Rebalancing the Empire Economy [slow induce]

so basically you're saying that rupees enter the system at a fixed rate.
http://empireminecraft.com/rupees/
^
here.
go to this page.
I can INSTANTLY add 5,000,000 rupees to the economy simply by forking over some money to Starlis.
INSTANT super-inflation. If I had enough money on me, I could make the value of iron become 1,000,000,000r/ingot if I wanted.

I say the EMC shop should let people sell there as well (for a really low price of course) so that everyone has a chance to make rupees.

Correct, I am saying rupees enter the system at a fixed/controlled rate.

I don't know of any limit Aikar has on how much rupees you can 'buy'. So if a player was willing to spend just under $1000 to buy 5,000,000 rupees, then yes they can do that. They could do that every day for 5,000,000 rupees and own a lot of stuff. In fact, you could have 100 players doing that and completely flooding the market with rupees, under valueing everything.
And Starlis would be able to maintain, and expand the servers with better hardware/bandwidth and huge advertising for years to come. Due to $1000 for 100 players = $100,000, or whatever.

So why has that not happened yet? Please explain.

Buying rupees with $$ is very different than spending 1 hr a day to sell 100,000 iron ingots to an infinite shop. Or 200,000. Or any amount, any time, unlimited. As I said. The example I gave actually happened, on another server, with very similar currency system as here. I can tell you with certainty it will happen here if EMC's /shop buys auto-farmable resources.

Someone else explain this stuff.. I feel like i'm beating my head against a wall here. I'm out.

Rupees like real world dollars are not "real". They are only tokens of purchasing power. If the supply of rupees are rapidly increased without an accompanying amount of things of value, you get inflation. With Inflation, someone loses purchasing power and someone gains it.

In this case, iron is essentially worthless because there is a vast over-supply. If I have an iron farm, I can exchange my worthless iron at the Empire Shop and get rupees. I then take my rupees and buy all the diamonds. Diamonds are available in limited quantities. Diamond prices go up. I gained, you lose. And I didn't provide the economy with anything people really wanted .

In the real world, when governments need money -- they have three choices. They can raise taxes, which is political suicide. Or they can print money. By printing money, the govt is taking purchasing power away from its citizens and giving it to itself. Printing money is indirect taxation. The third option, which the USA does, is to borrow money. The hope is that the economy later magically produces enough tax revenue to repay its debt. If not, the USA will resort to either raising taxes or printing money.

3 weeks ago they still had value? I think things do not change that fast.

How would you do that? Make the value 1,000,000,000r per ingot?

buy a lot of rupees, and distribute them is what I thought of

But I don't think the prices would go up so much all of a sudden when you have more money.

How many Diamonds are you going to be able to buy with your "worthless" Iron? How do you "rapidly increase" the supply of Rupees by trading in something that has no value? How do you make it impossible to get Diamonds if all I have to do is walk of the edge of the Waste spawn and mine for an hour?

Everyone would be able to sell their "worthless" iron anyway. You are suggesting that one person could ruin the game for all of us by magically transporting billions of blocks to Town overnight. Even if someone could affect one server, we have ten. Most people would probably not even notice and in a matter of days or weeks everything would settle back to the way it was. It just won't happen. They would get tired of it and break before the "economy" would.

That is the concern with the Empire Shop. The EMC economy currently says iron is worthless. If the Empire Shop buys this worthless iron. It is distorting the economy. I already addressed your points in my earlier post.

I didn't say anything about making it impossible to get Diamonds. If someone mines diamonds, they are creating value. If someone corners the market on diamonds by trading in worthless iron -- that is a different story.

This is a discussion about a game, that people care about. Reading your post, you seem to be arguing for arguing's sake.

Dear Mr. LouisKenX,

When you quoted my post and disagreed with my opinion, it was actually you who started arguing with me. Not the other way around.

I care about the game and playing on EMC also, or I wouldn't be playing and I wouldn't be here trying to point out how silly it is to worry about something that simply isn't going to happen.

We have both expressed our opinions in this thread and can leave it at that. Alternatively, in order for me to understand and agree with your point, I have asked you to define specifically in terms of EMC Minecraft and not real world generalities what would "break" the EMC economy and I don't think you have done that. Instead you are using general terms like "worthless iron" and "buying all the Diamonds" to cause "inflation". My "arguing for argument's sake" is me asking you to convince me and you've failed so far.

For me, breaking the economy would mean that I could not buy or sell anything. So far your only example of anything breaking has been your "buy all the Diamonds by selling all of your worthless Iron" scenario. I think it is unrealistic.

I have already suggested that Shop be limited in the number of items it will buy and that the prices it buys and sells for be dynamically adjusted, but you completely ignored that.

We are arguing about something without any real data, using our personal experience, so how about if we put the argument into my terms since you have not volunteered any numbers: I currently have a stack and a half of Diamond Blocks and a little over eight stacks of Diamond Ore which might yield around three more stacks of blocks for a total of 4.5 stacks or 2592 Diamonds. I am going to value your worthless Iron at a 1:64 ratio. 2592x64=165888 ingots=18432 blocks=683.67 Chests.

