The Empire Shop is CLOSING in 2017!

It's not necessarily the best strategy to give new players everything they need. By forcing them to acquire at least some key items, it engages them to use player shops or explore the wilderness.

Good items to give new players are things like basic tools, armour, food, torches, saplings, bone meal, sheep eggs, shears, a horse, chests, maybe a bucket of lava and water. Things that help them get started. Bad ideas are really good tools/materials, decorative blocks, enchanting supplies, etc...

The priority should be to make sure that new players are not stuck or frustrated acquiring things, not to just give them everything they need. There should always be a path forward, but it shouldn't be for free to acquire the most desirable items.

Well if you send me a private message when you open the auction for sure you will have one more bidder.

The question may be, do players keep it up to date?

You certainly did a great job on the tool and it's really appreciated. The tool is external to EMC so it relies on player input which may be challenging.

Ideally if a staff member (programmer) were able to scan the minecraft data files including sign posting and chest storage, then one should be able to derive the quantity of an item in a chest, it's cost, and who's selling it, and post it on the EMC web site.

With the shop going down, players need an easier way to look for goods.

Its been past Jan 3rd...

Also, Is there a way you would be able to make a area/say where to suggest stuff to be added to the new shop? I have a Few blocks i like, that they had until 1.8 and really wanted them for builds and all....

Well I am talking about blocks in the game but taken out like the mushroom stems and all.

Sound like he needs your computer tehe.

I've Silk Touched Mushroom parts before. Are we no longer able to do this? If it is more a matter of needing the time to do it, there are a lot of Forum players who might need projects to keep themselves busy(Like me.).

They took all mushroom parts out at 1.8 and since then the part you get is the mushroom texture of the type on all sides... (Red, brown).

In other words, if I Silked a stem it would be one of the top parts? Was the Shop still selling those? What other items are there like this? Perhaps we could have a small Shop that stocks those items and Promos.

Really?

This is so great!

The short answer is yes, information is being constantly updated. As for in practice, it depends on the item. Yesterday I searched gunpowder and got good results (all the shops existed, and only one was out of stock). Many items have less search traffic and so get updated less. It should only take a few minutes to update the listings as you visit shops and find the item is out of stock or that the chest shop doesn't exist anymore.

I think if staff were to do what you suggest, it would effectively eliminate the economy. It has been tried in the past. But basically, then there'd be no need to advertise a shop and nothing to differentiate shops. The reward for establishing a successful shop and having a reputation is the thin margin above the average price that people are willing to pay for having the item quickly. With all the answers, this is effectively eliminated. This would really just turn the entire economy into a competition for who can produce the most in the least amount of time, removing a huge amount of the fun and challenge of running shops, and that's if it worked well. Here are some easy ways it could fail:

• A shop owner creates a fake shop sign, which nobody can actually get to on their residence. Very easy to do. Very hard for any system to detect. Then, they drive massive amounts of traffic to their residence. For example, a shop selling diamonds for 80r with one in stock, high above the residence.
  
• Suppose they made the above illegal. Well instead, shop owners could make a 'maze' to buy the item, to keep people on the residence longer and hope they buy other things or to get traffic to a sugar cane farm for example.
  
• Shops showing up without the move flag set. Or with shops that are behind a door without the use flag set.
  
• Contraptions that activate a hopper to empty the chest when someone enters the residence and refill it with one item after some time later.
  
• Shops that are just confusing. Not deliberately, but unintentionally. One of the staff has one of those on SMP2 that confuses me every time and I can rarely find anything there, but there are good deals if you do manage to figure it out.

In a normal economy, all the above would be effectively stopped or discouraged because the shop would not get any customer loyalty if it didn't work. But now a new system is needed for those things. And we all know the next step will be people wanting to just type ie /buy 10 diamonds instead of even going to a shop. And then, really, there's nothing left but a bunch of people all competing for who can build the best legal bots to produce each item.

I guess I'm not making myself clear...or I don't understand how it would affect the economy as you describe. Your EMCMarket is a manual process. I would like a more automated process.

