Why do people think that there's some magical difference between a craftable currency and a non-craftable one? If you are able to derive currency from a sufficiently rare resource, it doesn't magically become less valuable when it's crafted.
As for your proposed systems, they seem to be missing the issue of inflation. If currency can be issued arbitrarily, then what value does it hold? Ops or the server can give me whatever currency I want, and it becomes functionally worthless. If currency is derived from gold then it takes time to obtain. Simply creating currency from nothing is equivalent to fiat currency, which is far more easily inflatable than a hard currency like gold. An easy way to subdivide gold results in a stable, reasonable currency which can not be upset by mod or server intervention.
^Yes. This. I think some people might be talking past each other here. Some people are thinking in terms of NPC shops and currency drops from mobs. But that is not true currency, but rather an incentive system (most multiplayer game currencies are incentive systems e.g. WoW, Everquest, etc. and they all see massive inflation.) But an -actual- honest to goodness currency would be, just as greenknight04 says, indistinguishable from any other resource, except that it would be designated as a medium of exchange.
Also, just to re-emphasize: infinite maps do not mean infinite resources. When you're playing Minecraft, despite the fact that the map is infinite, you don't have immediate access to all infinite resources. You still have to go and get stuff, which takes time and effort. Thus, at any one point in time, there are a finite amount of resources that you can access. In other words, Minecraft may be infinite, but scarcity is still an issue.
One thing that I think will make currency more desirable to those who don't currently feel a use for it are more Minecraft features such as more recipes, more mobs, etc. (as Notch seems to plan.) Currently in MP, there is a rather small selection of goods and services to render, so people will often rather do and find things themselves. With a greater array and variety of activities, people will be more inclined to speed things up by trading with one another.
There is no need for currency. It'd be a complete waste of Notch's time. If you all want to force an economy, use the gold that you already have - you don't need coins. Unless there's a 'drop x' option - wasting more of Notch's time - coins would be a huge pain anyway.
There is no need for currency. It'd be a complete waste of Notch's time. If you all want to force an economy, use the gold that you already have - you don't need coins. Unless there's a 'drop x' option - wasting more of Notch's time - coins would be a huge pain anyway.
One post up from you, lol. Explains how to implement currency without anything being added by Notch, without inflation issues.
Unless there's a 'drop x' option - wasting more of Notch's time - coins would be a huge pain anyway.
Isn't there already a "drop x" option? Pick up a stack of x resources from the inventory pane and drop it outside the inventory pane? But I mean, you're right in terms of people already being able do currency if they want. Although it would be convenient if you could split certain things further in order to allow for smaller transactions (it's admittedly a lower priority than, say, mobs, or anti-griefing, but I think we're all just talking here for our own amusement.)
Quote from FrostyWolf »
Explains how to implement currency without anything being added by Notch, without inflation issues.
I read your post. Everything seems pretty fine, except the bit about referencing a map tool to see how many resources exist in the map to determine pricing and exchange rates. The problem there is that the amount of gold/iron/diamond etc. in the map doesn't matter nearly as much as how much there are of those things in people's inventories. It's not that they don't matter at all, but the fact that there is a 2:1 ratio of gold to diamond in the server doesn't matter if, among all the people on the server, everyone has happened to find gold and nobody has diamond. In that case, 1 diamond is going to demand much more in terms of gold than 2. In fact, it will be either available to the highest bidder or too precious to consider trading. Engaging in price fixing just causes problems. Better to let people decide what their own personal exchange rates are based on what they need and what they have.
I would love a user adjustable smp mod for currency system if it's trade stuff for other crap or selling it for say a currency like crystal chips or something lol.
The diamond doesn't disappear when it comes from the store...it gets summoned. Consider it a out of country import. If players want to negotiate among them selves for trades cheaper then the store...theres nothing stopping them. I don't see why everyone things that implementing some kind of currency would stop the exchange of goods between players. Look at MMO's, all of them have stores, most of them have auction houses also, they both work together, and so does trading between players directly. The ratios would barely change from the initial start, unless under extreme circumstances. The whole point is, if there is twice as much gold as there is diamond, your would be finding two gold for every one diamond. Granted, it won't always work out that way, but it will most of the time given the scale, keeping things in check. Even if you some how managed to mine HALF the gold on a map, without touching diamond, the ratio would only go to 1:1. If it did become a problem, there is no reason why ratio's couldn't account for player inventories as well.
