[POLL] chickeneer fixes the economy thread

I was just trying to understand the rationale of those that voted yes. But I understand if that would derail the thread and you want to avoid it.

An actual economist here. Let me tell you that I would be very careful to listen to that poll, because I am pretty certain that absolute majority of the people voting in it does not realize the consequences of what they want. I have been watching the economy ever since I started playing here, because for me it is a really interesting experiment. And the thing is that the economy is not broken. Now hear me out before you start shouting.

When I joined in early 2017, there weren't so many complaints about the economy, but the complaints were increasing ever since then. But nothing has really changed in the economy. So if it worked then, why is it allegedly not working now? The fact that items become farmable and their price crashes doesn't matter, for each item like that there is a new item for which the demand and price are high. Not to mention that farmable items can still be sold, it still takes time and at least initial effort to farm them and there will always be people who are not willing to spend the time and would rather buy. Yes, for lower price maybe, but the economic activity would still be there. And here is the problem, the economy seems broken, because the economic activity is dropping and it is dropping, because far fewer people are playing than years ago.

The questions in the poll are looking for the problem in the wrong place. Almost all the suggestions made here will lead to only one thing and that is inflation. You will not get more economic activity, but you will get rising prices if you take it too far, and you will destroy the value of the rupees people earned. In other words you will actually break the economy, which in itself is not broken. I will introduce a simple concept, so everyone can understand. You have certain amount of goods and money in the economy. If the amount of money increases faster than the amount of goods, you get rising prices. If the amount of money increases slower than the amount of goods, you get decreasing prices.

Now to the specifics. If the server buys certain items, it will decrease the amount of goods (item forever lost) and increase the amount of money (player gets paid for it) in the economy. It is a double whammy to create inflation. But the rising prices will not create any additional trading between people. Why would it? Yes, people will have more money, but everything will cost more. You can see it today in real life. People spend more and get less. So they spend more on necessities and less on things they don't need as much and as a result everyone is worse off. Customers, producers, everyone. If people have the items, they can just offer them in an auction and sell to the most willing buyer. But they don't do that. This should lead you to where the problem is. When I did an auction 5 years ago, my auction thread was buried under tons of others within few hours. Recently, I sold some copper in an auction and it ended 72 hours after the last valid bid. The whole 72 hours it was on top of the auction forum. And it is not because people don't have money, they don't even offer to sell anything anymore, there are hardly any active auctions. I have never had an auction fail, there was always someone willing to buy.

If you increase amount of rupees for voting, it is the same thing. Just more money in the economy to raise prices. And btw, the rising prices will harm the new players the most. The server has actually no economic tools to "fix" what you see as an issue. It can only make it a whole lot worse. If there are not more people playing, there cannot be an increase in the economic activity. We cannot expect the same economy with half the people. The economy still functions well, only for smaller amount of people, so in comparison to the past it looks broken, but it is not. The player count shrinks, so does the amount of trades and so does the economy.

The only way you can help the economy in my eyes is to make trading easier. So for example, it would be great to have a command for a list of shops on each server. Or even better the list of shops which sell or buy the thing I want to buy or sell currently.

You get less of what you tax and more of what you subsidize. You want to subsidize mining basically. But I would have to ask - why do we need to do that? I am a miner, I have built some things, but I spend absolute majority of my time turning the ground into Swiss cheese. I have several double chests of gold ingots and not a single one is farmed. Yes, I feel sorry it has pretty much no value, but that is how the Minecraft world is and I must accept it. But for everyone like me who likes mining, there is someone who doesn't like it and would rather buy from someone like me. However, the subsidy will motivate everyone, so even these people might feel like they need to mine, so they don't fall behind financially and because people like me might be selling to the server and have nothing left to sell to them. And if the server price were too low, nobody would sell to it anyway and it would have no impact. This might be extremely difficult if not impossible to balance.

I know you want new players to have a way to earn rupees, but these ways exist already. If they go and gather some items, they can sell them in some shops, their own shop or auction them off. When I was a new player, I was also looking for a way to make more rupees. I started by harvesting wood for someone's business here. Eventually, I wanted something better, so I started going through shops and looking what might sell well and I started collecting those items. Finally, I realized that auctions were a good way to make the big bucks. I created a plan, made potions, got some maps and spend a lot of time sailing the oceans. I managed to get one double chest of sponge and auction it off for 1 million rupees. All that is still possible today. I might get less money for it, but everything is cheaper than back then, so my effort would still have the same value.

