Farming Costs

SuperDyl

I decided to experiment: I created a large farm by hand in the wild, ending up with about 10 plots of 80 farmland space. Basically, I made a large farm as efficiently as possible without going all out.

I found that crops gain the player a worthless 4 meebles a minute for this area (using calculations from the time it takes for a crop to grow). This doesn't seem right. 4 meebles can be earned in seconds by chopping trees, or mining stone. I understand that the staff feels that the farmer shouldn't earn money for crops using /jobs, but having a server shop works even less so.

Here's what I think should happen:

*Breaking full grown crops of wheat, carrots, potatoes, and sugar cane gives the player a very small amount of meebles (something low such as 0.1).
*Breaking pumpkins, melons, or cocoa beans gives a medium small amount of meebles (probably 1 or 2 as it would be similar to breaking stone or wood)
*The server shop would stop buying player resources of crops so it can be open to a free market.

Here's my expected results:

*Some people will actually use the farming job.
*Good amounts of all crops will be available in the v-shop.
*Prices of crops will actually fluctuate, instead of having no one sell crops or foods other than fish.

I understand that the staff felt that farming would be used for quick cash, but the only way to get much out of farming right now is a giant, semi-automatic or automatic farm.

Natsu

Well, that is not going to be profitable anyway and people are still going to complain

Remember that people can build extensive farms which can supply food for a population thousands of times bigger than meepcraft.

If it's raised higher, crop prices would eventually drop to the price at warp farming (which is extremely low)
If they remove the server shop, it would eventually settle near 0 meebles

And emerald prices will drop together (if it hasn't already)

Then the prices of ebooks and god tools will drop (even though they are already cheap af)

I don't see this working out.

SuperDyl

1. Increasing farm costs can make it somewhat profitable. The most profitable things to do are more of reselling, but this doesn't mean players shouldn't be able to make a small profit from farming. I don't know the perfect prices for farming, but it can easily be set at a value dependent on how long it takes a player to break crops.

2. Part of the reason that /jobs should pay for farming is because people can build giant farms. Right now, giant farms are capital intensive and must be gigantic, barring newer players from farming. Obviously players don't sell very much food (as the v-shop shows) because players earn more money from selling their crops to the server, since other players can just buy the food directly from the server shop.

3. I'm not suggesting to raise crop prices at the server spawn, but to remove or only allow buying new no selling to the shop. The suggestion is to do farming through the /jobs plugin.

4. Even if food becomes less valuable, it would be similar to the diamond market. On the server, diamonds dropped in value as people had enough for their needs. Now the market has almost doubled the value of diamonds as balancing occurs. Only enough people for the food market to remain stable will farm, as new people wouldn't see it as profitable. If someone comes up with better food gathering attempts, they can make their way in the market. Also, players who get started in a free market could deal with low prices, as these would be the players who already are set up with the capital intensive giant farms.

5. Saying that food price fluctuations will make other commodities increase is a slippery slope fallacy. if food costs that much at any point, then someone will step in to sell cheaper food which would earn them tons of money.

smk

You can easily make money through farming if you are creative, want proof? /bal smkorpi All but about 20k of my money derives at the beginning from farming.

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SuperDyl

1. The problem with the current system is that players cannot make money from regular farming. Farming requires tons of space for a minimal profit. To make a profit from farming, you need a giant farm space and automation. This system is either fully automated (which is looked down at by the staff) or not useful.

2. The system also limits a free market of crops and food, as all players can get food from buying crops at /warp farming .

TheTastyNacho

I like this idea. More people need to use the farmer job and the current system sucks. +1

smk

1. The problem with the current system is that players cannot make money from regular farming. Farming requires tons of space for a minimal profit. To make a profit from farming, you need a giant farm space and automation. This system is either fully automated (which is looked down at by the staff) or not useful.
2. The system also limits a free market of crops and food, as all players can get food from buying crops at /warp farming .
~ @SuperDyl

As a player playing in meep's economy where it is hard to make money, ignore frowned upon. Automatic farms are 100% allowed regardless of what one staff to the next says as many of these have poor wordings or comprehension by some people.

As for the suggestion, I like to make suggestions based on the intent behind things. The idea of the /warp farm shops was to pay for the farmer job, while not allowing the user to expand while still making crap tons of meebles. The solution to this, was the admin ships where we could sell our farm items. And meep was spot on with meeting their goal, but they don't offer enough money for it to be worth it to not expand or use the farm products to sell or make different products.

I think your best suggestion would be to raise the prices of carrots, wheat, potato, pumpkin, and melon blocks. What prices should remain low as the shop has it, cactus (which is the easiest autofarm ever and is overall a worthless item; only good for dye and parkour) and sugarcane (which is too easy to mass farm with collecting the top two blocks).

I do not support adding back pay to the farmer job, since this was a problem we had in the past. The only way I would support this was if you didn't get paid for sugarcane and it started at like 0.01 meebles per break and went up 0.01 pay per crop for each level (so level ten would be 0.1 meebles per crop) or so on and so forth.

