Spawn Shop Changes

Background​

One of the biggest complaints everyone heavily involved in the economy was the inflation in Alpha/Beta. The “old” economy had a little over two billion Meebles after two years. Within 18 days, the new Gamma economy has been inflated to close to sixty million. Considering that only about 4 million new meebles were transferred over to the Gamma economy, 56 million meebles have been introduced to the gamma economy, for an average rate of over 3 million meebles (17 percent) per day! That’s right--/warp shop and minigames (primarily /warp shop) have introduced 3 million, yes, 3 million meebles every single day. If you extrapolate this growth over the course of two years, or the amount of time since Alpha was released, we will have three hundred, sixty-five billion Meebles in the economy. Now, even with that kind of figure, it gets worse. As the economy gets older, the rate at which the inflation occurs will increase.

Now can we can all agree that /warp shop is becoming a problem? While it’s nice to have when you’re looking for a quick meeble or two, it causes mass inflation, as it introduces money into the economy at a rate far greater than it’s being removed. If we don’t take action to mitigate the effects of /warp shop soon, we’re going to end up where alpha and beta ended--a stagnant, boring world whose economy is dominated by a few elite players.

Current Issues with the Shop​

• /warp shop adds artificial value in items which are otherwise worthless in the player economy. For example, who says that redstone lamps are worth 10 meebles each? Why are (were, at least) jukeboxes so valuable? Items that have no intrinsic value shouldn’t possess arbitrarily assigned prices.

• This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the last point: /warp shop dramatically increases the rate in which meebles are added into eco--this one should be obvious. Many people choose to sell their items to /warp shop and not to other players, in the process artificially increasing the economy’s total balance. Essentially, the shop is creating a fixed and infinite demand, which, for an economy server like MeepCraft, carries catastrophic effects.

• Exploits are commonly found whenever major shop renovations are made (take Noteblocks and old anvil price, for example). These exploits, while patched, caused significant harm to the new economy, since players made millions of new meebles (hundreds of millions of old meebles), causing significant damage to the new eco and repeating the problem we set out to correct--an unbalanced economy.

• The current shop discourages use of vshop and chest shops to make meebles (because why do that when selling to /warp shop is faster, doesn’t carry a 5% tax, and ensured to give you meebles?)

Idea: Change /warp shop so buy and sell prices fluctuate based on demand, as opposed to the fixed prices currently in use.



The advantages and benefits to modifying the way the shop works are significant. Here are a few of the things it will do:

• Creates power in negotiating prices for valuable items, due to there not being a fixed price floor and ceiling introduced by the current /warp shop.

• Gives items their true value in the player-eco. Items won’t have value dictated by a server, which will mean some items that players need/really want will increase in price, while Junk will go decrease in price rather than minimizing at 1 meeble.

• The vshop will see more use and increase in competitive prices, and chest shops will also become more competitive as a result. In the long term, this will cause prices to be more accurate and fair for both the buyer and the seller. Additionally, if the vshop is used enough, the 5% sell tax becomes a significant money sink, further mitigating the effects of inflation.

Credits to CluelessKlutz (@kcschmidt), @PseudoGod, and @metr0n0me for writing this suggestion.

 

I don't think it is warp shop personally. For me, I usually rarely use warp shop. The money isn't worth it in my opinion. To make my money, I sell to player shops or do parkour/minigames. So far barely 10k of my near 800k gamma money was been from warp shop. The rest from skywars, parkour and selling rare items. This is just me though, I do not know how often other people use the shop.

 

That's for you personally, though. You see the kind of inflation of the Gamma Eco, right? So where else is that kind of money coming from?

 

Parkour, Skywars, Jobs, Quests, achievements, ect.

 

Didn't back in the day Meep have a fluctuating gold price? I like this idea because it is like the old stock market plugin, buy low and sell high and you just might make a profit if you are wise!

 

No, the old gold plugin made gold decrease in value so far until admins were forced to reset it to 100 gold. Then people figured out you could buy 10mil worth of gold at 85 each and sell it back when it got reset to 100, making them 17.6% of their initial investment, or 1.76mil, risk free.

 

Parkour was only recently readded, and doing the math that it has only been out for ten days, means it hasn't put out quite as much yet. If you presume sixty players have done every single course both weeks, it adds 9,800,000 to the economy. Despite that seeming like a large number, it's not compared to the calculated rate of 3,000,000 Meebles per day added through the shop.