It's the best of both worlds. Those of you that don't want a currency, don't run the mod. Those of you that do, get all the benefits of a currency, with out Notch having to code anything extra.
If you really wanted a cool mod, player made shops, which are featured in some MMO's, would be awesome. A store made by a player, that would stay there even when they weren't. You can just throw up a "store block", put items in it, put your asking price in gold, log out. Other people could come by, click the block, and buy stuff. When you logged in, you can click your block, recover what did not sell and your gold.
EDIT: I added both the idea for player run shops and trading posts to that other topic at: viewtopic.php?f=25&t=27178
Trading posts, if they could be implemented, should be a suitable alternative to make people happy as well.
So thats now three different ways to implement some form of trading/currency/economy. I believe that there is a suitable options for all sides of the conversation there now.
I love your ideas about how barter economy is inefficient.
My server has it set up as such:
1. Private trade, between any two people, is simply handled by barter.
2. However, buying from the "city" will use a form of currency, which we (the leaders of our server) have yet to decide upon. By buying from the city, I largely just mean plots of land within the city itself...however, as we later gather many resources we will start selling materials and supplies, as well as buying them.
What do you think?
In the future of our city, I think this would work out. People work hard to get materials, which they sell either to us to get currency to buy land or various materials, or they can engage in barter, and get materials that might otherwise be too expensive to afford.
The ratios would barely change from the initial start, unless under extreme circumstances. The whole point is, if there is twice as much gold as there is diamond, your would be finding two gold for every one diamond. Granted, it won't always work out that way, but it will most of the time given the scale, keeping things in check. Even if you some how managed to mine HALF the gold on a map, without touching diamond, the ratio would only go to 1:1. If it did become a problem, there is no reason why ratio's couldn't account for player inventories as well.
What your original post said back on the other thread was that you're tying the in-store values for exchange to information gleaned off a map tool. The problem is, this deals with theoretical resources rather than actual resources. It would be better for the mod to just let each individual mod shop determine the rate of currency exchange, like in any real market. This allows flexibility for the millions of little adjustments that would go on in a player-run economy. You wouldn't always have twice as much gold as diamond in the economy, regardless of what is in the map. During some periods, gold extraction will outstrip diamond extraction and vice versa. And even if the mod ratio accounted for player inventories, you would have some players who were, let's say, holding on to some diamond to save up for a large project, and have no intention of trading it or exchanging it or whatever. The way any market works, people have individual valuations for each and every commodity depending upon what they have and their personal aims. Thus, one gold bar in Minecraft is worth a different amount to me than it would be to you, depending upon how many units of gold I have left, and what I plan to do with it. Likewise, imagine that I have fifty units of diamond. The first unit of diamond that I decide to trade is going to be worth a lot less than the fiftieth, regardless of any outside factors like how many units of diamond that there are in the server, or how many you have. This is why this aspect of exchange should be left up to individual traders rather than some hard and fast exchange rubric that fixes the rate: prices are subjective.
If someone mined half the gold on a map without touching a single diamond, the rate of exchange would certainly not be 1:1. Why, if all the sudden I found 1 diamond, I might decide that I wouldn't trade it for all the gold in the world, and I would be justified.
The diamond doesn't disappear when it comes from the store...it gets summoned.
I think this may have lost me on the idea. Are you saying that the store isn't actually a place for players to trade their goods, but that goods are essentially being transmuted into other goods? If so, that's not so much commerce as alchemy. What happens to the gold that you're turning in? That gets used up when the diamond gets summoned? That would cause eventual deflation, since your gold supply would diminish as everyone traded transmuted it into diamond. Then the price of everything in terms of gold would drop, causing constant price instability. For gold, or whatever people choose as a currency, to work as a medium of exchange, it needs to be just that - a medium of exchange, not a reagent with which to summon something out of thin air. (I think) I know that you're trying to have two currencies so that you can trade up and down like different denominations of a paper currency, but this is, in essence, similar to bimetallism. The problem with fixing the exchange rates between two scarce commodities is that whenever the commodity supplies (that is, what people have rather than what they could have) fluctuate in relationship to each other you have price instability, as everyone scrambles to figure out what things are really worth, regardless of the official exchange rate (c.f. America in the late 1800s.)