And the free market stuff is just silly, half of the server doesn't even know that /warp farming allows you to buy crops, and the majority of the half that knows this, also knows that you can easily get crops for cheaper if you are patient.

I still would go with raising the sell prices and adding netherwart for a low price as well.

So I guess I'm a -1 since you are not suggesting a raise in the farm prices. Actually, I think I'll just go make a suggestion for it

SuperDyl

1. Automatic farms are perfectly fine, but one reason staff did not put farming with the /jobs was its ability to increase in use exponentially. By creating a small amount for the breaking of crops, farming can be done profitably by the player without resorting to giant farms which have no use in stimulating the economy, as the player has no incentive to sell their crops anywhere but /pwarp farming.

2. Raising the values of different crops would help make farming useful on the server, but it would:
a) Continue the current environment where crops are not used to stimulate growth in the economy.
b) Leave the confusion of some players of how to make a profit farming.
c) Leave an entire possible option of making money in the free market sterile.

3. Players receiving money directly for their crops then makes players want to farm more and allows them to sell their crops to other players. The money received would have to be tiny, as crops can be broken fast, but some work could lead to some fair profits for industrious players while improving trade between players.

4. Half of the server doesn't know about /pwarp farming and can't then do farming, while the other half do and would thus never farm without large amount of automation. This system works against the majority of players. Adding payment for breaking mature crops would get players to sell crops to each other and make any player be able to start getting money from a farm.

5. It should be noted that jobs such as the miner and woodcutter both practically build up materials to continue that job. Getting money for breaking blocks would act exactly the same as a wood farm, just without an axe and lower prices per break of a block. Having /jobs money earned wouldn't make farming overpowered, as any job can be done at a fair pace continuously.

Deljikho

I used to own a pretty decent cake island.

Vexmae

I like the idea. but I've seen some with automatic cactus farms they earn a bit. why do you really want the farmer job to earn more Via manual farming?

smk

1. Automatic farms are perfectly fine, but one reason staff did not put farming with the /jobs was its ability to increase in use exponentially. By creating a small amount for the breaking of crops, farming can be done profitably by the player without resorting to giant farms which have no use in stimulating the economy, as the player has no incentive to sell their crops anywhere but /pwarp farming.
2. Raising the values of different crops would help make farming useful on the server, but it would:
a) Continue the current environment where crops are not used to stimulate growth in the economy.
b) Leave the confusion of some players of how to make a profit farming.
c) Leave an entire possible option of making money in the free market sterile.
3. Players receiving money directly for their crops then makes players want to farm more and allows them to sell their crops to other players. The money received would have to be tiny, as crops can be broken fast, but some work could lead to some fair profits for industrious players while improving trade between players.
4. Half of the server doesn't know about /pwarp farming and can't then do farming, while the other half do and would thus never farm without large amount of automation. This system works against the majority of players. Adding payment for breaking mature crops would get players to sell crops to each other and make any player be able to start getting money from a farm.
5. It should be noted that jobs such as the miner and woodcutter both practically build up materials to continue that job. Getting money for breaking blocks would act exactly the same as a wood farm, just without an axe and lower prices per break of a block. Having /jobs money earned wouldn't make farming overpowered, as any job can be done at a fair pace continuously.
~ @SuperDyl

The point of warp farming was so that people couldn't collect a farm, get the farmer money, and still expand. You still haven't addressed how going back to allowing people to keep crops would be good (because if we are being honest, it isn't).

I again want to stress, you can make money from farming if you get creative. It may be a tiny bit slower than other methods, but it isn't impossible.

I shouldn't get even close to 1,000 meebles per farm level (since my farm is about 1500 blocks) and still get to keep my crops.

Also, the way you have this suggestion, having autofarms wouldn't make you any money since you want the rewards for collecting it, and just picking up a cactus shouldn't trigger the jobs (if it allows picking up a cactus to give you money, that would be easily abused).

While you address the problem, I don't see a good solution that wouldn't be easily abused.

SuperDyl

1. Manual farming has limits to the amounts of money people get for the work. Automatic farms creating crops to be sold to the server is a continuous supply of money from one time of work. This hurts the economy by adding more money without adding more items to the economy.

2. An example of an easily expandable farm is tree farms, which counts under woodcutting. We can see that expanding farms exist in the /jobs system currently anyways. Also, automatic farms create ever increasing numbers of items to be sold, while the /jobs system limits players to a good range of money for their work.

3. Allowing people to keep crops allows selling of crops and food between players as players who farm will have a place to sell crops for a non uniform price.

4. Making money from farming can currently not be done as a good full time work. The staff have said that they want an economy with division of labor, yet farming currently cannot be done on its own and be profitable, at least not compared to any other job.

5. The solution for crop farming is to test the player mining a mature crop. Pumpkins and melons would just be mined regularly. Sugar cane one I don't know about to be honest. Cactus is simple, as it takes a while to mine, so it could just count with the regular crops.

Klitch

I don't believe this would be the best fix for this problem, thanks for the suggestion though :) Denied.