You would actually be impeding on all that activity. The figuring out of how to obtain rupees in the EMC economy, the economic successes and failures. That is what makes the EMC economy interesting. You might create a situation where all that business spirit is replaced with mindless mining of raw gold or raw iron or whatever the server would buy, because that would be the way to make money. And let us not forget the monetary impact of it. You would be paying players to extract resources and destroy them. More money in the economy with no (or less) new goods, so more inflation. While if the players take the resources and sell them to other players, no new money is created and no goods destroyed, so it has no monetary impact.

If you see the farming as a problem, then I am afraid your only course of action to fix it is to make them unfarmable. So for example mobs will not drop any gold. Issue solved. But do we want that? Do we want to adjust the game so it fits the economy some of us would like to have? I don't think so. I think we should let the economy to adjust to the game we have. There are still plenty of items you cannot farm and you can make good money on.

I think that bosses and enraged should be off on default. The new player won't miss them, because they don't even expect them probably. And if they get invested in EMC and get into it more, they can enable it. Maybe just figure out a way to let them know they can do that.

C'mon. You know I'm not talking about mind controlling anyone. I'm talking about management getting back to participating in their creation and making EMC a popular brand again. This would resolve a lot of the issues you're mentioning in your poll because this server would be desirable. It's not right now for more reasons than just the economy being broken. It's the social aspect that keeps people on a server. It truly, truly is. People come here and leave more often than any other reason because there's no one that wants to hang with them or talk. If we had a higher serverpop, the chances of them having that social experience are higher and they'd stay. They come here expecting fun games going on, or pvp in the arena, but 90% of those events need to be run by staff. You don't have demand for staff righ now because server pop is low, so guess what, not a high demand for those events, annnddd the player leaves because no one around.

You have to give a reason for peeps to come here beside us being in a random list of servers to check out and they can make rupees. What's the point of rupees if no one to work with and go spend them? We don't have enough variety in players to meet this need. Players used to come here because of EMC's reputation. Now, people don't even know it's one of the longest running servers out there with truly enjoyable customizations for play. Yes, the economy could use some tweaks, but you give new players nearly 15k in rupees when they first get here. There's low demand for materials and prices have dropped dramatically because we have low server pop (server population-player count-head count-whatever you want to call it).

Fix the bartering system, sure. Create a shopworld and drive sell prices at existing shops even lower or force them to stop buying from other players altogether. Shops already have overflowing stock to try and keep peeps earning money, I know I do. Shopworld saves me money, sure, but I lose that player dependence on my shop for rupees. I lose a business relationship.

I'm not as old as the other players here (only have 1.5 years of experience) but here are my 2 cents

Having the option for players to sell non-farmable items like netherite to the server would provide a solid "base" price. It would not tank the value of these items, but rather give a last-resort option to sell to if there is no other option available.

Just like the Empire Shop used to be "last resort" to pay super-high prices for convenience, here, you would sell items for super-low prices in case you cannot find a shop buying them. Think, Ancient Debris for 400r.

Do this for other blocks, and you have something for new players to keep themselves busy with if nobody is online to tell them to go to xyz shop.

As Zomberina said, though, fixing the economy isn't just dealing with rupee minutiae. The economy is also a reflection of there being a lack of new players building things, starting large projects, etc. More staff are needed to host events more regularly, and some variety is needed too, lest it fall entirely on Moople's shoulders to be acting community engagement manager.

I think bartering could use tweaking without a doubt. I feel like shopworld ideas for buying certain items at a low rate is an option, but how low are we talking? Will it be lower than what's already kind of established, thus establishing a sell floor price? Basically, if peeps don't know I buy certain items, they'll sell them to the void. Which yes, brings up the shop directory idea of some sort. Not sure if you could have a command like /list shop and then the server populates all the address with that tag. Then the player could just click and go? Or just see the res #s. Problem is, plenty of folks list +shop and then have nothing there for years. I recently forceclaimed such a property and built my auction plaza there instead

nyello

I have been very outspoken about the economy and EMC in the past, and I want to share my thoughts about these polled questions too.

As a preface to questions one and two, I should mention that the only stores I have ran are promo stores, and most of my views will come from someone who actively sells to shops and other players personally.

1) Should the server intervene in some way?
I voted yes.

