Recently a number of topics regarding chunk pricing and the shop have arisen. The chunk prices have come down as a result (though perhaps not far enough), though changes to the shop have not come due to the policy that anything that can be farmed with too much ease should not be accepted by the shop. Both issues however are merely opposite sides of a coin. . .

TL;DR:
The V6 economy is wrong, the requirements to gain money do not match with its value. The income to chunk price ratio needs to be such that players that play normally can build normally - but to facilitate this the way income works has to be revamped to encourage player engagement by rewarding diverse and active play, while discouraging mass farming as the primary income for all players. We don’t just need one change, we need a few changes that work  together to increase engagement and reduce player frustration. . .

The Meat:
Now I'm not going to disagree with the premise of buying chunks, part of what makes Noobs town a good server is that there are heavy restrictions on what people can build where.  It makes it hard for people to cause trouble, and very much easier to police those who are.  However it causes problems for anyone who wants to build something big and grand.

I would contest that while the pay to build system is needed, it also breaks many of the core mechanics of Minecraft -- and that's the game we are here to play.  To balance that it is important that other mechanics are in place to mitigate the problems without causing more.  Unfortunately I do not think that V6 Noobs is doing this.

Now from reading a number of posts the intent of the admins is clear -- we want active players working toward long-term goals, and we want the V6 world to last.  Those are admirable goals, but unless they expect players to be online 8 hours a day for months that's not what this system is going to get- instead players will burn out.

Minecraft is a great many things -- Building, destroying, fighting, farming, mining, and crafting.  The current setup isn't conducive to most of those things.  Building is a pain if you don't have the land to build in, and aside from mining all the others are rather unrewarding. The problem is not just with the chunk prices but also with the relative lack of income sources. Counter to what seems reasonable to any minecraft player the most profitable materiel in the server is. . . Cobblestone. I can actually make far more money mindlessly mining stone while watching Family Guy on Netflix than I can by farming (plants or animals) or fighting monsters. Tell me that's not a little counter-intuitive. Sure it means I'm on the server all the time, but is that really the kind of "active" we are looking for?

Now I have seen the arguments against using such things as a means to accumulate noobs -- they can produce so many noobs so fast that players who set up massive farms can become unbelievably wealthy.  So for V6 the ability to sell such things has been removed. Problem is the chunk prices still reflect an economy where I can sit AFK while an autonomous cactus/sugar farm fills chests (yay hoppers!) full of money.  The hope is that players will use the auction (or P2P economy in general) to make money. But we run into a problem -- most people don't want to play stock market simulator.  I sure don't.  Maybe I could play the market game, farm goods and sell it to the masses, buy up items and resell at higher prices, but I don't want to play that game -- I want to play Minecraft.  I think many players agree.

Chunky is here to prevent obnoxious play, and the limited market is here to prevent autonomous play. . .  But what we need is something that promotes normal play.  People who mine normally, farm normally, build normally. And in exchange they need to be able to expand normally.

So how can we reward players for playing the game instead of the plugins? Well for one reward diverse play, let us sell almost anything, but limit how much of a given thing can be sold at a given price over a time period.  For instance, if every stack of cobble is worth 5% less than the last (to a minimum), and becomes worth 5% more every hour (to a maximum) then I can't just sell a bunch of cobble and call it a day.  If this is true for almost all items then if I farm them all a little then I can make more than farming one a lot. This also mean that if you do want to mass farm a specific item then you will have a bigger customer base -- most players will not be mass farming, thus when they need a big supply of something they are more likely to pay a premium (not to mention they should have more money and can afford it).

Furthermore wages for active play could be implemented. Based on MCMMO levels (with some skills weighted higher or lower) every hour of active (not just non-AFK, but significant levels of movement and interaction) would gain you a wage.  This way even if you aren't farming at the moment you can still make money by being active based on your previous effort.  The idea here is that MCMMO can be used to track active play in a number of situations (lower weight on those skills, such as acrobatics, that are easy to farm) and could thus be used as a way to reward monetarily for not just playing but engaging in the game.

On the flip side there is the matter of the chunks.  The price there needs to be balanced such that the income of an active player farming and leveling skills reasonably can unlock chunks at a high enough rate to build without feeling imposed upon to do unreasonable levels of farming to gain land.  In a normal game of Minecraft as the game progresses there will be a gain in excess resources that grows continuously -- the resources required to survive and build are often dwarfed by what the player can gather.  As long as burning that excess is all that is required (with minimal need to play the market game) to have the land the player wants then the balance is optimal.  Any lower a price and people will expand farther than reasonable (read: farther than they can fill will cool structures) and any higher and the player will be frustrated and will lose interest.

All this to say that the V6 economy is still wrong, the requirements to gain money do not match with its value.  The income to chunk price ratio needs to be such that players that play normally can build normally - but to facilitate this the way income works has to be revamped to encourage player engagement.

