Complex? We'd essentially be doing the same things as the bukkit plugin solution (exchange, shop, possibly atm) with some cool things tacked on. Yeah, poor choice of words there when I said big project but don't you want to keep the ball rolling? What is a project that we did on a grand scale this reset? With your planned big project for this world obsoleted by another mod, why not plan our big project for the next map? And, yeah, I know what you mean. We may aswell have /home and /warp already.
It can be done, but most of the work would be writing code, not block placement. I'm partial to placing blocks when playing MineCraft. CC is fun in small doses, but I'm not inclined to spend hours writing code.
I don't really see what is wrong with the way we do things at the moment. Player to Player bartering with items is fine and I enjoy meeting up with players to have a little trade. Not only that in 1.4 using trade o mats proved very successful and it allowed people to receive trades that they deemed reasonable when they were busy or offline.
Several people, including sk89q, have written long posts in this thread explaining in detail why a currency would be superior to bartering. It's basic economics, so if those posts don't convince you, google it.
I haven't read everything, but currency simply exists automatically when people stick to the same object as a medium of exchange. There's no need for server-side code, complex trade machines, ComputerCraft, and so on. Uranium has become a currency in Alice before for periods at a time, for example. It doesn't have to be officially sanctioned by an entity to be called a "currency," and it doesn't need any code or managing on its own. But the advantage of us picking a currency explicitly is so that we can pick something justified, as well as putting everyone on board. It also allows for the implementation of a debit card (like on Vincent) where you can unload your money into the system and spend it like you would a credit card. That would be added for convenience reasons, not because it is needed to define a currency.
Who loves roses, and coding? This guy! This was my one of my ideas tied to ATM machines! There can also be a 'default' shop program that vendors can use or they can write their own using an API. I want to bring power to the players!
After reading a bit more, I have to say that some of these schemes are overly complex. The reason why we want a currency and a debit card is so you can just go to, for example, the bazaar and buy stuff at will because you had money in your wallet. But if you have to work with some complicated system and setup a bunch of stuff just to buy something, then we might as well just trade cows for Ferraris. No one would use the currency because it's considerably more of a pain in the ass than bartering.
By using a sign to deposit iron for credits (and vise versa). Then you could spend those credits at any shop sign. The credits were not carried around, but held in a virtual bank. There was no need to carry anything around to shop. I'm sure SK had his own shop sign mod running, or at least modified one to add the extra map pad features that were available.
So essentially the same thing you've been advocating since the OP? Because that sounds simple enough.
Yep, but with something other than iron anchoring the currency. My hope was that a simple enough solution would get some admin support.
The shop signs didn't require that you use the currency either. You could setup bartering stations with it, though most people used the currency because it was more convenient. On another note, I was thinking about writing a mod that adds "buy/sell pipes." You can pump items into the market at a given price with a "sell pipe," and someone with a "buy pipe" with a set given price will constantly purchase inventory as long as the market price is at or less than the set price (and before a possible set limit is reached, and as long as there are funds, etc.). To discourage someone from automatically buying items at a lower price and instantly reselling them at a higher price, a fractional transaction fee can be added for each item. This solves a major problem with promoting trade in a modded server compared to a vanilla server: items are needed in much larger quantities. There's little reason to specialize heavily in the mass production of any given item because no one will want to constantly go to the market to purchase more quantities of your product (it is much easier for someone to rebuild the entire production chain at his or her own base). That said, I haven't thought of any items that someone would want to mass produce and sell yet. The major worry is if someone discovers a major exploit and distributes duplicated items across the market really quickly, which means we'd have to track down all the illegal contraband to destroy it all. We could, however, forego a global market and have buy/sell pipes individually connected between specific sellers and buyers; it wouldn't entirely fix the problem, but it would delay its impact.
OMG This! It solves the problem of massive trades. I was trading full 64k Storage cells of coal and wood, daily, on 1.4 just to make ITNT for people to buy. No one else was really specializing in it and ITNT was required to make iridium so everyone needed it. I was trading the ITNT primarily for redstone and rubies because I used it to make chrome. Half my shop was Trade-o-mats dedicated to selling ITNT for various different products because not everyone wanted to trade their redstone or rubies. My major worry about the pipes is the ability to buy and sell without players having to leave their bases. I am in agreement with Glitch about the easy mode portals, and I think that by allowing players to trade vast quantities without some kind of cost is over powered. Either players should still have to go to a central trading post to trade or the transaction fee should have a distance and quantity calculation, or both. But having a way for players to trade their commodities in small to enormous quantities is still a good thing. EDIT: My Chrome block count shortly before I stopping playing in May That's over 9000 ingots.
The pipe idea is really cool, but I would have to agree with Buttons that trading easily without leaving ones base seems like a bit much. Maybe something like a pipe addon for a shop machine would work? That way players that wanted to load up on an item could pipe it out into an item tesseract or something. Back when we were talking about a player built, centrally run trading network, one idea was to use AE as storage. How cool would it be if trade stations had AE drive space for sellers, and an input slot for buyers. Players could come into a shop carrying an empty 16k drive and put all their purchases on it.
You can kinda do that with AE hooked up to Trade-o-Mats. That was my plan with the scrap>credit idea. AE can interface with the Trade-o-mat like a normal player. Export bus on the top and Import bus on the side or bottom. The Trade-o-mat will exchange the items at 1 trade/sec. It's slow but handy for really large trades. And you can setup multiple Trade-o-mats attached to Enderchests. The Enderchests are supplied by a seperate AE system with level emitters to keep the Enderchest from over filling.
