I'm not sure what to think of this yet. It combines the market fluctuations and convenience of vshop with the guaranteed sales and availability of the admin shops. My first reaction was thinking that it's a great idea! :cool: But some people have raised valid concerns about exploitation and whether the prices the MeepShop settles on will be fair/make sense. I don't know enough about how it will work to figure those out.
There's also been much argument over whether this resembles the "real world." I'm not sure that matters, as long as it works in a Minecraft economy. But I'll try to make a comparison. The vshop is kind of like a flea market, or a series of very small independent businesses. Individuals buy and sell to each other, and both sides are very competitive - buyers shop around to find the best deals (on vshop this is actually forced), and sellers adjust their prices and their stock to attract those buyers while still making the most money that they can.
The new MeepShop, if I'm understanding it right, seems like more of a wholesale system. It's as if sellers are all suppliers for one giant retail store like Walmart. If overall demand for an item goes up, the store will pay more for it, and charge its customers more to buy it. If the supply of that item gets too high, and the market is flooded with people selling $10 cobblestone, demand will be low because everyone has cobblestone and no-one wants to pay $10 for it. So the store will lower the price and pay its suppliers less, because the item is not as valuable. If supply of something is low, like diamond horse armor or whatever, then buyers will pay more for that rare item, indicating high demand. And round and round we go. :) Edit to clarify: Prices won't just be based on how common or rare an item is, but also on the value that players give to it by buying. Cobblestone is generally more useful than dirt, for example, so it will likely continue to have a higher value.
Sellers will no longer compete with each other directly, which does take some fun out of the MeepShop. But they can still use strategy and timing to make more than other people, by changing what they mine or craft and sell based on the market. They also will be able to have a steady-ish source of income - but not as steady as the admin shops - and they won't have to deal with having a stock of thousands of items that no-one buys.
In a similar way, I think competition among sellers will still exist via chest shops, because savvy shop owners can keep track of price trends to figure out which items to put "on sale" and which ones they can sell for a premium. It might actually be easier to compete with the MeepShop this way, because you can "outsmart" it to some extent by predicting what's going to happen, and individual sellers wouldn't be able to undersell you (unless they run their own chest shops). That's just speculation (guessing) on my part, but it would be easy to do some research and find out how it will work. If this type of system is as common as people are saying, then why not take a look now and learn about the way other servers handle it? To those who are already familiar with it - beyond just declaring this a good or bad idea, or comparing it to the current vshop, can you tell us more about how this type of shop seems to work on other servers? Can players with chest shops still make money (not necessarily get "rich," but make a decent profit), and if so, how?
And... fuzzlr, please feel free to tell me if I'm way off the mark here. I'm not an economist, I just play one on MeepCraft! :D
This obviously comes from someone who's rich in-game. (Yes, I'm jealous! ;)) Just because you don't have a use for iron and diamonds doesn't mean that most players don't. Why do you think they're so valuable on vshop? (Ignoring the effect of the 20% reduction for the moment, because that would make this even more complicated.) As for gold, I'm assuming that the bank will still be around unless we hear otherwise. Diamonds and gold are also relatively rare items, so even if their prices go down on the new MeepShop, they won't crash below the value of items that are far more common.
You used the biggest and most colorful font! Clearly, that means your post is the most important and correct. :rolleyes:
This is a good point. :( I guess fuzzlr could argue that the vshop was never meant to be used this way.
~ @KariStar86
