Best Posts in Thread: How can we change the economy for the better

The issue you will always run into, regardless of the amount of players, is a lot of those common items such as stone, dirt, cobble, and most wood is you'll always have more in the market than people want to buy given these resources are virtually infinite. The server will never have enough players (even if it had 5000) to compensate for the sheer amount of these items going into the market.

You could implement a minimum price but you would have to deal with whatever unintended consequences that come with that, which there will always be unintended consequences. In reality there is no real way to achieve a perfect balance in the economy and the best you should shoot for is "Good enough for everyone".

In my opinion I think it's a mistake to use grinding as a way to make people spend more time on the server as grinding is not inherently more fun. Most players who join do not care about the state of the economy, they care if they can join a town or create their own and that should be the ultimate goal. This is a problem where the only real solution is literally getting any warm bodies you can and having good towns and mayors to properly show them the ropes and befriend new players, as no tutorial is really sufficient.

In my experience trying to micro-manage an economy will only lead to disaster and in most cases, like they currently do, letting the economy just do it's thing is the best option. MeepCraft should not be an economy server first and towny server second, but the other way around -- That is when it was most successful. Things shouldn't be too difficult and people shouldn't have to endlessly grind.

 

Finally, something with backbone. Ill read this and reply in a few.

 

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 <0.9 I bought all that dirt for, but it will only go down from there. In a competitive market, everybody will be using the undercut strategy I mentioned above, since it is much easier than owning a pwarp and advertising. Now, when I played more actively, and I made money, I tried to keep dirt at one meeble per block the majority of the time. So I bought all of the dirt on vshop that was for sale less than one per, and just for the sake of being relevant I put some dirt in the vshop as well. Dirt took more than a week to reach its 0.1 per block again. So for 52k a year, we could help the economy.

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

 

I agree with korpi on a lot of this. I remember one time, I bought out the entire diamond stock under 150 and sold 200ish diamonds for 150 each. Someone duped and needed diamonds (can't remember who) and I made 40k overnight.

I don't agree with your "no less than 1 meeble" idea though. Many items aren't worth 1 each on meep, heck, many aren't worth .1 at this point. So many things are so easily grind-able on meep that some items (like string/spider eyes) are basically free