Truthfully, yes and no. EMC's economy is sad, going out and collecting most resources just isn't worth it if you are looking to make money. For most items, the only time this is a viable option is immediately after a new update, which quickly fades after a few weeks. Other people have touched on the ideas of why this is the case, such as low player counts, and lack of actual activity that would require any resources; when was the last building competition?

The most viable ways to make money on this server don't require your hard work, going out and collecting resources to make profit. They are collecting promos and selling them, buying from other players and reselling, or voting. I do not believe that this should be the case on an "economy" server. This is why I call the EMC economy "broken".

The reason I also say no to this is that I do not believe the server should become overly involved with the economy, a point I believe Chickeneer agrees with, from reading his responses thus far.

2) Should the server buy non-"farmable" items?

I voted yes.

Let me explain. The old shop-world offered (near) every item in the game, at a ridiculous mark up on the base value in the player economy. This is exactly how it should be done for buying items too. Someone else brought up the point that these items should be bought cheap, much cheaper than any player would ever sell person to person. The EMC shop existed as a last resort for someone who needed items, as such the EMC shop can again act as a last resort, for those who instead need rupees.

People aren't going to suddenly stop selling to other players because this option exists. Player shops thrived whilst the original EMC store existed, there's no need to panic about this one either.

3) Should bartering mechanics be changed?

I voted no.

Chickeneer has made it clear from an earlier post that his concern here is not one of the economy, but one of game balance. I voted no purely based on the economic side of this, as such my answer will reflect that.

Obsidian requires an average of 11.45~ ingots to acquire one singular block. At even a very low price of 2r per gold ingot that is still 23r per block of obsidian. I'm fairly certain that is more than EMC's average obsidian price.

Soul sand requires an average of 2.3 per a singular block, coming out at around 5r per.

Gravel requires around 1 ingot per block, coming out at around 2r per.

All of these values were taken from the Minecraft Wiki.

For soul sand and obsidian, the value of gold traded to value of item acquired is higher than the actual price of those items in the economy, and for gravel the value is around the same.

I personally do not see an issue with this. If someone wants to AFK their life away to acquire a DC of obsidian after using 39,744 gold, let them.

To answer from a game balance perspective, it is not only slower, but much slower to acquire these items from bartering. Leave it alone.

4) Should every item have a use?

I voted yes.

Again however, this isn't a black and white answer.

One of the things I despise the most about EMC and the "economy", is the abundance of useless promotional items that do not serve any function, except sitting in a chest somewhere, with a sham value that disappears when you realise nobody wants to buy your collection of Holiday Candles and Empire Fireworks. Please give us more useful items, and allow us to buy them from the EMC shop.

However, the question asking "every" item is a bit unfair. No, not every item needs to serve an actual purpose. You can release items that do not have a use. I voted the way I did because the other answer I feel does not represent what EMC currently is. It isn't an occasional thing that items are just "quirky with a pun". Perhaps I am viewing the question wrong, but it is my personal belief that the "yes" answer here isn't a truthful representation of EMC.

Whilst we're at it, why not add some of the more useful promos from EMC's past to the shopworld? It was done for the Labour Bench, surely it can be done for the other actually useful promos such as the Mineral Mincer/Ore Buster etc.

5) Should enraged at difficulty 5 be nerfed to close to vanilla?

I voted no.

New players and any of EMC's custom content is an issue, it isn't just the enraged mobs. Nerfing them to the ground would completely ruin the experience for literally everybody else.

The issue isn't the enraged mobs, it is the fact that they aren't told about them. EMC's current tutorial sucks. It needs a rework (again). The tutorial that did teach players about these things was deemed too long, so to fix that all of the actual useful information from the tutorial was removed. You need to find a middle ground between old and new, so that players know what to expect when coming in to the server. If I could manage the sandstone maze when I was 10 years old, I'm sure new players can handle something a bit more complex than what we currently have.

tl;dr read the post

i hope you enjoyed seeing me type in full punctation for once

I'd like to address each of these blocks individually, because I understand your concerns around them to varying degrees.

Obsidian

It takes an average of 1 dc of gold to get *six* stacks of obsidian. In the same time it takes to afk farm that gold, craft it, and feed it through a bartering farm, I could probably dismantle at least half of an end pillar or more, which has a far higher yield. The great thing about obsidian being a result of bartering is it provides an option for people like me who don’t mind this slower but lower effort way of obtaining obsidian to get it without travelling to the end. My outpost for example is an hours nether rail ride away; it’d be quite a pain to go to the end every time I need obsidian. I know I’m an extreme case, but I believe the point still stands.

