make the ruppee worth less. By a long shot, makeing the money in peoples wallets worth less. Iron is supposed to be nerfed in avalibility in 1.8. major power player's like chickeneer closing shop to brace for the storm of 1.8. You will also make what money people have worth less. I say lets see what 1.8 brings. Iron ingots are 2r because of this competition. people who can produce enough iron can sell it for as much as they please. this is going for any item. Do what you think is right but lets say 5X lets not make what people have in there accounts be worth dirt

The way I see it, is that the richer players who may be a wee bit upset at this happening, already have loads of items. If you're only rupee-rich, then you're in trouble, otherwise (which should be the case for most) the items you already have will also go up in value, automatically making you richer for just owning the items.

I personally think this is exactly what the economy needs, allowing more space for competitive pricing, and increasing demand. Like people already mentioned, if we give newer players the flexibility to spend money on items, we're increasing demand, and by extension, making the economy flow even better.

Increase what exactly?

Yes! I buy for 100r per stack and sell for 108r per stack - and my chests are empty!

This price fluctuations are due to differences between servers, differences in concentration of new players who are willing to chop wood and sell. This is normal demand / supply play. This is GOOD for EMC economy, people are producing. Inflation - giving them rupees for free would decrease production. That wouldn't be good.

They will. Small inflation is good, but high inflation is a killer for economy.

Full shops and stable prices are signs of healthy economy.

I don't think there is a need to change and I'm actually a little confused about what exactly we are trying to "fix".

The biggest problem I have with the economy here is that Rupees are too easy to come by and there are only small money sinks like food consumption and an occasional death. Most every investment I've made into consumables like Diamonds have had a many fold return through either use or sale. A lot of how I've done here Rupee-wise has been because of my personality and game play preferences though, not because the economy is "ruined". Adding more money sinks would make the game of minimizing loss and maximizing gain more interesting for me and others like me while possibly forcing us to work harder at producing items(although I suspect a minority of players producing a majority of shop supplies is really what we are talking about here.). You give most of us more Rupees and we will keep on mining for our projects and selling the excess.

The only way I can see to spread prices out would be to raise their ceiling across the board by forcing Shop Signs into using increments of 5 or 10r, and/or forcing a base price. Even then, you can't force each other to buy those items when we can get many of them in Town or mine them ourselves without even traveling far from the Waste spawn.

Nearly everyone sells items in ratios of .5, 1, 1.5, or 2R per block and in units of 1, 8, 16, 32, 64, ... This is a way of thinking that has evolved naturally. I think a change like what I'm seeing proposed would make the math harder. If the problem is that we are trying to help those of us who are struggling to get by Rupee-wise, making our shop system less intuitive seems like the opposite of what should be done.

If it is the price of Iron we are talking about, Iron has been running around 1.5 to 2r per ingot. When I first started playing here I could find it pretty commonly at 4r so the price has been reduced by maybe half. If you look at other items like Cobble or Logs, you will see that the opposite has happened. When I first joined smp7 many people were competing to sell these items. The server was new and many people were looking for basic items to build with. Logs were around 70r per stack then. Now I see them between 100 and 140R. Cobble was around 10r per stack and now it is around 30r. Much more of a change in the opposite direction with a wider price variation.

What about Beacons? The first one I sold a few days after the Wither update went for 70k. Now with everyone and their brother selling them they have gone below 10k, less than one seventh of the original value, in spite of a bunch of farms being broken. What about Ore Busters? They have gone from 6k to 35k, increaseing in value about 600%.

Why should we have a problem with the value of Iron being halved when other prices have also fluctuated much more? It is its own situation and has nothing to do with the overall economy. At any time we could have its availability change through game mechanics. I expect at some point people will get tired of Iron and the supply will go down as we use it for items like tools and Hoppers. In fact, there is already some evidence of that as we were having many many Iron auctions several months ago and now maybe one every week. Because of new items that have been added, like Hoppers and Anvils, I see the low price and high availability of Iron as a good thing. The same thing could and has happened to other blocks. I see it as a natural thing that will continue to happen as the game develops.

As far as the volume of items that people buy and sell, I really don't see how a change in prices will change that. Shop sales are driven by people building and their willingness to get the items they use themselves. Collecting them is easier in several ways than it once was. Once you have the blocks for a building, you have them permanently either filling space on a residence or to reuse.

