Rebalancing the Empire Economy [slow induce]

My modular cane farm on SMP6 is fully automated and each module runs on its own automated timer.. Which reminds me, I need to check its storage.. o3o

I've been watching this thread since it's inception a couple days ago, and I've had a rather difficult time deciding where I stand on the subject matter. Or at least I did until the idea of the Empire Shop setting a base "buyback" rate was suggested a couple pages ago.

The beauty of this concept is because of how simple it is: if you pay better than the Empire Shop, people are going to sell to you more often, meaning your shop remains stocked. If you want to make any kind of profit, you have to sell your stock for at least 1r more than you pay. It's not too hard to wrap your head around (at least if my ability to understand it is anything to go by ) and encourages people to set their sell and buyback rates at more, I don't know, "realistic" levels.

Of course, you'll still have individuals who'll practically give away resources for free, but that's just a flat-out inevitability with any video game economy.

I think we should do away with the Empire Shop completely. It’s not fair that the human players have to compete with an entity that has unlimited items and funds. I think the economy would do fine without it as long as there is a better way for players to find other player’s shops.

Most new players spend all their starting rupees in the Empire Shop not knowing how much lower the prices are at the player shops. I think it’s not fair for the Empire shop to take those rupees when they could be stimulating the economy and driving traffic through player made shops.

I also think the Empire Shop should not be buying items from players. I do support a system where EMC can track how much items are being bought and sold for, but with less traffic going through player shops, that information wouldn’t be as accurate as it could be. Plus every item in EMC shouldn’t be worth something. Dirt should never have any real value. You shouldn’t be able to sell all your dirt to the Empire shop when no one else is willing to buy it.

Having a better way for people to find shops or have the ability to search for items by buy / sell prices would stimulate the economy. More people would be willing to invest time into creating and maintaining their shop / mall because more people were being push to them. Players that sold things for the lowest price would get more traffic and would sell out quicker and would be force to adjust prices. Naturally creating a bottom without the help of the Empire Shop.

I support keeping the rupee bonuses that same, but increase the starting bonus for new players by 20k or 30k. This would encourage the new people to stay and settle into the Empire (and get addicted to EMC) and pump more money into the player shops which in turn would cause inflation and more player shops.

Basically we have many items with a virtual unlimited supply, and even if there is a high demand prices will always creep towards zero. It has too.

Seeing as demand is basically fixed, you could add players I guess but there is a limit to that too, then all you can do is try to reduce the supply.

Reducing the availability of mining resources such as the wasteland would be very unfair to new players and in fact would discourage them from being part of this server (that is a different economy and will need to be weighed by the owners of EMC). I suppose there could be some kind of system that limited players resource gathering capacity but that seems to discourage one of the basic concepts in Minecraft.

So having empire shops buying limited amounts, might help new players out a bit, but still wouldn't help the price of materials that can be farmed. And if you had empire shops that buy unlimited amounts that would help the farmers get lots of Rupees but that would drive down the value of the Rupee.

So my answer is basically this,
1) if EMC is trying to increase its standing in server rankings, increase the daily voting bonus
2) if EMC is trying to increase paid memberships increase bonus to subscribers
3) if EMC is trying to make an easier start for new players and potential subscribers, have empire shops buy limited amounts of relatively easy to gather resources.
4) if we want to increase the amount of Rupees to buy things add Rupees to the economy using almost any means.

All I basically use Rupees for is to lock chests...but I really just like building things and the Rupee economy is not a big concern of mine...

And to be very clear, this is by far the best "public" server I have played on and from what I have seen so far, however this is proceeded on it will done as fairly and orderly as possible.

Oh and as a final thought, obviously by the amount of response, people actually do care a lot about how this server runs...kinda cool when you think about it.

Imma do an example.

Lets say we get 10x more rupees.

All this will do is make the shop owners change their prices 10x more so its the equivalent of what it used to be.

The price of everything wont really change at all. Players will still complain about being poor, beg for money, etc..

Using valuable coding time on this doesn't seem necessary to me because it wont be solving any problems. Bug fix's and stuff like that are more important than this in my opinion.