Gravel

Now I'll be honest with you, gravel I find harder to defend, mostly because bartering is actually faster than mining gravel, especially given the fact that gravel doesn’t have predetermined spawning locations like the end pillars. However, I feel like the point you made about iron farms applies here: gravel is essential to concrete, a highly in demand building that the server benefits from having a plentiful supply of. Is it a shame that gravel is cheaper now? Yes, sure, but it’s part of the nature of EMC’s economy that the prices of items changes with updates. Look at infinity and mending bows for example. They used to cap out at 4-5k at most, and now they sell for more than many promos and the supply will only shrink over time as players die with them in their inventory or log off and never return. Also, it’s not like gravel was the backbone of the EMC economy anyway. I’m fairly certain no one is going whatever the Minecraft equivalent of hungry is due to an over abundance of gravel.

Soul Sand

I don't really have much to say about this one, even if I agreed with you this one seems like the least problematic of the three. Soul sand isn't a super common building block, it's not rare, and it was never expensive.
It isn't really that useful in mass quantities for most people (I'll admit I'm actually slightly biased here, I have a wither skeleton farm and farm large amounts of withers so I do actually run through a fair amount of the stuff).

I understand where you're coming from but even with these arguments I don't think bartering farms are the economic boogey man that you might perceive them to be. The real problem is inactivity, and the remaining players all having been around for so long that they have accumulated vastly more materials than anyone could possibly ever need. To reboot the economy you need to create demand, not reduce supply. That is the crux of the issue.

EDIT: While I was formatting my post I got ninja'd and Miku made my point better than I could

As a thought experiment, what would happen if we went to the other extreme? I haven't been active in many years, but I remember back in the day azoundria had a website that catalogued player shops based on user input and produced a list of shops that bought/sold each item in the game. What if the server kept a similar database that automatically updates upon shop creation/destruction that players could access using a command? Ignoring logistical difficulties (whether or not keeping a list of all shops across 10 servers is possible, accounting for out of stock/full chests, etc.), could this be a step in the right direction?

http://www.azoundria.com/emc/market/

it still exists, it's just wildly outdated due to no one actually using it in the last several years (i also dont think it has been updated past 1.16)

I think voting should be high on the list, because it is easy and quick and because the server should want that (it helps the server?). But people don’t really vote. Just as a little experiment try to use the command /p [player_name] on everyone who plays when you join and you will find out that most people don’t vote daily or at all. And I think this should be the main way money gets from the server to the players.

I will reveal something I have noticed very early after I started playing on EMC. I have never mentioned it publicly to anyone, because I didn’t want anyone to jump on it and potentially disturb a very delicate balance. Especially, because it doesn’t create any issues. The server economy is currently very deflationary by default. By a very rough estimate the deflation is at least 10% a year in the last 5 years. And it is not because of declining player base, I think if the same amount of people played as 5 years ago the prices would be even lower. The reason is that people don’t vote. Voting is the only way to create new money on this server. It is basically money printing.

If you vote every day on every website, let’s say you progress your voting bonus by 300 a year, because sometimes you forget or cannot vote for whatever reason. And even though you can vote twice a day on some websites, it is unreasonable to expect average player to do it regularly. With this you will make 938000 rupees a year, so let’s call it a million. Now, a player that plays regularly enough to vote every day is absolutely guaranteed to create things and extract resources worth way more than a million rupees in a year. So the amount of goods the player adds to the economy is bigger than the amount of new money, so prices have to go down. If we take into account that majority of people don’t vote and thus only create new goods and no new money, then the prices go down even more. Someone suggested the server should buy for example ancient debris for 400r. I will guarantee you that will be the going price one day, even if nothing on the server or the game changes.

I believe that if you doubled or even tripled the rupee voting bonuses (including the patterned rupee bonuses), the prices would still be declining, just not as fast. As I said, the deflation doesn’t create any problems, but this would allow you to provide new players with more and easy money (no high entry barrier) without destroying the value of the money people earned so far and without potentially destroying the balance of the market prices for certain goods. And people might vote more. You would also have a better control over it, should further adjustments be needed. Unlike with a shop, where you would have to constantly figure out what to buy and what not to buy and also constantly adjust prices, because no matter how low they would be, eventually the economy would get there.

