Minecraft Economics

Meepcraft is kinda boring. Almost all jobs have one or two metas, such as excavators digging sand and terracotta, artists smelting sand or crafting wool then dying them, and farmers planting potatoes. Players, within reason, have 2-3 jobs, meaning that the most varied their gameplay can be is doing up to 6 actions. However, most players seem to only really do 1-3 actions as the entirety of their gameplay. And for what? To gamble it away?

Additionally, and most crucially, this is not intuitive or fun at all for new players. New players that stay more than a few minutes are extremely rare, and virtually never actually get involved in the economy. The server's most important problem is easily new player retention. This should be the main focus of the server. For this, I have some solutions. This will go over ideas for making the server more varied, intuitive, and, hopefully, fun.

Jobs are very flawed, but with the amount of effort that players have put into them, they're by all means here to stay. Therefore, these ideas will work around jobs, but with a global nerf to accommodate for new ways to make money.

The main problem with jobs is that they feel meaningless. People make hundreds of thousands to millions of green stained glass, logs, baked potatoes, ender pearls, and other items with nothing to do with them. The items themselves hold no value, instead the act of obtaining the item is valuable. This isn't intuitive, since usually when crafting something, the product is what people usually care about. Another side effect of the way that jobs work is that they just feel like an actual job. You keep doing the same couple actions over and over again and slowly accumulate wealth for it. Some of the most profitable jobs include simply waiting. This is not intuitive at all to new players, who expect the items themselves to have value. New players do not understand why 25 sand is as valuable as a diamond. The solution is to encourage players to get items that have a value.

I think back to what I did as a new player in Meepcraft. I would mine for a few hours and get a bunch of iron, gold, diamonds, emeralds, and whatever other ores I could find. Then, I would go to the admin shop and sell them all for a bunch of money. I would try to make the message that pops up say that I earned over 100,000 meebles in just one click. It was fun, and the fruits of my labor were clearly shown to me. The items I obtained clearly had value, and I was able to sell these items for the value that they had, providing a very straight-forward and easy to understand way to make money. Now that I knew how to make money, I could participate in the economy. Nowadays, instead of "get item, sell item" being the way you make money, it is now "browse jobs, read up on what each job does, go through the list of all the items that each job pays out for, calculate how profitable that would be given your resources, pick a job, make setups to maximize that farm, then do actions continuously" to make money. How can you reasonably expect a new player to give the time to learn the commands, read the payouts, make a plan, and follow it?

Regarding this, a solution to this problem is something I've held on to for a few years, slowly adjusting and altering it with feedback from peers. Jobs quests are essentially a set of villagers that ask for a bundle of items. For example, a miner villager may ask for 15 gold ore, 20 torches, and an iron pickaxe in exchange for 1200 meebles. These quests are infinitely repeatable with no cooldown, but you must have every item in the bundle in order to sell. The villagers are themed so that every villager caters to a job in Meepcraft, pulling from a set of items that are related to the job. Every bundle has at least one item where the item, or ingredients to craft the item, require manual work. In the example given, the gold ore and the coal/charcoal used to make the torches are ingredients that cannot be automatically farmed. This prevents players from simply making a bunch of auto farms and reaping the rewards from that.

However, the most important part of this, is that every three days, the quests change, and the payouts vary. This allows both short-term and long-term strategizing. If the new farmer quest makes pumpkins very valuable, people may start scrambling to make pumpkin farms. People may also buckle down and continue to stockpile one item, and wait for the day that it becomes valuable. This way of generating income should be roughly as profitable as doing jobs at ~level 25-50, making it a viable way to make money.

This is much easier to understand to a new player. Instead of being told to join a town, get a plot, choose a job, make an elaborate farm to do that job, use the farm, and slowly make meebles for no reason, a new player can join, see that if they do a quest they make money, and do that quest to earn meebles. This also changes up gameplay, encouraging players to try out different ways to make money and preventing players from going through a continuous grind to do the same thing all day every day.

However, this still does not quite answer one of the more major problems with Meepcraft's economy. What do you do with meebles? Most players simply do not need meebles. Materials that players buy require a trivial amount of meebles, and virtually all players have event items with mending that they will never need to replace. There have been attempts to add money sinks in the forms of taxes, the ability to buy eff7+ items, and other methods, but have not been very effective.

I believe the most effective money sink to make is in the form of cosmetics. Have an emotes plugin where players can pay to unlock different emotes. Bring back /effect where players can pay to unlock different effects. Let players pay to reduce the cooldown time on /fw, or increase how spectacular the fireworks that come from /fw are. Let users buy map art that they can put on their walls. Convert the legend side of spawn into an extravagant admin town, where players can pay top dollar to own land on. Rich players want to flaunt their wealth, and they deserve to be able to. It creates a money sink and allows those who have put their blood sweat and tears into the server to stand out from the crowd.

tl;dr, give items values with quests to make making money more intuitive and varied, and add cosmetics as a money sink.

 

I vote for adding cosmetics (gadgets) as money sink!