Nobody said anything about multiplying the existing amount of rupees

i am included in nobody
i never said anything about it either

That would be exactly the plan.
With the prices up like that, it would allow for mare variance and competition.
As of right now, iron is say 2r each. (as an example)
The only way to compete would be to lower the price to 1r, cutting income from iron in half, which isn't great at all.

And anyway, looking on the first page Aikar said he is no longer doing this.

Without the EMC Shop there is no way to cap the price of an item. This is the only thing stopping items becoming outrageously expensive. Look at most MMO games with an Economy and how inflation means people are trading in the hundreds of thousands for extremely basic items (EVE is a good example of this).

The EMC shop protects players from prohibitive pricing or player run cartels forcing the price higher.

Let's not have the Empire shop. As someone said, new players waste money there unknowingly. Without the Empire shop, the business would go to player shops and new players would be encouraged to gather resources in the waste.

That will also mean that promo items cannot be bought from the non existent Empire shop. I think that is ok. It was only beneficial for rich players.

Perhaps increase the daily bonus a little, but don't fiddle too much with the economy.
Maybe give new players a bit more money.

EMC's economy doesn't work like EVE's. With the exception of rare items, all items are attainable by anyone. No group could cut of the supply of any normal item.

The only item the Empire Shop has capped is Horse saddles. Everything else is priced so high at the shop that there is essentially is no cap. EMC does not have a problem with group of players artificially inflating prices or hording like EVE does.

For everyone who thinks you shouldn't be able to sell to the Empire Shop:
Let's take the most worthless item in the game, gravel dirt, and say it's worth 2r for 64. If you dig out an entire utopia plot, you get 28,800 rupees. You earn 28,800 rupees for doing a service valued at 120,000 rupees—not even beginning to mention how much sheer time it would take to ferry fourteen thousand stacks of dirt to the shop and back.

Do you honestly think that digging an entire utopia residence, then making four hundred trips to shop and back is worth 28,800 rupees? That's how much dirt is worth. That's pretty fair. (The single log it would take to make a single wooden shovel to dig a single stack of dirt would cost more than the dirt is worth.)

If people want to sell their infinite stacks of iron to the shop for minuscule profits, more power to them. The fact that there is demand for higher-priced iron remains true. The iron is taken out of circulation, decreasing the overall supply and further increasing the price of iron. Considering that the aforementioned infinite stacks of iron will no longer be infinitely obtainable, it isn't economically feasible to sell the iron for less than it's worth.

As a thought ... how about stimulating the Economy with a Server Shop that BUYS items?

As a long time player on SMP3, I have found that the Daily Bonus is the only thing I can count on for raising $. While I do have a shop and I set my prices to slaughter the Server Shop ones, and I really like the addition of the /v +shop concept creating more exposure, this is one Server I play on where there is no Server based buy area to sell items to for $. On a Towny Server, this is critical. On Empire, not so much - but it still could be a way of stimulation, without changing the scale on which it's run currently.

Lately, I have been visiting that SMP3 Outlet Mall (I'm sorry I forget the creators name currently ... res #6697 on SMP3) and have been able to sell items to gain rupees to purchase other needed materials. This guy has certainly stimulated MY economy . In the Towny concept, money is king and motivation for buying land, Town upkeep etc. and here not so much. But, with all the nice Bonus items floating around, I would certainly like to be able to go out on a gathering session with purpose knowing the items I collect can be turned into instant cash, to purchase these great items for long term use.

Simply my two cents here. I would like to take this opportunity to commend the creators of Empire for providing a MP Server with a very nice and unique approach to the MP realm. When I want to play the game "straight up", this is where I come. As a purist at heart, Empire certainly has embraced that concept while still remaining fresh and current with the different nuisances like the Wastelands (which is TERRIFIC btw) and has continued to expand their horizons to keep people returning day after day.

Please .... continue to keep up the great work

Please be very very careful which items /shop or the server will buy from players. Regardless of price.