I wouldn’t communicate it at all. Because I don’t know that, you don’t know that, nobody knows that. I disagree with your premise that some things are never wanted. You only need to find the opportunity and a willing buyer. I sold 50 DCs of dirt for 49000 rupees once. A friend, I am playing with, asked me why didn’t I throw the dirt away, and I would be 49000 rupees poorer if I did. It might be worthless to me and to most other people, but it might become valuable to someone at some point. You never really know where you can find an opportunity to make money.

I am not a shop owner myself, beside a very little exchange of 3 items I have, so maybe someone else can answer this. But I don’t think there is much the server can do to connect people to shops. That should be a task for the shops themselves to bring in customers. If there are tools the server could provide for that is really a question for some experienced shop owners.

I agree virtualizing the shops would make the experience worse. It is interesting to see different shops and builds. It should only be made easier to find the specific shops with the goods you want currently.

You got some good answers with calculations on the topic of bartering already. I don’t farm anything automatically beside agricultural products, because I don’t like the concept of farming things like gold or iron. So I don’t really know how useful bartering is, but from the numbers here I don’t see it as extremely problematic. You have to keep in mind that the people doing the afk farming need to have either a second account or have the game on when they are not playing. I am sure there are people like that, but are they really so many to make these items completely worthless? I doubt it. Their price will just be lower than it used to be. As I said, the economy will adjust to the game.

Agreed. I've spoken with a couple OG EMC players that have long since left, and they said to me (in an egotistical way) that they have a lot of rupees/their reses are worth a lot, either due to their location or the "lore" that is behind them.

While I do not believe the second half has much of a value anymore (given that the players that know about the "lore" have also left EMC), but the number of rupees in these inactive accounts, however, still maintain their value. That is a factor to take into account as well.

You have made a lot of good points in your last few posts, however I think the one section you may be overlooking is younger players especially, Ive seen many new players who (atleast gave off the impression of being on the younger side) join and make a small shop after much trial and error to get shop signs working right, finally get their small shop with maybe 2 shop signs open and tell people about it.
Most of the time 1-2 long time players will shop up and buy a bit of whatever they are selling, but after that it drops off too zero shoppers, So from their point of view, they have done what they are supposed to do and now are just sitting there hoping people come to their shop, and honestly no one, especially younger players want their time playing to be sitting around waiting.

So from what I see, the question becomes how do we make the economy that is still interesting for the players, like you winfield who enjoy the challenge and detail, while also making it possible and interesting for the less experienced and younger players.

This obviously isn't an easy thing to achieve but will be highly beneficial if we can pull it off,
Personally, I feel that right now the server buying some non-farmable items for a low price,
this gives players a more definitive answer to the question "Where can I sell my coal", letting us tell them "You can sell it at (location) for cheap or you can look for a player shop that might buy it for more"

The trick with this obviously becomes the balance now and over time (especially with new updates changing stuff)
Some key parts of this off the top of my head

• Not adding items until at least several months after they release on EMC, too let the players prices settle some
• Have enough item options in said shop to not restrict to just a few items, variety, well also not making it such a long list of items it takes huge amounts of time to re-balance every update
• And of course, an initial price balance that makes it worthwhile (especially for new players) but doesn't obsolete the player shop ability to compete with prices

Its likely I have missed some aspect of this concept, if anyone sees anything worth noting, please comment

Big part of the reason, why nobody visits that player's shop, is the declining player base and a server shop will not fix that. But even then, the player made a shop, it didn't work out as they planned, so time to figure out something else. And I think that if they can set up a shop, they know there are other shops where they could sell their stuff instead. Why wouldn't they just do that? Why wouldn't they just do that even if the server shop existed? What purpose would it have then?

And I would point out one more thing. Even more important. Whether their shop worked out or not might not be that important. They probably still had fun creating it. After all that is what the game is about. I have created a business, which cost me a lot of time and effort and I put a lot of thought into it, even though I knew from the beginning that it will probably never be used by anyone. But its creation was the fun and its completion was the satisfaction. Would it be more satisfying if people used it? Absolutely. But the fact that they don't cannot take away the fun I had creating it.

Even if the player made the shop initially just to make money, they still might have had fun doing it. But if a server shop was there, maybe they wouldn't even bother to explore the possibility of setting up their own shop. If they seek the interaction with other players, they will not get it from a server shop anyway. And if it is just about the money, there are other ways to do that, as I pointed out.