Economy and prices.

[gedion morellis]

So after spending some time reading up on video game economies and with some experience from different mmo's and the standard models in hand. I've come to the conclusion that i know squat about managing and creating a base economy. My main problems are deciding what to introduce the currency with. (i thought about buying un duplicatable items in a shop perhaps) And money sinks to spend said money.

Current ideas include /back signs warp signs to exotic biomes and between different towns ect.

And precious stones blocks. also tempting to add bullets and arrows and things. or maybe shops for the different mods. IC2 redpower ect.

What would you use to introduce currency? Mob kills, certain item turnins, both?

Or perhaps a plugin like time is money to pay for time played . *rips hair out*

The towns have trading posts that players can put items up for trades ect, but i need to set the value of the money without restricting must have items. or something x_x

[joe5]

I would use uu matter as currency and I would have a server run store where materials and products could be exchanged for uu matter at a slight loss

[gavjenks]

You don't NEED to introduce a currency. People will do that on their own.

What you DO need to do is to eliminate the various things in mine craft that fundamentally undercut the existence of an economy. And lack of currency isn't one of them.

Most of all, the reason economies always fail on mine craft is because there is no need to specialize. It takes a whopping 30 seconds to get into the wood chopping business, or a minute and a half to get into iron mining. So if both you and I can chop wood and mine iron equally quickly and with equally little barrier to entry into the industries, why would we ever trade wood for iron?

We wouldn't. There is no reason to. You can just get everything you need yourself just as quickly as you could have gotten the trade goods to trade for it. And by trading, you open yourself up to risk of getting stabbed or robbed, so it's even less attractive.

To have an economy, you MUST either introduce some plugin that has a skill system of some sort (such that chopping wood is almost impossible if you're a miner), or introduce some long and complicated tech tree that you need to get through before you can do just about anything. Thus, if it takes you a week to get the stuff to work with diamonds, that's one week you weren't spending on getting the stuff you need to work with stone, so you would need to trade.

Another thing you will need if you want actual regional economies like in real life, is localized resources. You need to get world edit or sniper or something and make it so that ALL the iron is in THIS spot ONLY. And all the redstone is over THERE, in different spot only. That will naturally give rise to towns that specialize in those materials and trade (this must be in conjunction with the barrier to entry / skills).

If you don't fix these things (and probably others), then picking a currency won't make a hoot of difference, because nobody will ever use it.

I would use uu matter as currency and I would have a server run store where materials and products could be exchanged for uu matter at a slight loss

Server run stores are not an economy in any way.

Unless the store is stocked by admins gathering actual materials in game fairly.

[joe5]

that depends on scale, if you are building small bases then that is true. if you are mass producing hv arrays then the need to specialize will rapidly become apparent

[gavjenks]

that depends on scale, if you are building small bases then that is true. if you are mass producing hv arrays then the need to specialize will rapidly become apparent

Not at all. HV solar factories are actually pretty useless, if you have the materials. I can make an hv solar array with like less than 100 clicks manually if I start with stacks of resources, and nobody ever really needs more than one or two, probably.

By far the most difficult thing about hv solar arrays is gathering the huge amount of materials, not making the arrays (thats probably <1% of the time invested). And gathering is not specialized at all.

(Unless you are talking about a server with EE enabled. In which case the concept of an economy is utterly laughable. I really hope we are all assuming there is no EE...)

Oh ALSO, as soon as tekkit upgrades computer craft to 1.4, it will be pretty easy to make a factory in a 10x10x10 box that can make anything in the entire game (by just typing in the recipes into a console once), with crafty turtles and very minimal resources to build the actual factory. Thus making specialized factories even more pointless. Once somebody codes the programs and uploads them to paste bin, others will be able to make such factories in probably under 2 hours, starting from scratch.

[joe5]

the number of HV arrays a faction needs is highly dependent upon what they plan on building. As I understand it, the alliance I'm currently working for is budgeting for an absolute minimum of 250 HV arrays.

Exactly, if you are producing HV arrays it is far more economical to simply by the preprocessed components from other players than it is to produce them yourself in-house. Besides, who has time to build specialized factories for each of the literally thousands of items in game.

The lack of EE is exactly what makes a UU matter-based economy viable

If that is really the case, then any server which wishes to have an economy will simply disable computer craft if they have not done so already for lag reasons. This

[gavjenks]

If that is really the case, then any server which wishes to have an economy will simply disable computer craft if they have not done so already for lag reasons.

The computercraft robotic factory would not do anything to hinder the economy, IF resource gathering were specialized. It just makes that last 1% of time crafting easier. You would need to trade for the raws to put into the machine...

Exactly, if you are producing HV arrays it is far more economical to simply by the preprocessed components from other players than it is to produce them yourself in-house.

1) I didn't say that at all

2) That is totally false, in current vanilla minecraft or vanilla tekkit (without the skill system or other barrier to entry into an industry). I stand to gain nothing from trading, versus my faction gathering everything itself.

[joe5]

as you wish

[Neeneko]

You don't NEED to introduce a currency. People will do that on their own.

What you DO need to do is to eliminate the various things in mine craft that fundamentally undercut the existence of an economy. And lack of currency isn't one of them.

