ExactlyThat's why I'm worried about a recession
~ @twomoo1119
It's not as much of a recession as much as everyone isn't going to be buying things. If you have you have no money, you won't be spending it on items when you can go out and get them yourself. Minecraft is a game with infinite resources, where anyone can get those resources for themselves. In a real economy, most people rely on buying things (mostly food) from other sources to obtain them. Additionally, those items are finite. Therefore, when there are 1000 units of something and only 500 people with enough money to buy one, only 500 can be sold, and the price will be lowered in order to allow 500 more people to buy that product. Now, say, that the price is low enough that 1500 people can buy one of those 1000 units. Now, the price will increase until only 1000 people are able to afford the item. As a result, when you pump more of a currency into a finite economy, the prices rise to reflect it in an event called inflation. However, when you're in an infinite economy like minecraft, the units are near infinite. To make it palatable, let's say there are 100,000 diamonds for sale. Because of /warp shop, the price would be locked between 600 and 900 per unit, 600 being when under 100k diamonds are in demand, and 900 (the buy price) when well over 100k are in demand. However, the units are not locked at 100k like a finite economy, and as more money is pumped into the economy, more people buy the diamonds, and therefore more player trades occur. When there is no available money in the economy to purchase those units, the player transactions halt. The reason the sell button was removed was to increase player to player trades and reduce the money in the economy, however, by reducing the total number of meebles you also significantly hinder your player trades, as anyone is able to go out and get those materials instead of paying their scarce meebles for. Another point I want to make is that buy options in the shop are what kept inflation from happening in alpha and beta. Most players had money easily accessible and in abundance, however, the prices of items and services didn't skyrocket. Instead, people bought more items more frequently. As you see in both finite and infinite economies, when people have an abundance of money, they tend to buy more opulent, high quality goods. For example, in meepcraft, for weeks I had mined up ~2000 Quartz or ~500 blocks. Although it was decently priced and it was the only Quartz for sale, it sat on the shop for weeks, never being sold in an abundance of one stack per person. However, in the alphabeta economy, that same Quartz would have been gone in days. The simple fact behind this is that when people had an excess of money, they started to build more mansions, which allowed my Quartz to be sold rapidly, therefore allowing me to buy items I wanted, such as my own town, more tools and ebooks, ect. In gamma, people don't have that kind of excess money and therefore my Quartz (don't quote me I haven't checked yet) is still sitting on the shop.
Before I run out of letters
Tl;dr
1. Wealth is communal. More money means more player transactions in an infinite resource economy
2. Buy prices make sure items never exceed a certain price because of inflation, sell prices make sure items don't become worthless because of deflation
3. When people don't have access to much money in an infinite resource economy, they stop buying items and instead go get them themselves
4. When people have easy money in abundance, an infinite resource economy, because of #2, does not experience dramatic inflation, and instead sees the rapid transfer of goods for reasonable prices
5. For an infinite economy to thrive, the /warp shop needs high sell prices and low buy prices. Although the shop does need to leave a margin between the two for players to decide the price via competition, the shop must provide both of these options at reasonable prices. If the buy price is too high, the amount of meebles introduced into the economy makes specific goods increase prices beyond affordability. If the sell price is too low, items are no longer worth acquiring by players in the hopes of making money.
Most important thing to keep in mind, the numbers in /Baltop are arbitrary. It doesn't matter if it says 1 million or 10 billion. What matters is economic stimulation; the player's ability to make money, buy the things they want, sell the things they have, and have enough fun to stick around and donate.
@Deinen
