Economy changes- Public Survey

[LilL0ki]

Auction House:
Auction House is the new "player shop" in the server. As Pau said, it's difficult for new players to establish a player shop plot since player reputation and influence affect it, plus players do not know where to go to buy items, so known shops are recommended such as shops in Tranquila Poppy Plaza. For the auction house, it would be good to have a cooldown period for selling items since after an item has been bought, you can instantly replenish it. Also, I suggest setting up a global player shop in which a small room can be rented by a player and can sell items so all players can go there and buy.

I haven't had the chance to read the Doc yet I'll do that tomorrow when I have time... I do agree with the Global shop the other server I used to play on actually had a two floor mall built and set up where you could rent a space for a certain amount per day/week/month

[Stycore]

I don't think baltop should be removed, as that would take the fun out of earning money for many players. Sure, maybe less people would grind money just for the sake of being rich, but if that's their only goal, what's the problem? It really doesn't matter if someone owns 5mil if they're never going to use it. And if they are planning to spend it, removing baltop wouldn't stop them from grinding money.

I don't believe you've read the original post, the suggestion was that instead of baltop showing current player wealth, it will show how much money someone has voluntarily removed from their balance, people who like the prestige of being number one on the leaderboards will now have to sacrifice some of their current wealth to achieve that, instead of hoarding large sums of money. The idea is to remove as much money from the economy as possible whilst retaining the ability to flaunt your wealth.

I don't really like the sound of that either, and like I said, what's the point? Rich people who don't use their money aren't the problem here.

[Oplegoman]

Update time!

So let's start this off, this topic has made many people more anxious and confused as they should have been. There have been many valid concerns to discuss and even more feedback I am going to summerise those suggestions but first would like to talk about things that WILL not be happening to the economy.

Things that are not going to change:

Balances are NOT going to be reset, this wasn't even under consideration or brought up once in our discussions. This will not be considered at all as its not a good option to help address the issues we are currently facing.

We shall NOT be penalising the rich just because they are rich! This makes no sense to me or just about anyone else. I think this was brought up as it's a point of contention around the world, but this doesn't have a place in a Minecraft server as we do not need the money to fund shop or any other aspect of the in-game economy.

We shall NOT be disabling features currently available to the server if anything we would like to add to them. This does not mean we are against making changes to game features, and we have some plans on how to do this. But for now, these are very elementary and not really to be published to the community.

We shall NOT be making significant changes all at the same time, as this would be like playing with fire! We aim to make small changes and space them out and see the reaction of the economy and players reactions to these changes, feedback will help guide us through this process.

Other Points of Note

As this is a substantial change to happen to the server, many people are understandably concerned and passionate about what is going to happen, and this is causing a lot of speculation between players about stuff that could potentially occur. This could partly be our fault with the limited information we offered up about the economy yesterday. It was done like that to get peoples views on each topic with as little influence by us, as we want to see what changes our player base think should be made.

Overall the feedback is going to very useful to us as is helping us make decisions about the changes we shall be making. Sorry, that it sounds too vague at the moment, we cannot layout everything we are looking to change as very few players will take advantage of this to make themselves more money or items before the changes come into effect. But we are not going to let this be a roadblock to us doing our best to communicate possible potential changes along with when they are implemented, we aim to have a detailed changelog for the economy which you can follow and discuss.

We are also happy to see that many players are also discussing the changes with each other from conflicting views, this allows us to gain a very balanced approach when deciding on final revisions for our patches. Let it be known your voices have been heard even if we haven't responded to them.

Some other concerns have been the unclear nature of what is going on behind the scenes and I would like to clear up some of this confusion. There is a team of 10 which are working on the economy rework. We have conflicting views on how to proceed. This has been healthy for this project as it has meant we have had to discuss much more about our ideas and our reasoning why.

Feedback

Okay, this section is going to be a big one, as there has been a lot of discussion going about and will like to present many ideas and our reasoning behind our views on each one. Again like how I have said before we cannot go into too much detail with changes and will be heavily focusing on ways in which players can spend their money as new voluntary ways to spend money is always nice to have access towards.

Villager trades

From our poll so far we have seen than many of you think that villagers can be exploited for wealth and many of you would like to see this fixed. Many of you have provided many options to us on how we can do this, and each one shall be considered. There are some things here I would like to dispel before people get upset, we are not disabling villagers in any way, and we are not going to be limiting trades. This goes against what I said about disabling features already available above.

Auction House

This point is much more mixed between the responses we have. And the consideration here was to add a percentage tax upon items sold upon the auction (example: I list 20 diamond for 2000, the buyer pays 2000, but I will receive 1800 from that trade). The aim is to drive the price of an auction up a little (as buyers will add the cost of the tax onto the product) and give a cost of using it. In our eyes, this shall not impact on new players or players who infrequently use auction to sell but aims to incentivise large traders who use auction as their primary way of selling products to make a towny shop or another physical shop in the world.
This goes onto our second point, we had strong feedback for promoting towny shop as many players think that this can offer much more to the community. Some of the comments where:

-   Player shops encourage player travel and interaction with what we have to offer.
-   More challenging to undercut using towny shops.
-   Stops players from being lazy
-   Great for buying in bulk

With this feedback, we feel justified in thinking that an auction tax would be a good idea.

Shop prices

Here I have to be kinda vague to stop the small number of players buying items up and attempting to sell them on for profit. There were conflicting views upon shop prices, and this is a tough one us to deal with as the shop is an essential part of the server. A lot of consideration over this shall be taken before any changes are made, and this shall be a while off yet! So no need to panic!

