Economy Update and More Details

[dizney07]

Hey guys, after the original announcement of Economy coming to Survival we realized some problems we needed to address before showing every detail of the system at work. Now we feel more stable and ready to announce more details on it, along with some of the changes we’ve made from the original announcement. I’ve broken the announcement up into parts to try and keep things organized and easy to understand.

 

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The Server Shop: The “Server Shop” will serve the purpose of a currency exchange. Within this, you can convert certain items into the currency, and convert the currency into certain items. The items that will be available for this exchange are:

 

- Diamonds

- Emeralds*

- Gold*

- Lapis

- Redstone

 

* We are aware that emeralds can be acquired through villager trading, and that gold can be acquired through pigmen farming. To make sure this isn’t an issue, villager trades will substitute emeralds for iron (the trades for redstone and lapis will be removed entirely) and the pigmen drops will be modified from gold nuggets to glowstone dust.

 

The Server Shop will also have other items available just for purchase. These are rarer items that can’t be produced, and will be revealed later on.

 

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Ways to earn money: There will be three main ways to make money that are built into the server (which means player ran businesses, shops, are not included). These are through Chest Shops, killing mobs, and PvP.

 

Chest Shops: Chest shops are shops that players can fill with an item and sell for a certain price listed on a sign placed on the chest. Players will also be able to purchase a room within the main “Shop” area to create their own shop in a mall like environment. Players can also make chest shops outside of the main shop in the overworld*. Players will NOT be allowed to sell these items in a chest shop: Diamonds, Emeralds, Gold, Lapis, Redstone.

 

*To create a chest shop outside of this mall area, the player will need to create a modreq. This is to avoid exploitation of transferring funds.

 

Killing Mobs: After a player kills a mob, they will have a chance to receive a small amount of money. Each mob will be set to their own percent chance, and will have the value set as well. Mobs spawned in spawners do not have this chance so players cannot abuse grinders to get money.

 

PvP: The system we’ve decided to go with in PvP is that when a player is killed, the money is subtracted from the losers balance, and added to the winners. The amount of money is dependent on the losers armor, not the winners. Meaning a player in Prot 4 Diamond killing a Prot 3 Iron won’t receive the amount for winning a Prot 4 dia fight, but will win the amount you’d receive for an Iron Prot 3 fight. To be able to win the money, both players must be in one of these four armor types:

 

- Diamond Protection 4

- Diamond Protection 3

- Iron Protection 4

- Iron Protection 3

 

If you are not within these types of armor, no money will be transferred. If you are killed and do not have the amount of money within your balance, the winner receives everything that the loser has until he hits 0 in his balance. To prevent players from dropping their money into alts, /pay will be disabled. This is also why players have to modreq for chest shops in the overworld, and why the purchasing price of server side items will be higher than the selling price. Players can also check the balance of other players to know whether players have the proper funds, and to plan for future attacks.

 

The reasoning behind having the player lose money is to 1) incite a more high risk higher reward with PvP, and 2) prevent players from exploiting PvP to make money. We wanted a system where we wouldn’t have to monitor players to see if they’re abusing the system or just killing their friends since I tend to kill my friends as well (just ask Eehee).

 

PvP Cooldown: To prevent players from killing the same players over and over again, there will still be a PvP cooldown timer. This only applies to armored fights, and doesn’t prevent PvP, however, it prevents players from continuously losing money to the same players. Essentially if two players fight in armor, the loser loses money. If the loser re-suits, tries to fight the winner of the last fight and loses, the loser will not lose money and will only lose whatever armor he took out. If the winner of the first fight loses, that player will lose money like normal and the previous loser’s timer will be reset so the process can continue.

 

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Reasons to keep up with funds: We’re obviously not going to force players to keep up with the economy, but there will be quite a few incentives to keeping up with your balance.

 

Events: Some events the server will run will require players to spend their funds to get in. This won’t change anything for the main events such as SAL or the player ran arenas, but some events you’ll want to have funds for. Especially those high roller arena’s, I hear they’re giving out some amazing prices!

 

Leaderboard: We’re working on getting a leaderboard set up based off economy similar to that of the PvP leaderboards. The difference is that the econ leaderboard will not reset like the PvP one will be. We will be adding incentive to be on the top of these leaderboards.

 

Server Shop: Like I mentioned before, the server shop will have unique and rare items for sale that you can’t find anywhere else. I won’t go into anymore details, but it’s highly recommended you check out what’s for sale at launch.

 

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Lastly I just wanted to say this isn’t leading into a pay to win server mentality. S won’t become a pay to win server, absolutely none of us are interested in going that route. It won’t even be an option. The reason we opted to go with economy is it can lead into so many different avenues for events, ideas, ways to play, and that it just made sense to add it to a sandbox game. We want what everyone wants, to make S more enjoyable for everyone while being less repetitive. If you have any concerns or questions please leave them below or message us directly, we’d be more than happy to respond!