More and more Rupees are changing hands all the time. Limited items are being collected. People are buying Supporter vouchers. Big multi-chest Auctions of things like Enchanted Books where we used to only see one pick auctioned at a time.

If it is about the divide between new players and old money, we all have the same opportunities here, historical factors aside. Some people are going to stay in Town, buy everything no matter what, and will always have a near zero Rupee balance. Others will never spend a thing unless it is for profit. No amount of adjustment is likely to change that. The average EMC player's balance is much greater than it once was. We used to have a few players we held in awe who were considered "rich", now we have many million and hundred thousand-aires. Hardly a day goes by that someone isn't having an AMA or birthday to give away Rupees and/or items. Setting everyone back to zero would only temporarily correct that.

One thing that perhaps has made getting started here is our change to Normal mode and the addition of the custom mobs. I rarely get myself into bad situations mining, but I remember what it was like once and that was easier then. Maybe more of a boost to players who are just starting out would help.

I have seen the conditions under which our "economy" operates change quite a bit. The fact that prices have changed as the game and conditions change suggests to me that it is stable on its own. I think a lot of the changes we have seen outside of game mechanics have been due to the maturation of players, the spread of ideas, and the age of the servers. Minecraft and EMC aren't new anymore and in general our players have become more sophisticated.

One of the first things I marveled at was a huge Water harvest Wheat farm I found in the smp7 Wild. Now that's one of the first things someone does here in Town. There was a time when a Silk Touch Pick was rare and valuable. Now there are many more ways to obtain one and having Anvils with the level 39 repair cap, that has changed. I used to think an infinite Water source was a big deal. The last Redstone machine I tried out was a Fishing machine.

Although I've brought up a lot of points, I have to say I'd really be ok with some changes as I would adjust to whatever they are. I'd prefer not to artificially control prices and I really think we need to have a way for some of us to drain Rupees rather than give us more. There's nothing I can think of to get rid of blocks though. They'll always be there.

How gradual would this gradual increase in inflation be?
I know that through voting and daily bonuses, there is a greater input of rupees to players in the economy than there is a decrease is totals because of the empire shops and banned players.
A gradual change could turn out nicely, however, I would like to know how much it will differ from the general inflation.

As for multiplication,
a 10x lift may work if its only purpose is to make cheap shops signs easier to manage.
25x might be going a little bit too far.
If it was an option I'd suggest a 12x lift because of 12's factorization properties (for mathy folks who like to live in a base 12 world. You know who you are. ). 1,2,3,4,6, and 12 are convenient numbers to divide with if shop sign users are dealing with smaller prices and quantities.
If the value was to multiply like this, I'd suggest having all signs change at the same rate at the same time (just like our rupee balances will). The problem is HOW to do it, for many errors could arise for signs with many digits as well as buy and sell signs on the same sign. (these are not common, but possible, cases)

In short, a gradual change could work out; a multiplication is second best, but might be hard to accomplish; otherwise we can just leave it alone.

It won't! This is a common fallacy to think that you are richer if you have more rupees. You aren't.
It depends on what you can buy for that rupees.
The items you have will remain items you have no matter how many millions of rupees they are worth. So there is really no change in value of your items if rupees are worth less and less. One diamond is still exactly one diamond.

This space is already there. I'm checking my sale volumes almost daily and I can tell this: there are industrious people who collect materials, who sell and buy and build - and they are perfectly well now. Then there are others who wait for next ration of free rupees to buy one diamond and few iron ingots. Believe me - giving them more rupees won't help them nor motivate them in any way.

The problem is also all of the promos EMC has. Too many players get too many 'special' items, therefore destabilizing the economy. There is an average of up to 2 EMC promos a month.

EDIT: This came out wrong. I meant it will destabilize the economy once it 'gets back on its feet'.

Artificially making a player action by holding down a button with a book or something using that method would result in a ban.

As much as I enjoy promos I have to agree with you, I wish it was capped where NOBODY got free promos. Now when a promo comes out players with alternate accounts claim 2+ promos for FREE. What is the point of using /shop to get extra promos when you can buy them 1/2 the price from someone's alternate account? Our first promo was the New yrs firework, and then 60k members items. Since the 60k members items, we have had too many promos. I think we should only have promos for major holidays I.E Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, and Halloween and the occasional celebratory promo (60k members for example, or the 2 year anniversary). So far the months I listed are the ones with promos, but whats next, a special promo to mark the end of spring? xD Promos wouldn't be a problem if they weren't obtainable for free by anyone