The ratios would barely change from the initial start, unless under extreme circumstances. The whole point is, if there is twice as much gold as there is diamond, your would be finding two gold for every one diamond. Granted, it won't always work out that way, but it will most of the time given the scale, keeping things in check. Even if you some how managed to mine HALF the gold on a map, without touching diamond, the ratio would only go to 1:1. If it did become a problem, there is no reason why ratio's couldn't account for player inventories as well.
What your original post said back on the other thread was that you're tying the in-store values for exchange to information gleaned off a map tool. The problem is, this deals with theoretical resources rather than actual resources. It would be better for the mod to just let each individual mod shop determine the rate of currency exchange, like in any real market. This allows flexibility for the millions of little adjustments that would go on in a player-run economy. You wouldn't always have twice as much gold as diamond in the economy, regardless of what is in the map. During some periods, gold extraction will outstrip diamond extraction and vice versa. And even if the mod ratio accounted for player inventories, you would have some players who were, let's say, holding on to some diamond to save up for a large project, and have no intention of trading it or exchanging it or whatever. The way any market works, people have individual valuations for each and every commodity depending upon what they have and their personal aims. Thus, one gold bar in Minecraft is worth a different amount to me than it would be to you, depending upon how many units of gold I have left, and what I plan to do with it. Likewise, imagine that I have fifty units of diamond. The first unit of diamond that I decide to trade is going to be worth a lot less than the fiftieth, regardless of any outside factors like how many units of diamond that there are in the server, or how many you have. This is why this aspect of exchange should be left up to individual traders rather than some hard and fast exchange rubric that fixes the rate: prices are subjective.
If someone mined half the gold on a map without touching a single diamond, the rate of exchange would certainly not be 1:1. Why, if all the sudden I found 1 diamond, I might decide that I wouldn't trade it for all the gold in the world, and I would be justified.
The diamond doesn't disappear when it comes from the store...it gets summoned.
I think this may have lost me on the idea. Are you saying that the store isn't actually a place for players to trade their goods, but that goods are essentially being transmuted into other goods? If so, that's not so much commerce as alchemy. What happens to the gold that you're turning in? That gets used up when the diamond gets summoned? That would cause eventual deflation, since your gold supply would diminish as everyone traded transmuted it into diamond. Then the price of everything in terms of gold would drop, causing constant price instability. For gold, or whatever people choose as a currency, to work as a medium of exchange, it needs to be just that - a medium of exchange, not a reagent with which to summon something out of thin air. (I think) I know that you're trying to have two currencies so that you can trade up and down like different denominations of a paper currency, but this is, in essence, similar to bimetallism. The problem with fixing the exchange rates between two scarce commodities is that whenever the commodity supplies (that is, what people have rather than what they could have) fluctuate in relationship to each other you have price instability, as everyone scrambles to figure out what things are really worth, regardless of the official exchange rate (c.f. America in the late 1800s.)
Except...this is minecraft, not a real place. The trading for currency that magically disappears and makes goods appear from no where is a staple of every RPG or game with a store in it. You are trying to apply real world logic to a video game. Gold is not easy to find. When you do find it, it is mostly worthless. All my store idea does is give a use for gold. If players run out of gold, they could just farm materials themselves....what they where doing in the first place when they stumbled on some gold. When gold 'ran out', diamond and most of the other rare materials would already be in short supply as well...it would be time to move on and expand the map. You confusing the store ratios, which are mostly unchanging, to the games current supply and demand. These are two different things. Take WoW for instance. NPC store prices don't fluctuate with Auction house prices, these are two separate things.
The ideas I am offering are based of off what has worked in video games for a long time...they will not translate to a proper real life economy.
If you wanted to get picky about it, you could make the store have a stock, based off of what exists in say, player inventories, to give it a more supply/demand feel. With some ironing out you could work it in properly, but thats not what the idea is for. You would mostly likely like the player run trading post idea.
Except...this is minecraft, not a real place. The trading for currency that magically disappears and makes goods appear from no where is a staple of every RPG or game with a store in it. You are trying to apply real world logic to a video game.
In this case, though, the real world logic still applies in regards to inflation, fluctuating prices, etc. since there are multiple actors involved and a limited amount of time and supply. In a single player RPG, coins or whatever are used as an incentive, which is what you, and I guess other people here are talking about. You collect money in order to buy new perks and abilities, furthering you towards the end of the game. In a single player RPG, the entire world isn't a resource as much as series of challenges.