[unce]

Every working economy has a way to directly transfer funds between two parties. New players will expect to be able to do this.

 

Here is my suggestion for adding /pay.

 

From what I've gathered pay is disabled to prevent money from being stored on alts. My solution is to give everyone a way to store money in a bank.

Bank areas can be set up at spawn and by portals to prevent bank camping. Only money on your person can be used with /pay and you must be within 5 blocks of the other person to successfully /pay them.

 

All money is now dropped on death, making carrying money a risk.

 

Let me know what you guys think.

[Guest]

I actually really like Unce's idea instead of the proposed system which would slowly eat away or add to your balance when you're PvPing. This might add a bit more of a challenge if you want to trade using this currency, and doesn't necessarily mean you need lose anything if you die either.

 

Quick thing though: If we're using a shop command, couldn't we just have the bank inside the shop? That would kill two birds with one stone in my mind, lol.

[roastnewt]

I like the idea of everyone having their money on them at all times, so when you kill them, you get a piece of it, but I don't think it's tenable.  Unce's bank suggestion makes this a lot fairer.  Without it, I see the server dividing into players that have alts and those that don't.  Even without a /pay command, people with alts will just use one account as a "trading" account, and one as a "pvping" account, to avoid ever losing money.

[xXNjordXx]

I honestly dont understand why there are already 2 pages of rules before the plugin is even in effect.
The rules ive read so far are basically all against a dynamic economy.

Lets just say a player got a plot near spawn and thinks its a good idea to build a shop with 20 chests.
He needs to make a modreq for every single chest. Thats 20 modreqs and maybe 3 hours before he got all chests filled.
Now the prices change because others sell it cheaper. The problem is he cant just break the sign and put a new price on it, he needs to make 20 new modreqs. At the time they are fulfilled the prices might have changed again...
Forcing the players to Modreq a chestshop outside of the mall, drives the possibility of being a free trader, that trys to have the best deals almost to a halt.


Next question for me is: Why shouldnt players sell Diamonds, Emeralds, Gold, Lapis or Redstone ?  
Because the bank buys them for a fixed rate and a player could buy them cheap to sell them high ?
Thats how economy works. Buy cheap, Sell high.
What if a player got 500+ diamonds ? Why not let him sell the non renewable resource to other players, instead of the server ?
Whats the first thing a newbie wants ?
If you answered Diamonds you were right, so let him hunt some monsters earn some cash and buy them from a player.
 
YES someone could abuse that system and use an alt account to make some dough, but why dont you trust the players for once.    
By removing Lapis Redstone and Emeralds from the villagers, and gold from the pigmen you already made those resources non renewable, which most of the time means that the price will go up, so it should be rather easy to find people that are trying to cheat the system. Another indicator for this theory is that Lapis is a key element in Enchanting


The no /pay thing is another useless thing.
Okay so i cant send the money to the other account, ill just modreq a chestshop and buy tons of cobble with my Alt from it.   
And thats just one workaround of that block.
What it really does is it hinders clans to actively help their members, by sending them some funds if they need them.
It also removes even the slightest chance of a player driven bounty system, and it removes the slightest chance of players getting hired as mercenaries.
It also completely removes the idea of Having players pay "protection money" which could be a nice thing and a little game changer for some players, if they know they are protected by a clan.

It does more damage to the economy than its worth imho.

 

Tl:Dr.
Give the system time to evolve before you cripple it with boundarys that might not even be needet.

[twilexis]

TL;DR - Make iron grinders and use iron from golem drops to sell in chest shops and for trades.

[redwall_hp]

There's still the loophole of tossing "free armor" to newbies at spawn and killing them as soon as it's on, for easy kills.

[iamdarb]

TL;DR - Make iron grinders and use iron from golem drops to sell in chest shops and for trades.

More incentive to find people's bases and kill their villagers.

Edited March 29, 2015 by iamdarb

[Guest]

There's still the loophole of tossing "free armor" to newbies at spawn and killing them as soon as it's on, for easy kills.

 

Would new players have in-game money? Unless we're going to be giving new users money or we're going to let people go into a negative balance, I don't think this would be much of an issue. If we are giving new players a starting balance, couldn't we set it so (with Unce's bank idea) that it wouldn't drop out of their inventory until they've played on the server for a bit? This way we could curtail the problem without having to create a rule about this.

[dizney07]

I honestly dont understand why there are already 2 pages of rules before the plugin is even in effect.

The rules ive read so far are basically all against a dynamic economy.

Lets just say a player got a plot near spawn and thinks its a good idea to build a shop with 20 chests.

He needs to make a modreq for every single chest. Thats 20 modreqs and maybe 3 hours before he got all chests filled.

Now the prices change because others sell it cheaper. The problem is he cant just break the sign and put a new price on it, he needs to make 20 new modreqs. At the time they are fulfilled the prices might have changed again...

Forcing the players to Modreq a chestshop outside of the mall, drives the possibility of being a free trader, that trys to have the best deals almost to a halt.