Since this only pays 1k per win, this isn't a very big factor, especially compared to the amount of money being added per day.

I highly doubt jobs are adding a fortune to the economy. Not to mention, people haven't built massive farms like before quite yet.

I calculated this at 110 players completing both quests. Quests haven't even added two mil to the Eco as a whole.

The current achievement system doesn't really work(being worked on now, though), because most of the achievements were for minigames.

 

The problem with a demand-based fluctuating shop, is that the prices will eventually go down. Many more people will be selling than buying, and over time the demand for every item will be so low that nothing will be worth anything. Just like what happened to the gold back when it was demand-based, I remember it started at 600 and it eventually got to 80.

I think a completely random fluctuating price system would be better. Goes up and down, but doesn't really rely on demand, it just pretends to.

 

I wear blue socks so everyone wears blue socks.

 

I've made over 150k at skywars... and don't say that's not a lot cause it is.

Apparently you are blind cause I stated multiple times that it was just my opinion and what I personally did. Please read before you be an idiot

 

*didn't read* *sees poster*

+1

 

wow i never knew someone could get offended so quickly, amazing

 

I wouldn't say I was offended, just telling you that you were wrong. But I'm not a nice person so I'm not gonna say it in a nice way.
And also you didn't comment on how I was right and you were wrong.

 

If you weren't offended you wouldn't have replied. I think it's real cute how you find pride in referring to yourself as "not a nice person". Anyways, I've met plenty of people who don't know what a joke is, it's not your fault. This is a suggestion thread and I think it's best if we end this spectacle.

 

To combat these issues I have a few solutions. Here they are:
- significantly nerf the selling money at /warp shop, and update prices accordingly in the future to eliminate the "ceiling".
- add fluctuating market prices only to minerals and ingots (ie. diamonds, emeralds, iron, gold)
- add a tax to /warp shop, which would be lowered if people buy in bulk.
- when the time comes to reset the wild, stretch the eco a bit don't reset right away.

Conversely, I have another idea that I think would work, albeit somewhat weirdly.
- only add back gold fluctuating prices, but this time around find ways to better integrate gold into the market. Either make gold an important way to back the "value" of the meeble, or integrate it better into the marketplace. For the latter:
- perhaps make a /warp shop balance, which requires you to input gold (which would be valued at whatever gold is currently worth); selling would give you more of this balance, which can be converted at the bank back to gold, which in itself can be converted to meebles at the current price. This would provide the incentive for people to make sure the gold price doesn't dip too low. Now thinking about it, this type of system with a fully fluctuating market may work well. I may very well create my own post lol. Then again, I may be forgetting a major factor that would impair this idea. Someone pls tell me!

 

@metr0n0me I was the one who suggested fluctuating prices first

 

really the point of /warp shop should be to sell items to players, therefore taking money out of the economy that is regularly generated by jobs, parkour, quests, ect. However, since shop prices are so high in trying to leave a market for player-player transactions, nobody really buys anything other than unobtainable items. Warp shop should instead sell things that are high demand that are hard to obtain by players. Take tnt for example. Many players could use it for clearing plots, mining, having fun tnt shows, ect. However, gunpowder does not match the bulk demand of the item, and therefore it becomes a semi-rare commodity with limited use, as well as limited selling potential, I.E. nobody will spend time gathering the gunpowder and sand it takes to make a tnt operation worthwhile, but the shop price of 3200 meebles for a stack also thwarts players from considering it's use.

 

Isn't most of the inflation voting?

 

If you presume sixty players vote, and get 8k a day, it still would have exceeded 10 mil.

 

Of course, I think it is important to realize that a majority of this inflation also stems from the fact that nothing economy-wise has changed, other than parkour prizes. I mean sure, if you're looking at it at from the beginning of Meep, then obviously this seems ridiculous, but then again, nothing has changed in regards to how we make our money. Jobs are the same, voting rewards are the same, everything's the same! So I think that to get a better picture of the amount of "real" inflation we have here, we need to look at the amount of inflation the month before the update, since (even though we started at 0$) we're still adding money in the same ways. Therefore, if any Meeper has been keeping records of Meepcraft's economy, and knows what the inflation was totaled to then, please tell me now!

-EDIT-

If it was less than 52 mil ( the 60 mil - 8 mil conversions, which keep in mind doesn't even count player conversions) then we have a problem. More, and this is completely fine.