If you are going to have /shop buy from players. That is, players able to sell goods to the server for fixed price. Be VERY very careful which items you buy. Regardless of price, this can go horribly wrong.

Being able to sell infinite amounts for any price, no matter how low, can be exploited.

Atm, a player must either find a finite player shop to sell their goods to, or set up their own finite shop to sell to other players. Either way, there is a limit to the amount they can sell. And it takes time, and relies on other players wanting what they have. This means they cannot sell infinite amounts. They can only sell how much other players will buy. And it cannot be exploited.

So again, please be VERY careful which items /shop would buy from a player. Price is almost irrelevant.

EG. Any auto-farmable resource should never be able to be sold to the infinite server shop.
This is a real example from my personal experience on another server:
Iron Ingots. Even selling for 1r each. If a player was to find ways to farm 100,000 of these a day, they can sell them to the shop, and earn 100,000 rupees a day. It's limitless. You could never sell that much to players.

Perhaps the problem here isn't the shop buying goods, but is rather the obscene quantity of stock. Aikar has made it apparent that he does not intend to allow the mass-production of effortless goods.

If something is making players too much money for too little effort, it will be tweaked. This refers to either the selling price, or the ease of acquirement. After all, it's kind of bad when people have so much stock that it literally could never be drained faster than it is accrued.

(This is ignoring the fact that 100,000 iron ingots would take quite a lot of time to "move." It's over three large chests of blocks. To add to the inconvenience factor, the shop could only accept ingots, making it nearly 29 large chests, or 43 and a half trips.)

I believe that new players are informed of player run shops in the tutorial and the wiki.

If I remember right, there was a player long long ago who did that very thing, he made prices for a certain item very high. It would take barely any effort to raise prices on things like leather and other time consuming items.

I'm reading that as your opinion, as I have not seen anything from Aikar to suggest that he intends to directly interfere in that way.

In my experience, I personally can move and sell/buy large quantities fast enough to get that 100,000r in my bank very fast. Faster than earning money other ways at least. But yes, it does take time.[/quote]

I find the objection to the allowing people to sell to Shop contradictory. Many people voted that they would like more Rupees, which is actually what this thread was originally about. Yet the objection to being able to sell to Shop is that some very industrious person might make a lot of Rupees selling blocks there. So it's ok for us to get lots of Rupees just for logging in, but not ok if someone works for them? To top it off that person is going to have more Rupees. Isn't that a good thing since they will be more likely to spread them around by spending them? It seems not only contradictory, but upside down to object to the idea.

I certainly wouldn't want to spend day after day carting the same items into Town to sell at Shop for pennies, but if someone else enjoys it I say more power to them. I find that more respectable than buying Rupees from the website or having them given to us. No one is going to ruin the fun for me or ruin the "economy" by earning Rupees, especially if we all can do it. Those are more Rupees that they might spend at my or someone else's shop and isn't taking anything away from me.

I used to play Guild Wars a lot and they had a system that would work to limit grinding items at Shop if it's a must have. The merchant there would change his buy and sell prices dynamically. His stock was limited. As more and more items were sold to him the price would go down and eventually he would stop buying once a limit was reached. Same thing with selling. We had a dragon festival and every year the Merchants would run out of Glittering Dust because it was used to make fireworks. I remember making a bit of money from my friends as I routinely salvaged materials and I would have plenty saved up. If our Shop had a limited virtual storage for items, say four double Chests per item, I would think Aikar could code some signs that change their prices like the GW Merchant does.

That is correct. It is NOT ok.
Sign-in rupees are controlled, fixed/finite, unexploitable.
selling blocks to an "infinite" shop is not controlled, is not fixed/finite, and is exploitable.

Does that clear it up? Do people understand the danger to the economy from an unlimited source of rupees?

No I don't understand the danger. Will I become unemployed and starve? Will I lose my residence because I can't afford the rent? Will the server explode? Will my client suddenly display "Game Over"? And how is giving me Rupees every day until the end of time finite or fixed?

I think the only thing that could break the economy is something that prohibited players from participating and I don't see how someone collecting and selling blocks could do that regardless of magnitude.