Most of all, the reason economies always fail on mine craft is because there is no need to specialize. It takes a whopping 30 seconds to get into the wood chopping business, or a minute and a half to get into iron mining. So if both you and I can chop wood and mine iron equally quickly and with equally little barrier to entry into the industries, why would we ever trade wood for iron?

We wouldn't. There is no reason to. You can just get everything you need yourself just as quickly as you could have gotten the trade goods to trade for it. And by trading, you open yourself up to risk of getting stabbed or robbed, so it's even less attractive.

To have an economy, you MUST either introduce some plugin that has a skill system of some sort (such that chopping wood is almost impossible if you're a miner), or introduce some long and complicated tech tree that you need to get through before you can do just about anything. Thus, if it takes you a week to get the stuff to work with diamonds, that's one week you weren't spending on getting the stuff you need to work with stone, so you would need to trade.

Another thing you will need if you want actual regional economies like in real life, is localized resources. You need to get world edit or sniper or something and make it so that ALL the iron is in THIS spot ONLY. And all the redstone is over THERE, in different spot only. That will naturally give rise to towns that specialize in those materials and trade (this must be in conjunction with the barrier to entry / skills).

If you don't fix these things (and probably others), then picking a currency won't make a hoot of difference, because nobody will ever use it.

Server run stores are not an economy in any way.

Unless the store is stocked by admins gathering actual materials in game fairly.

Need.. must... no.

What you describe is one way of building an artificial economy, it is far from the only way. Skill trees as a barrier are kinda like skinner boxes.. they are common because they are easy and well understood, but they are also crude not to mention hard to balance.

Much of this really depends on scale. Economic structures that work well for 10 players tend not to work like ones intended for 1,000 players. Regional economies can work when you have large player bases, but even then you generally should not make fundamental things like iron regional since that makes lockdown (either through intent or lack of economic participation) common. In general you want an economy that it is to the benefit of the player to interact with, not one the player is forced to via crippled mechanics or tedious advancement.

Ideal case, the player should be sitting and working on something, realize they need some wood.. and when they think 'hrm, which is easier, going to my trade screen and buying wood on the market, or going out and getting some', which tends to result in players specializing in a few things and buying other things because it is easier. Granted, this tends to work best on larger scales with a robust economy in which most goods are readily available.

To the OP, the tricky part about minecraft economies is they are all very small. Balance becomes more difficult the fewer people you have, and it becomes more important to meddle directly. Taxes are a good sink (either for property, or on transactions), while mob bounties (maybe buying XP?) and NPC merchants can be good faucets. You will have to watch for inflation and other balance issues, but that can be fixed by adjusting the values or simply selling bonds. Regardless, if your playerbase is small and you want the economy to actually get heavy use, you are going to have to supplement it with NPC activity to some degree.

[gavjenks]

Ideal case, the player should be sitting and working on something, realize they need some wood.. and when they think 'hrm, which is easier, going to my trade screen and buying wood on the market, or going out and getting some', which tends to result in players specializing in a few things and buying other things because it is easier. Granted, this tends to work best on larger scales with a robust economy in which most goods are readily available.

My point is that if there is wood EVERYWHERE (which there is), and if it takes literally 10 seconds to punch a tree (which it doeS), then nobody in their right mind would ever ever make the decision to go out and trade with somebody, which requires coordination, a journey, and risk of being robbed, when they could gather their own wood in half the time it takes to set up the trade (and to replace whatever they traded for the wood).

Occasionally, there might be a few trades here and there when two players have opposite luck for rare items. E.g., gold for diamonds. But that's not an economy by any stretch of the imagination.

Anything with faucets is also never going to create a healthy economy. Never. No human in the world is fast or accurate enough to manually set up prices like a real economy can to balance itself. Mayyyybe if you had a fancy system where the faucet's flow rate is automatically (in code) tied to player's rates they are buying and selling those items at (or things that use them), but that would be even harder to do than what I'm suggesting, for the same result, so why?

Are my specific suggested solutions the only/best ones? Surely not. But the problem is real and serious. There NEEDS to be some way to prevent everyone from being able to get into every industry almost instantly, if you want a real, functional economy without 80,000 lines of code. If you can think of a better way of doing that than what I pointed out, then great. But slapping some broken, trivially exploitable NPC merchants on the street ain't it.

The complete and utter failure of every single major minecraft server's economy is a blazing testament to that fact.

[joe5]

what if they need 200 stacks of wood? wouldn't it then be faster to go to the person who has the automated wood farm?

[gavjenks]

Yes, in the fantasy world scenario of requiring 51,200 wooden planks at the last minute, and somehow not having prepared for it at all, they would trade with the guy with the automated wood farm (if he exists, which on most servers he seems not to).

Things like this might happen once a week or so, in my experience. That is not "an economy." An economy is everybody trading almost for everything that they need, or at least a large bundle of things that they need, on a regular and recurring basis.

Tekkit definitely does a better job of this than vanilla, but still not a good job. For instance, the crops you get from cross breeding take a really long time to develop, and their fruits (hops, etc) might be something worth trading for. That's a good product done right in a way to stimulate the economy. But these examples are few and far between, because most other end game items, like HV solar panels, still don't require any special machinery to make (maybe a rotary macerator, thats about it), and use only basic materials equally easily gathered by anybody.