Okay. This is something I brought up last time I was in game, and I plan on making a suggestion, but economy is very tricky.
The current problem on meepcraft that I want to discuss how to address; too many items are worth very very little, to the point no profit is really being made.
There are many ways to solve this, and one of the most simple solutions that the community can use to solve this; be smarter.
I don’t mean to offend anyone that plays the game differently, but I found that over the years, (and from a few discussions with lDaffodil) that the most efficient way to make money is to sell items. And the best way to do this is to advertise your a** until you’re known to be the place that sells *blank* (god picks in my case), or that you undercut all of your opponents and sell on vshop. Now, I also explained to someone why I bought dirt today, even though I had no use. I spent maybe 1,000 meebles to buy about 4-5,000 dirt. Now, that’s a wasted 1k, but I can use it for farms and it somewhat helped the economy. Dirt sells for 1 meeble per block on the vshop as of 10pm est last night, which is way better than the
This buy low, sell high method of running a vshop is very profitable if you can get yourself into stocking like 30-40 items in smaller amounts. And to buy some blocks out and selling for higher helps the economy. So like I tried explaining, play smarter and the economy will take longer to devalue items.
I forgot to add somewhere in this section, charging a price on vshop is not unjustified (double negative, means this is justified), because you are charging for the convenience. In the case of dirt like I talked about yesterday, people are used to it being 0.1 per block, but lazy people will type /buy # dirt 1 to save the 2 key clicks, and if you are close to the end of a build you would be willing to sacrifice the overpay in meebles.
This ideal brings me to my next possible suggestion, enforcing a minimum price on vshop. As I said with dirt, selling for one meeble per would help the economy in many ways. Firstly, the price would be more, meaning selling dirt would be more profitable. Secondly, not allowing people to undercut beneath 1 meeble per sets a bare minimum cost for the convenience of being able to buy instantly. If someone wants to get around this one meeble minimum cost, they can easily set up a chest shop and use the advertising method I mentioned above. I am very supportive of this idea because it sets a minimum value of items without the implementation of a server shop, and promotes setting up pwarps or owning a shop in a mall so that you can sell items for cheaper than in vshop.
Another possible solution bought up in chat, raise taxes. This could mean many things such as raising town upkeep, or raising vshop taxes to cut more profit. I do believe that raising a the town upkeep margin would help the economy, but in my opinion this is not the best option, especially since large towns like Legend would struggle to stay alive, and I admire their noble causes. But, I will continue to explain the positives of this for the sake of discussion. If town plots were to result in a larger tax upkeep, inactive towns would be cleared sooner, resulting in town raising becoming a business again. Having higher taxes forces town owners to play more, earn more meebles, or maybe even change to taxing their residents more. This promotes people to spend more time on the server, and often times ways of making money involve buying something. For example, one common way to make money is through mining and using the jobs plugin. Now, the quickest way to make the largest profit from mining is to have a silk touch or fortune 3 god pickaxe. So promoting mining as good way to make money results in people buying god pickaxes. Basically, raising town upkeeps means that players will be forced to work harder to earn meebles, often resulting in stimulating some market in one way or another.
Raising vshop taxes would also help the economy, although if done incorrectly this could hurt the players. By raising the taxes on vshop, profit margins are cut, meaning less experienced players will want to sell here, but if it isn’t raised too much then this could work out. As a result of raised vshop taxes, pwarps would be promoted, and since 1k a day is taken for one pwarp, then money would be removed from the economy, making one meeble be more valuable, and helping the economy.
I know this is going to be a confusing blob of text, but I was told to act instead of complaining in chat, so now this is a thing I will try to make work. @KlutchDecals