Other ideas for Balancing The Economy

The overall consensus was that we need more ways to use our money and remove it from the economy, with emphasis on making this voluntary. So I would like to list some of the ideas off and see what you all think about them:

-   A new currency which is bought through money only (Sents ? placeholder name) and can be used to open loot boxes at different cost depending on the type of loot available. This can be expanded upon much later on or when new ideas come to mind.
-   Cosmetics. Things like custom pets which follow you around and can be used to show off or custom items for the pets which could be bought through bidding wars.
-   A small fee for /heal, /feed,/kit or other donator commands.
-   The idea of bringing back a death tax to the server.
-   Reduce the rate at which mob farms drop valuable loot (pigman farm referenced)
-   Removal of /baltop so massing large amounts of money isn't seen as a goal and not always comparing yourself to the top players. No point grinding cash if you are not going to spend it.
-   A way of purchasing beacon effects or other buffs which would be applied to the player for a given amount of time. This could be for large amounts of money.
-   Sentinel lottery.
-   Buying towny chunks or claim blocks for money.
-   A managed page for jobs.
-   Increase of town creation and upkeep price.
-   Creation of a charity fund sounds like an idea which could be used at the discretion of the players running it (most likely with some oversight from a staff member) to donate money, items and/or time to new players or players in need.

We can see that you have many ideas (some of them are ones we thought about), and we could not list all of them as some would not fit what we are going for as stated above or many were repeated by multiple players. We have not included what we feel about these ideas quite yet as we want to see to which ones the community gravitate towards.

Again with these ideas above, please treat them as ideas, they need much more refinement for them to fit well into the economy and the server as a whole. This means all actions will take time to implement, and when we can, we will update you with our progress and future ideas. If you have any more suggestions or concerns, please say them below so we can discuss them further.

[Eagler1997]

the only thing I would like to remark is that if drops of pigmen will be nerfed just nerf sword drops
Swords drop too much imo and also cause a number of other issues, it gives an infinite amount of enchanted books, it gives 2 gold ingots when you salvage them, and it clogs up any sorter causing another number of problems

I would say that a 5%-15% drop chance per pigman killed is a lot less than we have now but still enough to get some profit out of it
also that will also fix people using golden swords to quickly train mcmmo repair and people might go back to diamonds to do this, and that will also up the price of diamonds again
I feel like ingots and nuggets is fairly well balanced and you need to save a lot of tokens before you get a decent pigman farm

[HeLiX_iS_BeTa]

Inflating Economy:
Crates are great rewards for votes or purchased via in-game money. I think that was brought up last time by a form for late registered votes that stack up in the server.

I definitely like this idea. Allow users to input in-game money towards the ability to spin a crate or "a game of chance" if you will. Give them the ability to purchase "spins" and try their luck at winning something. Prizes could be some form of cosmetic or item that has no value in the server but would look nice as a decoration. Like player heads, for example.

[Horoku]

I don't think baltop should be removed, as that would take the fun out of earning money for many players. Sure, maybe less people would grind money just for the sake of being rich, but if that's their only goal, what's the problem? It really doesn't matter if someone owns 5mil if they're never going to use it. And if they are planning to spend it, removing baltop wouldn't stop them from grinding money.

I don't believe you've read the original post, the suggestion was that instead of baltop showing current player wealth, it will show how much money someone has voluntarily removed from their balance, people who like the prestige of being number one on the leaderboards will now have to sacrifice some of their current wealth to achieve that, instead of hoarding large sums of money. The idea is to remove as much money from the economy as possible whilst retaining the ability to flaunt your wealth.

I don't really like the sound of that either, and like I said, what's the point? Rich people who don't use their money aren't the problem here.

People who are rich are often more carefree with their money if they need something, they are more likely overpay for items and therefore distribute more money to other players overtime. It's not like you're unable to flaunt your wealth anymore. You're doing quite a bit of assuming as to what people will do or won't do with their money. If someone like Joel is willing to get up to 8000 MCMMO repair, why wouldn't they throw away some of their excess money to pursue leaderboard ranking? this is actually an idea from a game called runescape 3, and for some context that game is 20 years old and it still has a thriving community, they had to get creative with ways for ways players can spend their money on. I'm not sure why you are against this idea, I'd prefer if you elaborate on why that is.

Ultimately what it comes down to is adding the ability for players to use resources in order to get levels, repair is an excellent examples of this, and if there were more skills like it, it would help the economy survive. However pigmen farms are completely destroying the need to train repair using diamonds.

However I don't quite agree with completely removing /baltop, I'd prefer the idea I have suggested, this removes money from the economy and allow people to flex their wealth, I think it's a good comprise, however if this is a form of technical issue I understand it may not be possible.

[Horoku]

the only thing I would like to remark is that if drops of pigmen will be nerfed just nerf sword drops
Swords drop too much imo and also cause a number of other issues, it gives an infinite amount of enchanted books, it gives 2 gold ingots when you salvage them, and it clogs up any sorter causing another number of problems

I would say that a 5%-15% drop chance per pigman killed is a lot less than we have now but still enough to get some profit out of it
also that will also fix people using golden swords to quickly train mcmmo repair and people might go back to diamonds to do this, and that will also up the price of diamonds again
I feel like ingots and nuggets is fairly well balanced and you need to save a lot of tokens before you get a decent pigman farm

I definitely agree Eagler, pigmen swords needs to be tuned down and it's one of my main points that I wanted to get across, however I'm thinking of a less lenient approach and just getting rid of pigman swords altogether. I think it will just make the process of levelling repair a lot slower, and gold sword farming will still be the preferred way to level up your repair, as you get both money and levels from it. I think by removing them, it reduces the amount of gold someone can get on average from killing pigmen, and is a much more secure way to stabilize the diamond economy.