Make Earning Money Fun + Assorted goodies

Like all suggestion threads I post, please be open minded and borderline respectful. I welcome a good debate. I understand that this entire thread has a passive-aggressive undertone, and I'm sure many people will read this is a load of rambling BS.

This is a follow on from a previous post (Is it too hard to make money?).

Currently, myself and the majority of the people I've talked to feel that the economy is too strict.

Making money in this economy is a chore. It's not FUN. The point of a Minecraft server is to have FUN and the point of an economy server is to become rich (i.e. make lots of money), and it's incredibly BORING trying to become rich when the only legitimate way to do so is to do hours upon hours of mundane, repetitive work. This is why we are currently seeing so many ban appeals of players who've resorted to all sorts of illegal activities in order to get the same rush they used to get out of being rich.

As a more experienced player (joined Nov 2012), I find it incredibly underwhelming earning a fraction of what I used to while working infinitely harder. I have to place blocks for an hour straight to earn 10-15k, and I'm a level 54 builder. Think about that for a second, the highest ranked builder on the server having to slave away for an hour to earn what he used to be able to in a few minutes. It's not fun and if I were new I certainly wouldn't hang around for long.

And it's not just experienced players who find this new economy off-putting; put yourself in the shoes of a brand new player. They come to this server, have no clue how to talk in shout to ask for assistance or simply introduce themselves, they have no sense of direction and don't know how to get to towns, they see the quest masters and just go 'wtf is they' and walk off, they realise that making money is boring and simply log off, never to be seen again. No wonder our player count is declining. We need a short, sharp tutorial.

Now enough of my (hopefully) refined ranting, time for some proposals.
-Bring back paid minigames, you know, things that are actually fun to do. *By minigames, I'm referring to simple, easy to learn, games which don't require a huge number of players (which, let's face it, we don't have) and are popular among the community. Infected in particular <3 <3
-Buff jobs: Yes Klutch, you've buffed jobs a thousand and one times. But many older players will gain no satisfaction from earning a meagre 2.5 meebles for cutting a log or 1.3 for placing a block. I remember when I got paid 12 meebles for chopping a log and 4 for placing a block, those days appear to be long gone. I'm no economist, but if jobs are buffed then shouldn't inflation allow the value of the meeble to remain relative anyway?
-More donor shop options: We have nothing to spend our earnings on. Yesterday, Vkl earned 325k from dicing. I asked him what we were going to do with it, he responded with something along the lines of "idk, let it rot in the town bank". Ten minutes later he decided just to dice it away because there was nothing fun to spend it on. Bring back grappling hooks, bring back tnt, bring back glass picks, bring back fun.
-Add a tutorial: We need a short, sharp tutorial that will teach players how to teleport to towns, earn money, join a town and talk in shout. Keep it literally that simple. We don't need signs telling players how to /plot set perm ally itemuse on, we don't need signs advertising our empty and too often broken minigames, and for the love of Jay-Zus Christ we don't need a plethora of signs attempting to indoctrinate a moral code into players.

TLR:
This is a Minecraft server, making money should be fun. We shouldn't be confined to hours of mundane work to earn what feels like a fraction of what we used to, and then find out that the only thing we have to spend it on is paying upkeep and dicing.

Now to lighten the mood, please enjoy this picture of a baby sloth sitting in a mug.

 

Huge +1 on all of these

 

Meep hasn't had an economy where is was fun to make money for the last two years, its all about our mindset of "let's nerf everything". Its making me nervous that skyblock, my get away from the nerfing, is getting nerfed just as badly as towns.

TBH, do this suggestion and make mini games like Kitpvp become profitable for people who get killstreaks, get more than one kill per game (booms) and maybe a 10k bonus for completing every parkour map to the fullest

 

I think the biggest problem is the nerfing to death of farming, which has been talked about recently in another thread. Although some players seem to show moderate success selling crops to other players, people who have less sought-out-for crops really just waste their time.
For example, if I have a double chest of cactus (54 stacks), that only earns me 432 meebles at /warp farming. Harvesting a double chest of cactus could take an immense amount of time, even when automated.
Farmer has not only been nerfed through jobs, but also through the actual value of crops. This is exactly like wage/price control in real world economics: If people cannot get money for a job, they aren't going to do it. In a real world situation this could be devastating. In meep, however, it's just plain annoying, and pretty much kills an entire profession.
If staff really want a good economy, maybe they should exercise going with the flow a little bit: raising prices to actually properly fit the current meeble value and make money easier to make, of course not to an outrageous extent, but to at least restore some balance.