I see both sides of this. On zeel's side, I agree with him that the wild chunks are quite pricy and that will drive many people away from living in the wild and instead be driven towards towns (I'm not complaining there though, soon to be a mayor myself). However, this will help decrease the load on the wild world and keep it from being overloaded with people. On Cite's side, he is right in saying that there are a few who mass farm/mine/cut wood, etc., but it is still extremely hard for players who spend a fair amount (but not a ton) of time on the server to make a living on the server. In order to be successful, you have to spend EXORBANT amounts of time on the server, which most people don't have. In V5, it was much easier to make at least a little bit of a living. I'm pretty torn on it, but I would say I'm leaning towards zeel. I think that 2,000,000 Nbz is still an insane amount of money for 1 chunk, even if it is your 40th/50th chunk. That is almost 2.5 times more than a town!

Cant you only have 50 chunks...?

Good post, but I have a number of remarks.

1. This server wants to be able to promote itself as an economy server. So even if you don't want to play the stock market game, it is part of an economy server. Don't like it, then this isn't the server for you.

2. A lot of people here love to grind, and grind a LOT. Whether it be mining, woodcutting or anything, they will spend hours on day to level the skill they like and earn money that way. If you revamp the income in the way you want it to, you are essentially punishing these people for the sheer amount of time they put into this game. Even if you say that normal people won't do mass farming, and mass farmers can sell to these people, you also have to consider that normal people DON'T DO MASS BUILDING, and thus don't need these mass supplies. You can already see it with wood, where woodcutting grinders are stuck with 30 double chests of logs without people to sell it to.

TL;DR:
Your post is good, but you focus too much on the normal, average minecraft player and seem to forget this server is a survival/economy mcmmo server, and is promoting mcmmo grinding and the ability to play the market.

You are correct to an extent, as am I. A balance must be struck where many forms of play can be supported.

Real world economics are zero sum -- Everything (resources, land, the right to mine resources on/in/under land) is owned by someone. We then use currency (anything that has very little or no inherit value, but a high prescribed value) to make all the trading simpler, but there is one pie and it's divided up among all people. Minecraft isn't like that: In SSP the economy is far more simple -- There is a pie of infinite size, and you own all of it; in CSP there is no pie, just an infinite expanse of assorted pie fillings.

In Noobs town the server keeps making new pies and throwing away old pies, and some kinds of pie are free and other kinds get more expensive the more of them you own. This system really helps nobody. The problem is of course that Minecraft is not designed to simulate zero sum economics, there is a theoretically infinite supply of resources available if you just look for them -- or just sit around repeating the same task over and over. Unfortunately for any server that wants to be an "economy server" this means acting like it's a zero sum economy is not going to work.

Auctions work because of scarcity (one pie), but in minecraft there is only one resource that has true scarcity -- time (and on a server, land). But auctions and to an extent all P2P economics are not good at preserving time, I probably can mine a chest of smooth stone faster and cheaper than waiting for the auction to end or another player to come online, sure sometimes a player might be able to make a good deal if they are luck but that's not a reliable business model. Plus it's equally easy for all player to accumulate resources if they so please, I can't make a good profit on pumpkins for instance because anyone who buys one of them can start farming them too, and could become competition (not the good kind, this isn't an innovative economy - competition means nobody is making any money).

The server shop provides a way to make some money without using the (broken) P2P system, but when faced with the prospect of increasing costs without increasing profits/income this is not a solution. And as we know simply being able to sell anything isn't either because there is an infinite supply of resources and some of them can be gotten too easily.


So what can be done? Well there are many (some not necessarily mutually exclusive) possibilities.

Forced zero sum - How most PVP servers operate, there is one world of finite size. This means that you can own anything you can defend, and if someone else wants it they pay for it or kill you. This is probably the most realistic - but also not what we are looking for.

Market pool - All resources can be sold too or purchased from a central market. The quantity of resources available is always the same as how much have been put in by players. Buying and selling of goods to the pool is at a equal rate (what I make from selling 10 stone is what you pay for buying 10 stone) based on supply. The more of an item in the pool the less it is worth (both to buy and sell), all resources trade at the same base value (diamonds are only worth more than stone if there is more stone available), price is only controlled by supply. This kind of thing can work but is easy to upset, mostly because again resources are theoretically infinite.

Don't try to be fair - Classic server shop system where everything can be purchased or sold at a set rate. It isn't fair at all but it tends to be easy for people to use, and it's highly intuitive. The opposite of a forced zero sum.

Be totally fair/extreme socialism/utopia - Everyone shares in everything and everyone is a great big happy family. This really only works on a small private server - and only with the right players.

Pay to play - Well I think we all know what this is, those with the greatest real world economic standing can buy a better virtual economic standing.

Paid to play - Make playing the game worth something, this is the hardest to implement and balance perhaps - but also possibly the most powerful. The idea is that instead of paying you for resources you are paid to obtain them, or paid to use them, or paid to build something neat. Getting paid to mine or farm is a simple matter of tying into MCMMO and using it to track that people are "doing things" and reward them accordingly. Being paid to build is harder, as I don't know how it would be implemented without direct moderator intervention (it would be easy to cheat without a human overseer).


There are of course other (many other) ways, but as with those listed there are drawbacks and bonuses to them all. Finding a balanced approach is the challenge.


