Sorry in advance for the wall of text.
So I was thinking about the current economy and different options Meepcraft has regarding how they can set up their current shop system. Each system has its own main detriment which causes most of the players against that system to hate it. These main detriments are:
- Vshop - Players can easily undercut drastically reducing the values of items or someone can hoard a bunch of items in order to control a whole item market
- Meepshop - An infinite amount of money can be added to the server
- Chestshop - Huge monopolisation such as Diana's shop
In order to solve this 3 way war between the shop systems within the server, I have attempted to come up with a new system which uses the best aspects of each shop to overcome their individual flaws. What I have come up with is a bit hard to explain by typing, so bear with me:
So first of all, there would be a "thing" where you can store items you want to sell or you have bought. Whilst this is open for modification, the current thing I am proposing is a sign with specific words written on it on the right lines (much like how you setup a current chest shop) and this would turn it into a shop. For example, if you were to write something like this:
When you click done, it would turn into a shop that looks something like this:
Now to stock the shop, you simple put the item into your hand slot or have it somewhere into your inventory and you right click the sign and the items would be stored into the sign. This would cause the sign to change to something like this (if I had a stack of diamonds in my hand and I were to right click the sign):
Now to remove the sign all you have to do is left click the sign and the items will be removed from the sign.
Note, everything I have just said above is open for change as this is just how the items will be stored in the shop world and isn't directly involved in my new shop system idea. Just having a dummy shop item makes explaining my actual idea a lot easier.
So now for the shop system idea. Much like the meepshop, every item will have a set value which will increase the more items that are stored in the signs and will decrease as less items are stored in the signs (and I am talking about all sign shops across the entire server), so say there are 100 diamond signshops across the server each with a stack in them and then someone else makes a signshops and stores a stack in there, the overall price of diamonds would go down. On the other hand if someone was to remove some items or buy some items from the diamond signshop, the overall diamond price would go up.
Now onto how to buy/sell the items. The command to buy/sell items would be much like the command used in the Vshop, for example /buy [amount] [item]. Now when this command is typed, the amount of items the person wanted would be split evenly between every signshop in the game and all the signshop owners would gain the same amount of money based on how many items were removed from their shop. For example if someone wanted 300 diamonds and there were 100 signshops selling diamonds, 3 diamonds would be removed from each signshop and given to the player buying the diamonds whilst the amount of money the player spent on the items will be split evenly between each player selling the diamonds so they all get their money's worth for selling the 3 diamonds. This works the same opposite way if a player sells the items, they get split evenly between the signshops and each signshop owner pays the player their respective amounts.
Now it gets a bit confusing when an indivisible number of diamonds is bought or sold by a player from the signshops. So say there are again 100 diamond signshops, however a player only wants to buy one diamond. Then they get the diamond, and each signshop goes down by 0.01 diamonds. As the diamonds are not legitimate items, they are only stored in signs, this is still possible. Now if a player wants to remove their (in this case) diamonds from their chest and it isn't a whole number, than the item amount would round down to the nearest whole number and the player would get that amount. This I believe would be fine as the player could just wait until the amount of items in the signshop are close enough to a whole number to remove them without a large loss (and besides, you are only really losing like a fraction of a single item anyway).
I think this method overcomes all of the current flaws in each respective shop system as:
- There is no monopolisation as everyone sells the same amount of items no matter what (unless their sop goes out of stock)
- There is no undercutting as there is always a set price that varies depending on how many of those items are in the "shop world"
- There is no infinite source of money as all the money is exchanged between players and no money is generated.
- It is also quite convenient and easy to teach to the new players.
Once again, I'm going to say that this is just an idea and is open for inspection and improvement , especially the shop "thing" where the items are stored. If anyone managed to find a flaw in the system, just let me know and I'll try to patch it, otherwise I'm open to whatever feedback you have.
