Believe me when i say that the moderators don't want to intervene in the market. If sk could set up a currency system that'd be great, but to rely on it when shit goes to hell would be bad. I mean, what if someone discovers an exploit? the market would inflate without being able to recover from it because nobody can log all the trades made (well, can, but...) to rewind. With a simple exchange for a block there is no other risk involved and the market would be only regulated by the players. I see your point for a currency, but the possibility of an exploit and that moderators would have to maintain it are going to cause problems.
Some one could find an exploit with trade-o-mats and empty them out too. The beauty of a sign shop based system is that if there is a problem, the only thing a mod would need to do is remove a couple of ATM signs at spawn to "protect" the currency. If someone did use an exploit to raid a bunch of shops, well shit happens. The bazaar was built on unprotected land and we had very few problems with players trashing things. Few players want to get banned. I did a quick check, and the some of the sign shop mods do have logging built in. A player could still use and exploit and quickly flood the market with money, but would get the ban hammer for it.
I am pretty sure there were SK coins back on some version of Alice, but it wasn't well known though :3 Yea, of course there ARE thousands of things to trade but the most COMMON things I see being trade are precious metals and Iridium. Those are seriously our "currency"
The same could be said for bugs at the core of MC i.e. duping. POPQUIZ: According to the rules, what happens when you hack/exploit? Back on-topic, this currency concept for the economy still sounds appealing but there were complications last time there was talk of it so hopefully it'll be resolved this time around
Having a currency is great because setting prices and trading is much, much easier. The difficulty for Alice, though, has been choosing an item to base the currency on. A few people have brought up currency for Alice before, but because a lot of people are not familiar with basic Econ 101 concepts, the threads just have become "explaining the basic concepts to the other half." Amber Bearing Stone was used for some quest line in 1.4 due to its inability to be easily mined en-mass, so perhaps we could use that. On Vincent though, because we used a critical item in a lot of recipes (iron ingots), it kept inflation under control as ingots would disappear from the money supply over time. Does Amber Bearing Stone have that property? The bazaar wasn't kept closed because of non-working trade-o-mats. We added trading booths. Worrying about exploits is silly. An exploit can occur in a machine, in a recipe, and in a dozen other different places, and it can have a massive impact whether there's a currency system or not. There's no reason the currency system would add much more risk.
We were discussing this on TS just now, and our idea is: Keep the barter system, but with a standard trade rate of item:item. For example, 4 Charcoal : 1 Coal is the value in a generator. There could also be a rate on how many ore blocks of said material per chunk, averaged, mixed in with that. The problem there, is the artificial items, like Iridium or Solar Panels. I'm not gonna lie, I despise currency. I have always been in favor of the barter system, and it seems to work very well on Alice.
GOD Damn it, I missed the TS chat T_T Anyways, back on topic. Glitchy you ignored the fact that I said people are lazy and is too lazy to mine. Of course, using something that is not easily producible is good, but, like I already said, we already have stuff like Iridium and electrum and what nots. The price and item change as people advance in the game and people are usually pretty honest in what and how much they can produce. So like I said, we don't need a new "currency"
So it's the question of how to distribute ... which could be done dynamically, kinda like bitcoin. Let's say the server starts and everyone begins mining and stuff, doing what they do. On day one, they can exchange diamonds by asking a moderator with a 1:1 ratio. The next day with a 2:1 ratio, so 2 diamonds for 1 credit or whatever. Day 3 it'd be 4 diamonds and so on ... until it'd be impossible to keep up with the diamond ratio, or maybe make it cap whenever. (this is just an example) Now the people who buy credits but lose diamonds on the first couple days so they don't progress that fast, so it's kind of fair, i guess, and loads of people would want them so it'd be distributed among many. Now when people join later they can sell their wares on the marketplace to achieve credits from the users who have them. I also propose to use a digital system so moderators have logs and can flush the credits out of people who hoard them and go missing. With an actual block/item as currency you'd have no control of who has how much. BUT. This needs people who look after it, so idk if you'd wanna do that, sk.