Though on another note this is all mostly a problem because of the big money sink - chunks. Chunks are the only thing (at this point) that the server has and you can only get through some part of the economy system. You can't gather chunks like resources, instead you have to burn resources to get them. Problem is that there is only one reliable way to get the money. Guess what, if you are using the P2P economy guess where the other player got the cash? Cobblestone. Even if you are managing to pull off playing without farming stone the vast majority of players are. We could really just replace the currency with stone at this point since it has little inherit value but so much economic importance.

Also, right after the restart I noticed that Treefeller (Woodcutting skill) was nerfed so now it's impossible to chop down multiple trees with it, making it mostly useless (and this certainly devalues bonemeal, too).

Dont know what the issue is, I was able to fell more then 1 tree with treefeller activated.

I know how Treefeller works (it does consider all touching trees as one, that's why Treefeller was always considered OP), but now it's limited to 3 trees from what I can see.

It wasn't like this before the last restart.

If this is paving the way to have wood or saplings in the /shop this would at least make some sense, but I doubt that's going to happen.

This seems like a really silly complaint to me, you don't NEED to chop down 2x2 trees. It makes for far too easy and fast wood gathering. It still works perfectly fine with chopping down lots of trees if they're single-trees, as Dracomere's Spruce farm proves when I was doing Tree Feller on it even after woodcutting was lowered with 16 trees per floor I can chop down one-by-one in a row with Tree Feller just fine.

So don't go trying to say you "can't chop trees quickly", it's simply been brought down so people can't get an absurd amount of wood in a short amount of time. And it was absurd if you could get a double chest in just one tree feller. I think it's perfectly fine that we can't chop down 2x2 trees now. If I recall the higher your Tree Feller the less damage is done to your axe, so as you raise the skill you should be able to chop down the 2x2 over time again anyway. But then you would have worked hard for it and I wouldn't think it OP if you could get a dc in one swing.

I'll have to agree with Cite on this one. In most of the towns on v5, the largest plots you could get were 2x2 or so, with a few towns allowing 3x3 and 4x4's. You can do quite a bit with that size of a plot. Now my grief magnet wilderness complex was a massive 40x90 chunk behemoth, and while I miss the freedom to expand at will, I see no problem with the new system.

It means that I'll need to plan my expansion and builds a bit better, I'll have time to focus more on the finer deails of everything, and I finally don't need to worry about some knuckle dragger breaking in to have a look about while making a proper mess of everything.

Quote from: zeel01 on 25 Feb 2014, 01:28:01

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Just one quick reminder for the reason of the money sink that is chunks. I don't know if you've played last version, but we ended up with a bunch of people sitting on millions of noobz with nothing to spend it on. That's why they added a money sink like this to give these players more goals to work towards. So this hasn't really got much to do with the economy you keep bringing up, since everyone gets 10 plots free which is enough for a royally-sized house and everything you need to get started on the server.

Is too much money that big a problem though? I mean in a SSP world you will probably end up with far more of everything than you can use. It sounds like V5 players simply liquidated that.

But sure, I guess it's a problem in so far as you no longer really have anything to work for anymore. But as Darkwings points out a money sink is for dumping excess - the Wild chunks aren't a money sink though, their a pain in the back side. We need the chunky system to prevent the many problems inherent with fully open a free servers, we don't need that to make players who want to make buildings suffer.

And how is it not related to the economy? All anyone seems to be doing with money is buying land (or saving for towns), and 10 chunks is 3x3 area plus one. That's not really all that big in the grand scheme of things. Money flows through noobs town in a rather direct manor: in through cobble, out through chunks. This leaves builders unable to build, and anyone who likes gathering anything but stone out of a job.

Remember that Minecraft is a game of many things, and all players will want to play in their own way. The system as it is however only works well for people who like to mine like crazy for hours on end. If your a farmer you are out of luck. Like cutting down trees? Too bad. Want to build a private island resort in the middle of the ocean? Think again. None of those other things can be done reasonably. I don't want to play stock market simulator, and I certainly don't want to play stare at a stone tunnel for 4 hours a day too make a laughably low profit with diminishing return. No offence to anyone who does, but I thought I joined a server called Noobstown - a server about community. If I was wrong, and a more appropriate name would have been Noobsmine then I'm sorry for wasting your time.


P.S. I played in V4 (at least I think it was 4), it was far more to my liking back then - if a bit buggy.

The one who complained about the trees wasn't the OP and that is not the topic of this thread.
I mentioned the change in Treefeller only because it could have been relevant for the introduction of Woodcutting items in the /shop.

Get over with that please, else it will become a strawman argument.

Zeel01 nailed the problem on its head and I've yet to see an counter argument different from "then don't do it" or "it would be too easy".

The server never aimed to be plain vanilla MC. If you have to gather all you need by yourself then there's no use for the economy at all.


Alternative methods to gain money that don't involve mining for hours were listed.

From that list we don't have quests yet and everyone can see how mobs bounties are nowhere near being useful at the moment.

(I still have to test mobs near towns since there's been a crippling bug with towns chunks since the last server crash, but I guess it would be completely inferior to mining anyway while also being more risky)