In one respect, the net result would be the same, but I think what you're describing is that an automated process would be easier to enter "fake" prices. Of course, they can do that manually now if they wish. But what's the point?

...provided you buy it from a player instead of EMC. Some people may prefer that. But I can understand the issue of running shop. Some people like to create a shop to invite traffic and create friends. But others are in it just for the money. Some players visit shops for the friendship loyalty factor. But other just want resources without the hassle.

I've set up several shops in the past, but tore them down. I wanted to provide low prices to new players to give them a head start, but shop owners buy out your inventory just to turn around and sell it at their shop for a higher price. Oh well. People are people.

Now days I just have a "trading post". I buy for the same price I sell. I don't need resources or rupees. This is my main reason for finding a good "average" price for items. The EMCMarket has the average price listed, so I can go with that.

Again... Thanks for the EMCMarket. It's a really good and effective tool.

Alright, let's explain how an economy works in general.

In a completely efficient economy, the consumer, aims to buy the item at the lowest cost. While the producer, aims to get the full price for their product. In a 100% efficient market, there would therefore be exactly one price for each item. And it would move up and down, but these two prices would always be one and the same.

This is all theoretical, however many markets come close. The global oil market operates fairly close with a standard price per barrel. On the other hands, markets like consumer electronics are incredibly noisy and there is high variation. In those markets, there is huge opportunity for things like reselling the same item at a higher price (retail stores, e-commerce, salespeople, etc...) Basically a whole ton of middle-men.

EMC is also a very noisy market. Take even something like cobblestone. You have producers who would produce and sell for 32r/stack, all the way up to mega malls selling at 80r/stack (and higher possibly). Now, why would someone who wants cobblestone buy from a mall instead of a supplier at 32r/stack? The answer is that this is because the mall allows them to buy the item reliably and quickly. Malls provide a service therefore, of discovering the suppliers and take the risk of buying excess cobblestone they might not sell. In exchange, they make profit, the price difference between what someone who needs the item quickly is willing to pay and what someone who produces the item is willing to sell it for. But generally, what would happen is instead there's a player in the middle who goes around to find all the super cheap cobblestone, or recruit the new players to use a stone generator and mine it for easy money.

In your perfect system as you propose, there would be no need for the malls. There'd be nobody going around recruiting new players. There'd be nobody hunting for super cheap shops. Anyone who had an item would always be able to get it for the best price.

A completely efficient market like this is also open to exploitation by rich players, who can buy up all the cheap items with complete knowledge, and sell it at a higher price. In the current market, nobody has that ability because they don't know all the shops.

Another issue is that in times of complete scarcity, prices can very quickly swing one way of the other, and players might fall victim to playing a price they don't know is extremely high. For example, when Minecraft removed the Notch Apple, there were points when you couldn't find gold anywhere, even at the top of 'exchange' style shops. A player could therefore have placed gold ingots for 500r each, and a new player might end up buying them. In the current system, if a shop wants to do this, people would have to find them and they would damage their reputation, and meanwhile there are still some shops around with gold for reasonable prices because people don't know about it yet so there's a challenge of finding them.

In short, a lot of the joy of playing on EMC is building creative shops, and forming relationships with other players, in order to make this profit. There's fun in finding a new shop or working out a deal. When the market is 100% efficient, it's just a transaction, and a lot less fun.

It's kind of like, yeah it would be great if the test told you the answers, or if you didn't have to do the mining to find the diamonds, but that's really at the end of the day an important part of the game. And so building a tool to help solve the problem is one strategy to play the game, but being handed the best place to buy or sell an item for free is sort of cheating. At that point, there really isn't a game anymore.

I remember when I joined this server, the shop had nearly everything I was looking for. (Albeit overpriced, it had the items I wanted nevertheless.)

I'm really sad to see it go...

Nice, looks very quaint.

I like it. Must easier to find something

Didn't see bat eggs in there. Does this mean we can now egg them?