I kind of like madness's idea, but instead of raising the cost each day, how about by the amount of credits exchanged, so that 1st credit equals 1 diamond and 3rd credit equals 3 diamonds and eventually the price jumps at something like your 10th credit and starts doubling for the next credit. To exchange for later credits, maybe the material used to exchange can br changed into iridium or something
Unfortunately it's not as heavily used as I'd like. Something like nether quartz ore would be much better (used in tons of recipes, and as a building material), but MFR's laser drill is a problem. There is no "blacklist" for laser drill item output, and the mod is closed source. It probably would not be to hard to modify the jar, but it would have to be tweaked whenever the mod is updated, and that would be a pain. Madness's idea is not terrible, but implementing it would be a chore for the admins to implement. Also, unless new injections of currency are made regularly deflation will kick in. Money gets trapped by hoarders (those "I must be the richest player on the server" people), so keeping it simple and tying the currency to a more or less stable item makes more sense.
I think you may have misunderstood me when we were on TS... I said that AE is closed source. MFR is open and is avaliable here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...ded-powercrystalscore-and-netherores-updated/
Nice. That makes item selection much easier since the laser drill is the only major machine that automates silk touch.
That would make it a centrally planned economy, which is not inherently bad, but there were over 10,000 items on Alice 1.5. No one has the time to set prices for even a bulk of those items, especially as the prices would have to be adjusted every day because value is not something, contrary to what many people think, intrinsically static. It varies over time according to the desirability of an item (demand) and its availability (supply). It is completely irrelevant what the percentage of coal in your average chunk is like if someone is giving it away or if many people are needing it. Currency has developed over time because it significantly reduces the cost of trade. For example, I would not accept a job with a payment of cows, because I do not want cows, nor do I want to try to convince my next buyer to take my cows. Cash is much easier to work with. Searching around for "cow to pig" converters or figuring out how many bushels of wheat a Ferrari costs is something that makes trade more difficult. Barter does not make trade impossible, but it does not promote it. That's why we should have a currency. Picking one is another matter though, as there are some very desirable properties to aim for that are hard to find in an actual implementation. The chosen currency should not deflate over time. Deflation means that the value of the money grows over time. If I knew my money was going to be worth more tomorrow, I would not spend it, nor would many other people. This means that trade is at a standstill. The chosen currency should not be subject to high inflation. Inflation is when the value of money decreases over time. Too much inflation means I have to worry all the time about the value of my money, and if I'm gone from the server for a few days, I may become poor. A small level of inflation should be present in the currency. We always want some inflation because it encourages trade between players. Otherwise, many people would just horde their money. The currency should be highly divisible.* If the lowest unit of currency is something of extremely high value, it is very difficult to use the money to buy smaller things. I could buy 200 headphones with my 1 unit of currency, but because I don't need 200 headphones, I probably just won't buy anything. The currency should be accessible to most players. If someone has to go out of their way to obtain the currency, then it's going to negatively impact their gameplay because they are having to do something that they weren't enjoying to begin with. With that in mind, because we're playing a game, we have a few advantages that can help in choosing a currency. People stop playing, which will reduce the money supply. Whatever money they have will become inaccessible to other players, so it just disappears entirely from the server. With all other things held equal, this would result in deflation (or reduced inflation) because the left over money still in circulation is now worth more. We can enforce certain conditions with code. In real life, the only thing that can keep a system in check is itself, but here we can cheat. Capitalism "works" (mostly) because one person's greed helps keeps other people's greed in check (at least it tries it best). On Vincent, our old vanilla survival server, iron ingots served its purpose very well. While the ingots themselves were not the currency, it was the means by which you obtained the currency. People had to use the iron for a bunch of recipes. That mean that kept the money supply in check, prevented deflation, and also added a little inflation. Everyone needed iron. Everyone found iron. It was a very accessible currency. Everyone had many iron ingots, so 1 iron ingot could easily buy very cheap items. Ideally, the currency that we chose