(I quickly became aware that my original goal of players recording every notable purchase throughout their rupee histories along with the prices for a wide scope is extremely expecting of players. If you would like to do it, feel free. If you'd like to record a month or two, notify month and dates and give like a google docs spreadsheet page or post it in the thread (in a spoiler so it doesn't take up a ton of space, please) with whether it's buy or sell, it's price, the item of course, and the amount purchased, please.) Okay, so... backup plan. People of all SMPs, since my original plan for world domina-- wrong speech... since my original plan of records is too unlikely and requires too much from players, I'm using a different strategy. If anybody reading this revamped thread could go to his or her home SMP and go around checking malls and shops and record prices every week or every other week, I would much appreciate it. I will do my part as well as continue working through my rupee history for the data chart. If you would like to know what this is all for, it will be part of a World Cultures social studies course paper I must write later in the year relating to inflation, supply/demand and buying trends. I ask of any person who owns a major mall to keep tabs on how many items are bought maybe one random day of the week of your choosing, if you could, to better help with buying trends, or conversely if consumers could do that as well. As a side note, anybody who helps input information towards this would be cited as part of a source meaning if we get 10 players from every SMP (sorry, Utopia. We don't like you. Just kidding), there would be 90 names mentioned in the citations as well as the server itself. So... who wants to see me have three pages for just citations? Help me out then! Yaaay!
I'm confused on why rupee history should be involved... Just check out the main shops server to server and average them, and do so bi-weekly or monthly...
What would really be interesting would be an Empire Price Index to measure inflation. Basically, every month, we ask active EMC users to provide their rupee history. We can then see what goods they're buying, annotate anything necessary (for example, if someone buys dirt for 1000r, but that represents a ticket for something and not someone buying a 1k block of dirt) and compile it into a table. We group items and see what people are spending, and what on. We can then manipulate this data to measure inflation and see changes in consumer tastes.
I want to get back as far as possible, not just recent. I'll be doing checks at major shops often, for sure, but I want a wider scope to see. I mean, I could just go through my history but that is limited since there are some items I just never or rarely buy and 1 person doesn't help get an accurate reading. Even if people just gave me the most recent month or two, I'd be fine with that to get a bit larger scope for what I'm specifically tracking this data for (don't worry, nothing malicious. It's for a school project later in the year but I want time to gather enough info). In a sense, that's what I want to try and do from a player base standpoint though that would be nice to be added.
Just revamped original post as the original goal is kind of expecting much. Rather, I'm now only asking players to help keep tabs on shop prices. And I did not put it in the original post but to help signify supply and demand, any shop owners that would like to help, could you try to keep track of stock of major items (diamonds, iron, logs, so on) on a regular basis? I would appreciate it much.
Is no one else interested in what this speech was about? Anyway, I love the idea. I would gladly support this with my rupees history, although there would be a massive 2 year gap in it.
I have gaps as well and considering it took me about an hour or so to go through one week, this will take a while. I would greatly prefer if you started with the most recent month or two then the oldest month or two to compare then work your way through it all if you still would like to. Personally, I have at least two 3-month gaps in my rupee history. Also, please note that I'll need to use any data I collect in around April or May so there's also a long while to do this. I guess it also depends on how much you buy and sell items. I'm pretty sure once I get past the first month or so, I'll be going through days much quicker.
I've got lots of people supplying current market data to my site and you can too if you like right here. Exactly what are you curious to know?
What I'm curious about is how prices change over time. I'm especially interested in EMC as some materials stay static after a certain time or decrease overall (promos) while some are able to be constantly generated (sugar cane, wheat, et cetera) and some decrease then increase then back and forth (diamonds, gold... basically anything not normally renewable that the reset of wastelands technically makes renewable). Most servers just let the materails that can't be sustained die out so you see prices of rarer items going higher and higher but EMC fixes that with the occasional reset of wastelands. So I guess I'm just interested in the unique case of "world restocking" so to say that the real world doesn't and how that affects monetary exchanges. At a bit lesser of a point, I'll be looking a bit into "server culture" to see price differences and if they are impacted by the "culture", such as if one server has majorily mega-malls for shops competing for prices or if it's a bunch of small shops with varied items and less competition; a "chain" of malls on the server that set prices equal to eachother or varied shops with varied prices. Another big impact for that is which server is the automatic for new players at the time because, well, to be honest (and anybody reading this may take this (somewhat) cruel advice), new players can be taken advantage of easier when it comes to buying items because they don't know the server prices well enough so a few popular shops could jack up prices just before an influx of new players to make a bit more, but that's besides the point. In short, I find the Empire Minecraft setup fascinating as to how it creates a rather unique price pattern.
You think of price as something simple, as though every commodity prices itself at one particular price. For example, you might say diamonds have gone up in value over time. Yet even with diamonds you've got various prices. Price someone who desperately needs a few will pay about 82-85r. If you're looking for a good deal, you pay about 70-75r after shopping around for a long time. If you're selling to a shop, you get 72-77r. Most shops are priced around 72-80r. If there were a DC of diamonds in an auction it would probably reach 85r each because of the convenience factor and EMC has a lot of rich players who would fight over them. So what is really the price?