In order to "buy all of my Diamonds", you would have to run more than 682 Chests of Iron into Town, from what I would expect would be an Iron farm that is some distance away from Spawn. A round trip to and from mine takes me about one half hour and would not include mishaps or other things like stopping to eat, fight, chat, stopping to organize inventory or sell to a Chest. If you were to run constantly between my farm and Town it would take you 341 hours or about two weeks to run all of them into Town. That is without stopping to eat or sleep.

Even if you were to do this I know of no Iron farm that can supply two Chests per hour of Iron. The reality isn't even close. And even if you had all that Iron saved up in the Wild it would more realistically take you months instead of weeks to bring it all into Town. So your sudden influx of Rupees would never happen.

So let's say you stay up for two weeks straight and bought all my Diamonds. Now I want to restock all 2592 of them all at once because I have some serious enchanting to do. Let us say that I scour all the servers and buy every last Diamond and Ore that is available. So now I have all the Diamonds and have ruined the economy in two weeks. Right?

Wrong. I think as I buy those Diamonds, each of those shop owners is going to go mining sometime in following days after and I know that anyone that tries can get at least a stack in a nights work. If they decide to raise prices, or if they start asking in Town or on the Forums for people to sell Diamonds to their shops to resupply, people like me who have saved up Diamonds are going to start selling them because they are motivated to buy low and sell high. The shops will soon be replenished and the price will lower them again.

But is it even possible to get to that point? Here's an alternative scenario. You spend those two sleepless weeks carting your worthless Iron into town and selling it then buying Diamonds from Shop for 100R a pop because everyone is sold out then sell them to shop Chests at 50R each. Now you've converted 165888 Iron Ingots into 1659 Diamonds then sold them for about 83k. The shops are restocked, and you have worked yourself to death getting the equivalent of a little over a month's worth login and voting bonuses.

I know I could do better chopping wood or whatever and I think most people are not going to bother grinding Shop like that at least after the novelty wears off. If you can present me with a reasonable explanation of why this is wrong and use real numbers I would be glad to agree with you.

Sincerely,
Pab10s

<sigh>

In post #299, you asked why there is a concern about the Empire Shop buying back items.

I replied in post #305 what my concern is. By buying back something that currently has no value, the Empire Shop will give out rupees, which can be used to buy items that do have value.

You were apparently unhappy with my response and replied in post #309 with several rhetorical questions that I find to be combative and argumentative.

In post #311, you said the Empire Shop will have limits on what it will buy back. I heartily agree with that, that was my original concern.

I'm not saying this because I think it happened, but just to try and be ahead of time: Don't let it be that we will keep stating our same statements and keep disagreeing until a mod closes the thread, like happened with the #notchback thread.

I think we should just leave the economy the way it is. If we multiply it 10x everything is still worth the same proportionally, there are just more rupees going around. I really do not think that we need an inflation.

RainbowChin and I replyed multiple times to this, this is my last, short, time: it doesn't matter that it's still worth the same, that is a good thing. It's that with this people can easier vary in prices.

There is at lest one limit: Time. We all have limited time
As mentioned few pages back the /shop would need to adjust the prices dynamically.

Let's say someone worked 60 hours to collect materials and build an efficient iron farm. She stays AFK at the farm 24 hours a day (with an alt) and gets 2.7 DCs of ingots or around 16 stacks of iron blocks per day. Every 3 days, she transports 48 blocks to the town and sells, this takes 20 minutes. She will get bored and will stop after a month. Believe me - after a month that's not a game any more but a chore. Let's say the average iron price is 2r per ingot when she sells, so /shop will offer 1r per ingot initially.

So, during one month, she sells 276,480 ingots and gets 276,480 rupees for work of around 64 hours. That's 4,320r per hour which is not bad - but you can make more by collecting sand, sandstone, hard clay or similar. Buying large amounts of iron, the /shop dynamically adjusts the price, so it offers less and less per ingot - so farming iron gets less and less interesting.

I guess it is clear that even with a big iron farm, one could not "get infinitely rich" or "get rich fast and without effort."

Demand and supply regulate the prices, buying power and competition, not the cap from EMC shop. It is not needed at all.

I've asked several times in the past, but there was no one who could give good, valid and fair reasons for having an economy cap. I guess there are none.

I like this, but with others saying I agree. Farmable things shouldnt be able to be bought i.e gold, iron, and all mob drops (mob drops might be fine since they arent worth a ton..

There could be a limit per person and item during a time span - for example:
within one week you can sell a distinct item to the /shop for up to total of 20,000r
and then the /shop will refuse to buy that item from you until next week.

The price in the shop would be 1/2 (half) of the average price (that includes sells to the /shop).
Example:
- People sell iron to player shops for 2r per ingot.
- /shop buys for 1r per ingot
- iron market is saturated, EMC players consume 100,000 ingots in 3 weeks
- during this 3 weeks, iron producers sell surplus 400,000 ingots to the /shop
- average price is now (100,000 x 2 + 400,000 x 1) / 500,000 = 1.2 r / ingot
- /shop price is half of that, so /shop buys now for 0.6 r / ingot
- etc. but updated dynamically

The /shop price algorithm would have to contain certain checks and filters to prevent manipulation.