would consider a number of factors: The amount of (enjoyable) time that you put into the server, relative to the amount of free time that you have available. The amount of "fun" that you helped add to everyone else's experience. However, translating that information into value is not straight forward. Iron on Vincent had somewhat a decent correlation with the amount of time you put in. Now, we do not have to base the currency off an item as we had done in Vincent, but items have always showed the most promise. Other approaches that have been suggested bring their own problems: If a certain amount of money is injected once, such as at the initial world start, the money supply would only lower over time as people left the server. Over time, deflation would occur as each unit of currency became rarer. If everyone receives a set amount of money when they first join, this would lead to inflation. For example, If I sold a matter fab for 200 units of currency, and a newcomer received 200 units of currency for free, I would not continue to sell that matter fabricator for the same price. Everyone else and I would raise the price of that matter fabricator; therefore, those 200 units of currency lower in value. If a moderator judges "the worthiness" of each member and provides money accordingly, this would likely result in a very unfair and inconsistent system. A computer system could perform the duties of the moderator to ensure consistency, but this would be very difficult to program and I can't see this being worth the effort. So far, sticking to items and using the Amber Bearing Stones seems like the best route, but in comparison to iron ingots on Vincent, it has a number of problems that have been already mentioned. *It is possible to use a fractional amount of currency. However, this is generally harder for people to grasp and the code would have to be made aware of fractions.
OH! How about this: We have this "machine" that turns Silked Amber into this "special" Amber which can be used back in the recipes AND for trading? :3 YES I AM A GENIUS LOLZ JK JK Still thought, I think the currency is unneccessary..just to get that into your head
God damn it SK! Edit 1: I love how AFK89q took the time to write that...Not sure if no life or SUPER DUPER UBER FLUTTER BUTTER PRO(See what I did there :3) Anyways, we can totally have our currency Japanese style and instead of having cents and dimes we can have dollars and tens, so I am not quite sure what sk is really concerned about. To modify the "machine" that I took 2 seconds to invent earlier, maybe 1 silk amber would equal more than 1 amber when put into the machine to encourage people to use it AND get more money around SINCE there is a huge span in value and tradable items Regarding the issues with price changes due to automation: The changing of price is normal since some people ARE faster in the game and I think it IS quite fair since competition is healthy. Maybe some people can't afford to sell..let's say diamonds... for a lower price. I guess they just have to wait for the peeps with lower price to sell out when it gets to him OR he go and work on something else(for example, tungsten). Then he might eventually become the best supplier of tungsten and people that can't out compete him goes and work on something else. HEALTHY TRADE CYCLE (hope that was not too confusing and you get the wrong idea) Stll, I think currency is still unneccessary due to the fact that only so many things ARE getting trade and is usually involved in 99% of trades Edit 2: Not only that, there are also people(Moi!), that stops general trading(stops shopping at and maintaining shops) after a while(for me? around 2-3 week0s,others might be longer) and since the only thing we need left is Iridium, everything else is automated.
We don't want the numbers to get too high. This was actually discussed when we were deciding the currency for Vincent. We also discussed whether the exchange rate should be a multiple of 8 because stack sizes max at 64, but eventually we decided on 1:10 because it was easier to to do mental math with multiples with 10. It's not a dichotomy of "trade happens" or "trade doesn't happen." It's either we have the current level of trades, or we could have theoretically way more. I personally didn't bother with trading much because I couldn't be arsed trying to figure out trade ratios and setting up shops.
I am wondering if anyone here has remembered the coins that ic2 has given us. Not really sure about an official way of obtaining them but there is a set of different denomination coins right under our noses
Any of the silk touch only items would work, so we actually have a pretty wide range of items to choose from. The item need not be set in stone though. If we started with amber bearing stone, but it proved to rare to maintain a healthy money supply, switching items would be easy. I still like nether quarts. It's fairly common, but does require working in the nether. The best thing about nether quarts is the shear number of recipes that use it (my count puts it at over 40). It also makes a nice building material, so if inflation becomes a problem, a quartz housing boom should set things right. The colosseum may have been built with limestone and cement, but my version will be all marble.
