Best Posts in Thread: Why instant transportation and instant item purchasing (vshop) is bad for the eco [Theory]

I’m sorry, did you just fact check him based on numbers that change daily, could you not, maybe, just maybe, not be so annoying?

 

-(P.S.[pre scriptum in this case]: This isn't necessarily a suggestion for Meepcraft, but more of a general look into Minecraft economy servers as a whole. Adding these changes to Meep would be unrealistic and probably disliked at this point of the server's life, which is why this is a theory and a discussion, not a suggestion.)

TL : DR underlined

-Intro
Being mostly uninvolved with Meepcraft for the past several months, you may be wondering, "what is bloody doing here providing a in-depth thinkpiece on Meepcraft/Minecraft economics?" The answer is, I am as confused as you are. Don't know if anyone will really read this but I needed to get my thoughts on paper (or in text).

-Why it may work
Meepcraft is not unique in having /home, /t spawn, /back and other mainstays of the teleporation plugin sort; there are thousands of servers that utilize similar commands. They make getting places very easy, and speed up the general Minecraft process, allowing you to jump from storage room to storage room, home to home, or even from one side of the world to the other. However, achieving high tier items in Minecraft (especially multiplayer) is additionally very very fast. Within several weeks of the server being open, some of the highest tier items had been found (tons of diamonds, elytra, max enchanted tools, dragon egg(s), etc) and a very short time after that almost all people owned some of these endgame items.

Why, then, would it make sense to have such quick methods of item transfer/player movement to an already quick game?

This is really the basis of my theory. Many of you may recall in old Meepcraft there were railroads that spanned most of the Alpha and Beta worlds, connecting strings of towns together. Teleportation was much the same as it is now, so why was this necessary?
It really wasn't.
The economy had inflated to gigantic proportions, with close to any item being unvaluable. Most people had amassed considerable riches, and had nothing to do with them. There was nothing they didn't already own. So, they set out to build. And they built huge kingdoms, massive towns, luxurious mansions, and even unnecessary railroads out of pure boredom with the economy. What if, the economy were much the same as it is in modern Meep, except building transportation is necessary?

Imagine (We'll use meep as an example here):
Meep had just reset. There was tons of hype as usual and everyone was rushing on the server in droves to blaze their way into the Towny wilderness and start a life for themselves. This time around, however, there is no /home, no /tpa, no /t spawn, no /pwarp, etc, and no v-shop (Warps to worlds/spawns would stay obviously). People quickly start to realize, "Maybe we should build closer to each other so we can buy and sell things/interact with other players more easily." A centralized group of towns start to form and people start to create short bridges to other towns (think the GMA). Of course, people will constantly be creating towns and wanting to distance themselves from others, so several people will set out away from the main group of clusters to make it on their own. This standalone town may grow into a cluster of more towns once again, eventually creating a network of towns mostly close to each other.

As this happens, people will start to open local stores. This is one of the things that excites me personally. With no /pwarps, people would have to shop at somewhat local stores (or take railway/boat rides/whatever to bigger stores). This would help to distribute wealth and make a lot more business owners and many less workers/consumers, plus I feel like it would make business more personal and increase player interaction greatly.
For comparison, in the current eco, things are much different. If you live in any large towns like Legend or Mooville or similar (whatever are the biggest towns in the present) you've probably seen some of these local stores people have built into their homes. Usually these are somewhat used in the early days after a reset, but very quickly large conglomerated /pwarps set in and quickly annihilate the value of any item by mass production and quick sales, leaving small, unpwarped stores in the dust. Think of the whole Amazon vs. Toys R Us situation. For those of you unfamiliar, Toys R Us was a huge retail toy chain that had been mostly put out of business by Amazon's competitive pricing and fast delivery. While Toys R Us is trying to make a comeback, Amazon will always dominate them. Similar situations happen within Minecraft ecos, except 100x faster (because everything economic happens faster in Minecraft). Plus, unless you live nearby a small chest-shop like this (and it somehow has better pricing), /pwarp ___ will always be there to crush the little guy.

While this instant shopping/purchasing is nice, it makes monopolies way too easy, and drives prices way too low. At certain points I was selling pickaxes at prices sub-2k meebles just because I could mass produce and draw in people so fast. I might as well have been giving the things away. As Hornemans has shown in economic reports, to paraphrase, something akin to 0.3% of the eco owns over 50% of the wealth. And being in that 0.3 isn't that fun, part of the reason I don't play much at all any more, along with Hornemans and a few other giants. Centralized towns would make local "mom and pop" (if you will) stores would be much more successful, and very likely, profitable.

To make one last brief point, it has been shown on other servers that spreading out goods more makes their value stay much the same. There is a real, running, and somewhat popular server that demonstrates this concept. I won't mention it by name so instead I'll call it Server X. On Server X there are almost no rules. X-ray, tracers, almost all hack client features except fly are allowed and even duping is allowed (although the glitch gets fixed when discovered by the server staff). Even with tons of items being x-rayed and duped, items hold their value. Why? Because players have to travel millions of blocks to transport goods, because there are no world borders and players on Server X spread out all the way to the limit. On a smaller scale (with a smaller world, less valuables, and actual rules) I think the concept would work similarly.

-Why It's Fun
Now that all this economic stuff is through with, we have to talk about why this would be a fun concept (outside of making the eco less boring). Integrating transportation would make for endless fun projects for town owners. There could be horse highways, llama launchers, boat canals (or iceroads ), railroads, bridges, elytra trails with boosters, or even with the 1.13 update, some sort of trident based transportation.
You could ship items to other players, hire people to transport goods for you, be a highway robber and try to steal valuable cargo, and more and more. It would open up entire new playing styles and give players something to do constantly. The sort of town-cluster concept would also give way to diplomacy about transportation linking between towns, rules and regulations, etc. Anyone could open a shop and likely see success. Of course competition would occur, and that is healthy, but owning a monopoly, being able to buy anything, and then sitting on top of a pile of useless money would be much less common. These changes, in cooperation with other rule/plugin changes, could revolutionize Towny/eco as we know it.

I am looking for differing opinions on my theory and concepts so please share your ideas/criticisms. Thanks