To get a little more on track, i think in addition to making money easier in terms of tasks, we do need more reward for minigames, more quests, etc

 

I like everything you said, but I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that a tutorial in the form of a quest is on trello.

 

Well then those quests better be damn obvious for new players. It took me three hours to realise we had quests and another half hour to do them.

 

At least you completed the quests... Once I realized they were fetch quests, I stopped doing them. Sure the first quest could be a tutorial about where to go, how to use /warps, maybe sell a gold ingot in the bank idfc. But please lets be more creative with these.

Edit: I don't really know why I replied to only you, this could've just been a general comment on the thread instead

Also forgot to mention that I agree with your ideas

 

I don't have the time to grind 6h a day to obtain meebles. +1

 

Yesss. I always struggled to earn meebles, and I hope this thread gets noticed by a staff.

 

Look at the comment above yours.

 

Oops sorry. Ignore my second sentence then.

 

Okay so sorry to say I'm actually a huge -1, so the point in minecraft is to build. Yes we're an economy server so now it's to get rich. When I think of this, thinking about being largely rich I feel it would get boring. You have everything and not much more to do. 10-15k an hour isn't bad money at all. Shoot many of us have played since the reset and still have under 100k. I could potentially agree with maybe donor jobs. That would help people donate to the server plus give us more perks within donating.

 

I love this, and I love you, you beautiful carrot-wielding monster. All in all - We keep

Cannot tell you how much in support I am of this.

Kind of curious why they aren't paid now - Is the payment dealio broken? Or was it a specific choice? o.o

Again, I'll +1, because I fully agree with your point. I sold a rank because I got bored with how money was made. I can't vote or play minigames, so I'm left with jobs and shop. Granted, people are lazy, I"m hella lazy, but I don't see why grinding placing blocks for 2 hours sounds like something a player, especially a new player, would want to do for 20, 30K.

Absolutely a +1 because we not only need donations, but hella money sink

Meh, a warning is always nice. I don't think the signs do any harm. It's not so overdone it's annoying, IMO.

Think of this from a player retention standpoint. I'm not sure what the stats are exactly so I'm going to make some educated guesses, they may be partly off but they'll get my point across

Lets say we get an average of 50 new players a day. That's a player just logging in. Probably at least half will log off immediately after logging on, so we'll count the 25 players. Of those 25, probably 10-15 will wander around spawn a little bit, not know how to use /g, and figure either A. This is boring. I don't see anything I can do. or B. No one is responding to me ugh, I'm getting off.
So now we have 10. Several of these will inevitably quit within a day or two due to lack of understanding or lack of activity. Some will quit because they are ignored in global when asking about towns and get frustrated. Some will build a wild house, get griefed and leave. At the end of the day, we keep maybe 1 or 2 of these players. Out of the players we get in a week, we'll probably keep 1 or two players a WEEK for over a month.

A tutorial is more important than you think. With this spawn, it's not super hard to find all the minigames (I mean there are giant letters in the sky lol) but seeing as half our minigames don't currently work and there is little to no instruction to towny or skyblock or anything beyond /help which most new players probably dont even know exists.
Something like a tutorial, and adding more fun ways to make money, and being able to achieve things besides owning a town that are smaller, will help increase that total. 1-2 turns to 5-10. And with some changes, those players are more likely to stay for longer periods of time. So the 1-2 players per week we keep for a month + turn into 5-10 as well, and maybe some of those stay for even a longer period of time. We now have over twice the amount of opportunity for these newbies to tell their friends, and/or donate, which is what we want.

The problem is not so much an existing player or we the players that have been around for a good long time. The ones who are stuck here because of our friends lol. If we want the server to be a success and be able to grow, we have to find the heaviest problems and hit them hard. Right now I think our biggest problem, not counting serverside issues such as the bugs with the reset and development etc, is player retention. If we can't keep the players, and we slowly lose what we have, we are never going to grow.

