Best Posts in Thread: 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.