 

When modreq'ing, if a player opens a shop outside they can make one modreq and have the chest shops already made. We would go in and basically just turn the shops on. There wouldn't be a need to make a modreq for every single chest.

 

 

I honestly dont understand why there are already 2 pages of rules before the plugin is even in effect.

The rules ive read so far are basically all against a dynamic economy.

Lets just say a player got a plot near spawn and thinks its a good idea to build a shop with 20 chests.

He needs to make a modreq for every single chest. Thats 20 modreqs and maybe 3 hours before he got all chests filled.

Now the prices change because others sell it cheaper. The problem is he cant just break the sign and put a new price on it, he needs to make 20 new modreqs. At the time they are fulfilled the prices might have changed again...

Forcing the players to Modreq a chestshop outside of the mall, drives the possibility of being a free trader, that trys to have the best deals almost to a halt.

Next question for me is: Why shouldnt players sell Diamonds, Emeralds, Gold, Lapis or Redstone ?  

Because the bank buys them for a fixed rate and a player could buy them cheap to sell them high ?

Thats how economy works. Buy cheap, Sell high.

What if a player got 500+ diamonds ? Why not let him sell the non renewable resource to other players, instead of the server ?

Whats the first thing a newbie wants ?

If you answered Diamonds you were right, so let him hunt some monsters earn some cash and buy them from a player.

 

YES someone could abuse that system and use an alt account to make some dough, but why dont you trust the players for once.    

By removing Lapis Redstone and Emeralds from the villagers, and gold from the pigmen you already made those resources non renewable, which most of the time means that the price will go up, so it should be rather easy to find people that are trying to cheat the system. Another indicator for this theory is that Lapis is a key element in Enchanting

 

I don't trust players to not abuse an abusable system because I know how I would play the game. Look at other games that have easy exploits, they're always taken advantage of. In Skyrim I exploited a book to max out every skill, in runescape I abused the grand exchange to make money quick. If it's not hard to do, and it has high reward, it's going to be taken advantage of. If a player has 500 diamonds and sells them cheaper than the server, a player could but the cheaper diamonds, and then sell them to the server to make a profit extremely quickly. All they would need is the amount of one diamond, and then they can become extremely rich. This was the example we actually discussed while designing it this way. 

 

The no /pay thing is another useless thing.

Okay so i cant send the money to the other account, ill just modreq a chestshop and buy tons of cobble with my Alt from it.   

And thats just one workaround of that block.

What it really does is it hinders clans to actively help their members, by sending them some funds if they need them.

It also removes even the slightest chance of a player driven bounty system, and it removes the slightest chance of players getting hired as mercenaries.

It also completely removes the idea of Having players pay "protection money" which could be a nice thing and a little game changer for some players, if they know they are protected by a clan.

It does more damage to the economy than its worth imho.

 

Tl:Dr.

Give the system time to evolve before you cripple it with boundarys that might not even be needet.

 

Our fear is that if we left the economy naturally, and let players choose to take advantage or not take advantage of the system, then players would abuse the system heavily and there would be nothing we can do. If we changed the econ mid rev to attempt to rectify the economy and make it more balanced players who abused would already be heavily rich. With the system we are going with now, if we feel we can open it up or find other solutions we can change mid rev and open the economy up more. We have a system that's in place that can be changed at anytime. 

[dizney07]

Every working economy has a way to directly transfer funds between two parties. New players will expect to be able to do this.

 

Here is my suggestion for adding /pay.

 

From what I've gathered pay is disabled to prevent money from being stored on alts. My solution is to give everyone a way to store money in a bank.

Bank areas can be set up at spawn and by portals to prevent bank camping. Only money on your person can be used with /pay and you must be within 5 blocks of the other person to successfully /pay them.

 

All money is now dropped on death, making carrying money a risk.

 

Let me know what you guys think.

 

I like this, and we're discussing how to make it work. I can't promise we can get it worked out by the time we start up this weekend, but I definitely want to see how we could make it work without it being exploited, and different ways to give incentive to players who carry money. My fear right now would be players not carrying money to avoid loss. Maybe something like a bank tax where over time you lose a very small percent of what you put in, or players carrying money gets a small bit of interest added too it over time. Also would this be only armored fights or would you lose your money when being killed at anytime (say, by stone sword killing an unarmed)?

 

If there are any other ideas please let us know. We talk about every suggestion thoroughly and always take them seriously so please do not hesitate to contact us. 

 

Edit: To add to this, we're not afraid to add things in mid rev if we think it's necessary or adds great value to the server, so please do not just save your ideas. Let us know now so we can begin discussions on anything as soon as possible.

[unce]

 Also would this be only armored fights or would you lose your money when being killed at anytime (say, by stone sword killing an unarmed)?

 

Both armored and unarmored kills. This makes holding money more risky and promotes putting on armor to protect it. It'll be like carrying diamonds around before endchests were added to the game.