I usually am not one to know much about the economy, but I know for a fact it is kinda broken in some places. I've been dragged into this by my friend gianluca99star as I help him run a business on smp1. I'd love to help in any way I can.
So I just spend about the last 10 minutes going through the thread and I just have to say, I love this idea. I have no official degree IRL in finance or Economics. I do however have a ton of knowledge of the EMC Economy which has come from my 2 Years + actually trying to make money on it instead of just building and other such stuff. I do however have a bit of business knowledge IRL as I'm trying to run my own business with Trading Cards and Sports Memorabilia. My main focus in EMC is Stone, Wood, Obsidian, Lava, Villagers, and I'm an avid horse breeder (which is a severely dying market). My goal with the group would be to help with researching in game as I have plenty of time on my hands and if need be I can record videos and such stuff (such as marketing reports). I am quite gifted when it comes to numbers so if you need someone to run numbers I would be the guy for it. I've loved numbers for as long as I can remember. The biggest thing I would like to see helped is the Emerald Economy and Horse Economy. The emerald economy I feel though is where it needs to be (price wise), for emeralds are WAY easier to produce since 1.8, considering you no long have to craft paper. I have tried to help save the horse economy by starting up the EBRA (Empire Barrel Racing Association). With this horses have a reason to be collected and sought after. *crosses fingers* I think i covered everything I wanted to say, if not I'll be posting again soon
What if I accidentally moved 3 reses to the wrong place, and had to give Senior Staff 450k to fix it because I'm an idiot? Would that be a valid rupee sink?
Yes, but I'd suggest not to do that. It seems that we're quite stable now, possibly even leaning a bit towards deflation. But I didn't really check, that's just a feeling. At the same time, I think there are still massive dormant rupee reserves around that are potential source of instability.
I'm newer to EMC but I've been most interested in the economy. I have a semi successful shop and would definitely like to learn more. One topic that really interested me was the pricing of items throughout EMC (including between servers). I've done this to a small degree on my own to better price my shop. If a few other people wanted to work on this with me I can set up a Google docs spreadsheet so we can try to keep track of prices. My question how many individual prices would be reasonable to pull for each item for each server to get an accurate mean value for each smps price?
I believe a lot of this is available via shop keeper or the Azoundria website. I do not know that we have to do it manually. One issue with collecting these prices may be in knowing what sign actually has physical stock behind it because its easy to say you sell shulker boxes for 1000r if you don't have any in stock but it would impact the price if it was one used. I believe shopkeeper uses signs somehow but how is a good question. Either way it presents some issues since if it tracks signs just being present, then empty ones would count but the flip side is if it only takes what is clicked then it would miss a bunch of valid pricing. Azoundria has an online site that also does the review of rupee history. What I like about this is this one is based on actual sales, not signs. Even if empty now if they had it and sold it then rupee history would show it. One issue with both is the thing with rupee history including old data, to be relevant only the past 60-90 days transactions max would have a real picture of the current market. While I have no issues with a life long average price, prices change over time and things like parrots are the highest they will ever be right now (and have already dropped) as well as things like diamonds which in the past couple years have almost doubled in price. So oddly enough even in 2 months Parrots may be 1-2k while today they are 4ish and the average price would still be 3k. ...or on Diamonds, which would be drug down by 5 years of prices, they may still show 80r for a sale price average when today its say 110r. Hard to get a fair market value when things are skewed that way.
Another question: do you really need to? For a large amount of players (no idea how much) shopping on another SMP creates extra hindrances; such as the costs to use the vault for example. It never bothered me at all, but I know players who were (or maybe still secretly are) upset with vault pricing. It's not uncommon for a shop to mostly focus themselves on the prices of the same server. After all: that will be your direct competition where most players will be concerned.
When I first started, I thought the vault pricing may be a bit of a pain, but quickly realized that to go buy something for 1k less somewhere quickly offset any vault fees. I would assume the idea of sampling many smps and shops is to get smp averages as well as overall. Fair price/average pricing would then be available to shop owners and shoppers alike. If you find that your smp is overpriced you have the right to still buy there or go to another smp. This is really more about gathering of information and decimating it for use. It will be each shop owners choice how those figures impact how they price. BTW, while I don't think I have the most used EMC shop by far, I consider my small shop to have a wide reach and does fairly well. I do believe I have multiple returning non SMP1 players for various things I offer. I try to offer a fair price, while making it competitive and profitable but ensuring I have stock all the time. One thing is most of this conversation is in selling prices to customers but not much on those shop owners buying costs. Wanting to move to that in my next expansion, I am pretty interested in that as well.
The tools download and process the rupee log or a recent part of it. Shop signs are not used. Automatic analysis can be attempted, but it is far from trivial to automatically detect mistakes, outliers and irrelevant transactions. Also, rupee history is historical data, with little information about the current availability. Manual checking is needed to get reliable information.