Plus, more of a side note, as said above it's a game. People play the game to have fun. If you say to someone, "Hey, do you want to play this game where alll you do is chop down trees for 2 hours for 2 weeks and then you may be able to possibly get one of the end goals? Maybe? no?" they're gonna laugh at you. I do understand the nerf of the jobs and totally agree with it, but now that the reset has settled a little bit, I think it's time to make more additions to both add and remove money from the eco. We can always change things again later.

 

Im sorry, i think you may have misunderstood what i was saying so let me explain. I only commented on the money thing. The fact that you dont get paid that much for working with /jobs let alone the fact that you can do work for other players. i am all in favor for bringing back items to buy and thinking of new items to buy. I am all for more job perks for donors as i said. I just dont think /jobs should be a away of getting rich quick.

--- Double Post Merged, Feb 27, 2017, Original Post Date: Feb 27, 2017 ---

and of course a tutorial is good too!

 

100% agree with every single one of these points. However (and I know 99% of people disagree with this) I also think there's a problem simply with the sheer amount of items on the server, which devalue their prices and makes them a lot less fun to find. In particular, I believe this applies to the Miner job, however you could stretch it for others such as Woodcutting. Basically, I think it would be a good idea to reset the wild using Minecraft's mineral composition settings, to make items like diamonds, iron, and emeralds actually decently rare and fun to find.

I also think some changes should be made to buff some other jobs with this method (i.e: increasing the amount of gravel underground for diggers).

Finally, I really think we need to work on creating a real market for food. I'm no tech, but I'm pretty sure that we'd be able to mess around with certain mechanics to make crop growth harder. Perhaps make it so all crops grow 20% slower, need access to direct sunlight or else grow 'x' % slower, and give lower amounts of food points (whilst raising saturation so people don't constantly have to eat - once again I don't know how feasible these are but they'd certainly help raise food prices). Also, perhaps increase gestation time for animals from 20 mins to 25 or whatever. If any of these are possible I think it would help make Meep more realistic. I also don't think it would affect the farmer job too badly if the $ lost to not harvesting extra crops is made up by the rise of food prices.

Anyways, I know there's really only one person who agrees with anything I say so I don't expect anyone to care. Still, great job w/ your points!

 

It's called screw communism and sell your diamonds for 1000 each
you'll get rich fast no worry

 

My goal is just to add another point of view, since I truly don't know much of what occurred before the reset (I tried long ago and didn't know about jobs so I just sold crafting tables for 5 meebles each).

If money doesn't require work, then it quickly loses value. To add more moneymaking alternatives, there needs to be suggestions other than: increase the money you get.

The "rush" of getting rich stalls because people need to do something bigger each time to receive the same rush as before. This problem would occur, regardless of whether people earn 100,000 or 10,000 meebles.

We earn less meebles for all tasks to create an economy with less money in circulation, which keeps prices low. It's a lot easier to remember prices with small numbers than paying ten thousand for a book. The numbers may not look exciting, but they're sure easier to remember.

This in fact has been worked on and is just needed to be implemented. The full suggested tutorial can be found on trello.

To be honest, minigames with less people would be a good idea, but there already is difficulty with starting a five player round of boomo, so adding more minigames could split people between minigames, making it impossible to start a game.

This would bring more money, but no products to offset costs. In the end, the prices of everything would be much higher and harder to compare.

If people don't feel that there are enough things to buy, then someone could try filling that niche in the market with their own fun named weapons, cool books, powerful tools, etc. Also, these players could spend time creating and building instead of making money as they have enough money that they don't have to work for it much.

As said before, just needs implementing.

Many of these arguments aren't my own opinions, just ideas of why the server is set up this way: there are reasons for the decisions the Meepcraft staff have made.

 

Just yes. Yes yes and keep yessing. I 1,000,000% agree with every single one of your ideas. Absolutely adoring you right now for making this thread. One thing I think you forgot is to bring back CTF. Maybe make the pay less because it was kinda OP, but please bring it back. It was really fun.

 

Well, it was already confirmed in the most recent Meep Times that CTF will be brought back. There might be more delay than orginally because of the current change in techs, but I really do hope that it's brought back to Meep. I don't know/forgot which version though, and the prizes will probably be adjusted for the current eco.

 

We are going to take your suggestions into consideration. We will possibly make some easier ways to make money in the near future.