One thing I would like to know is how many players visit my shop and public farms, how much use do they get, and are they worth setting up. I think there is a redstone trigger that can count the number of clicks using a pressure plate rigged to a hopper timer and chest with a block released each time the plate is triggered by a player tping to the res. This would at least let me know how many ppl visit although not 100% accurate. I have tried to look at ways the basic new player can earn a few rupees easily or purchase an item economically without breaking their bank balance. I find though that while a few players will sell megga amounts of high priced items to the shop that don't sell quickly items like wither skulls and beacons, these tend to be experienced players, newer or inexperienced players either don't understand the basic concept of how to earn rupees. I have considered looking at readjusting all my prices down but it would only work if all shops did the same in order to readjust the economy and don't know if this would fix the problem. It would also mean taking a large hit financially loss wise.
You can tie in a room where it counts who spawns there and you can only exit, only way back is to tp back there. Once they are in the room it would send a palse to a system similar to my lag reporter and have a delayed so players cant spam it. Just one way to see how many players go there.
Public Farms may be a whole different topic since they have so many up and down sides. From flooding the economy, red stone ticks, tps lag, cheap food, great for trade, etc... I see more good than bad and that wasn't what I really wanted to comment on. So I'm going back to one of my standards as one of the newer shop owners, if I had been playing on EMC for 3+ years and had millions of rupees, my main builds all done for a shop/mall/both then this wouldn't bother me near as much. I don't have those things and want them so I can buy rare items or great res locations. Forced lowering of prices will simply allow those with large sums of rupees to retain them and those who do not have them a much harder struggle to reach higher levels. I do not believe it will stimulate any more purchasing. If you think of a shulker box, even with just voting, you can purchase one from 3-5k the places that carry them, so that is 3 to 5 days of voting. You can get elytra with roughly 10 days of voting. I am not seeing some horrible price inflation that is staggering the economy even for new players. In fact non rare items I would bet in general have taken a hit in price, like bones, feathers, spawn eggs and wood products. The only things I know that have more value today than in the past are promos, items in higher demand with release changes and maybe shulker boxes. To boot, the past 3 dc of shulker boxes at auction went for 200k or better. I don't have time to always get my own shells and at that price I afford a half price mandated cut in selling prices. The actual issue is not the fault of anything but time. Players with tons of rupees can afford to outbid player with less which drives prices up, but only the rare and harder obtained items.
It bothers me also, I did not always have millions of rupees, and every one of them I have worked hard for and earnt. I have also lost millions through economy changes and the price of some items bottoming out at times. Players selling to the shop at top sell price, filing up your chests and then selling massive amounts of that item for half the price, making the stock they just sold you near worthless. Trust me when I say I know the effects of reducing prices, it is not something I consider lightly and yes I agree it does not help those that are looking to gain millions of rupees quickly. When I first started playing on EMC a diamond was worth between 21 and 27 rupees now they are over 100 almost 5 times that amount. Demand has always been the same, the problem here is a massive reduction in the number of players from 600 plus players to just over 200 at peak times. So how do we help new players get a leg up so to speak and stay? The public farms are more for new players that have yet to get established financially and are not yet ready to venture out into the wild. New players want to come buy good tools and armour but lack the funds. I agree they can vote, but they tend to want it now not next week, so if they spend a little time shearing sheep, chopping logs and sell them to shops they can get those items a bit quicker.
Thanks for your reply. I never questioned "deserve" or "work: on the part of anyone. I do believe that in the course of time, you have had to deal with and seen many things change. I do see your diamond example, but do me a favor and make the same things for elytra, wheat and beacons. I would likely agree with you on demand, but the price should adjust to the market, if people are pricing diamonds at 120, someone will either pay it or go get them. As a shop owner, if my diamonds are not moving, then "I" will or may lower my price if I want to try to sell more diamonds. There is going to be a breaking point that player_X will say, oh it's easier to buy diamonds than go find them. As far as public farms, I'd love to say they were for new players, but when is the last time you took a new player to one? I did just a couple days ago but it was because of other things that player was doing it made sense to show them that. Most new players will not know of or go to them because the information is either through luck in a /shop (or painfully doing /shop a million times until you find one) or someone telling you. Just like the overload of information for EMC in the tutorial, the forums, where most information is, is not visited by new players. One of the things I love about EMCs online web site is the amount of information, but this is not a common web site for a gaming server. ...and on the last part, just like I'm not asking to have millions of rupees and a full mall built with no work. ...and I believe that new players have some level of tolerance and understanding of you may have to work a little bit before you drop in to the best stuff. They can through "vanilla play" on EMC obtain pretty much the same thing in a similar time to doing a local game. To boot the starter gear/set is actually pretty dang nice. Coupled with /difficulty lowering, they can easily start collecting the minute they arrive on EMC. This of doing a single player game and many servers give you less. Heck, to boot, I would give them a max set for an entire set of starter gear if unused but they don't know the value of what they are wearing to start either. I want to retain players, but not at the point that they don't have to play the game, because giving them max enchanted gear cheaper is not likely to retain people much longer that were not going to stay anyway.