For multiplayer games, it's a bit more complicated. WoW, the example you used, has constant inflation because it has an incentive system rather than a currency system. Also, since the mats in that game are constantly outmoded by new and better mats with each patch, no player-made store of value has emerged. If you stopped playing WoW before Burning Crusade and came back for Cataclysm, you'd find that the gold you'd amassed was not worth so much in comparison to what people are trading for now. I like to think that if I logged off of a Minecraft server with a ton of diamond and then logged back in a year later, that diamond would still be attractive in a trade. For a pay service like WoW, this is great for the developers because it gets people to have to constantly log into the game to acquire more gold (or whatever; I've been off WoW for a while. My friend tells me that the end game currency has more or less changed to dungeon tokens or something.) I like to think Minecraft won't come to that.
Quote from FrostyWolf »
Take WoW for instance. NPC store prices don't fluctuate with Auction house prices, these are two separate things.
But, in WoW, NPC stores that use gold as currency are mostly useless, precisely because their goods and prices don't change. Like, have you ever gone into Orgrimmar or Stormwind and decided to shop at one of the stores for a gun or whatever? They're charging like 10 gold for white items. And sometimes, this leads to weird exploits too. Like for instance, there was one point in BC where cloth was trading so cheap on the auction house (because, even though it's a video game, tons of people were getting tons of it, flooding the supply) that you could turn around, turn that cloth into bandages, and sell the bandages to an NPC vendor for more than you paid for the cloth.
Don't get me wrong. Now I understand what you're going for, and I'm not trying to be the jerk who shoots down your idea. Basically, you're trying to make gold a wild card resource. I'm just saying that even then, because different people are going to mine at different rates and value things at different levels, that a static exchange ratio is just going to lead people to overvalue or undervalue x resource. Because even though it's just a video game, people are still going to pursue their own goals in it and value their own time in it.
Although, if gold is going to be a wild card resource because you feel gold is useless, why not just have a game mod that turns all the server's gold ore into diamond ore for you? Then it would be valuable, and you could trade the diamond for other things. Not being smarmy, genuinely curious.
Okay, so far I think as basic barter system is fine, but I've thought about this for a while.
Let's say that money would not be craftable. Let's also say that each player has a set amount of money, and that money cannot be bought outside of the game. It would be completely optional to use it, and not necessary to play the game at all. People would be able to set up shops, and use it to buy (or even help their trading) or things. We should also go with that currency does not need to be made more of, as with every new user puts 1000 more cash into the existence. Whether it goes used or not, is up to them. If soemone runs out of gold, they have ways to replenish their supply, by selling things.
Like I said, if it sticks to the rules of not being able to be bought outside of the game (look at gaia online as an example of why we shouldn't do that) and it being entirely optional, and every user gets 1000 to work with, it should be fine, shouldn't it?
At the very least, I hope there's an actual trading system put into place eventually, if no currency is made.
Okay, so far I think as basic barter system is fine, but I've thought about this for a while.
Let's say that money would not be craftable. Let's also say that each player has a set amount of money, and that money cannot be bought outside of the game. It would be completely optional to use it, and not necessary to play the game at all. People would be able to set up shops, and use it to buy (or even help their trading) or things. We should also go with that currency does not need to be made more of, as with every new user puts 1000 more cash into the existence. Whether it goes used or not, is up to them. If soemone runs out of gold, they have ways to replenish their supply, by selling things.
Like I said, if it sticks to the rules of not being able to be bought outside of the game (look at gaia online as an example of why we shouldn't do that) and it being entirely optional, and every user gets 1000 to work with, it should be fine, shouldn't it?
At the very least, I hope there's an actual trading system put into place eventually, if no currency is made.
But that would become very stale, and one person could easily horde all the money, leaving nobody with any more money.
PLUS if nobody wants to buy or sell, the money will have no value whatsoever...
People are making some silly statements on here, and I'd like to point this out.
Craftable money means that money will be worthless. We should use barter instead.
That is a silly statement. You're telling me that because we can mine gold, any currency we make from gold will have no value... but we can mine diamonds, so why would a barter of 'want to trade diamonds for redstone' have any meaning? We can mind infinite diamonds too! And infinite redstone! Hell, there's infinite everything!!!!!
But that doesn't matter, because we have to put effort and time into acquiring these goods, just like we put effort and time into getting diamond, or wheat, or glass. All money, whether it's diamonds, gold coins, or imperial florps, is just a stand-in for work done. The more work we put in to acquire things, the more value they have. Diamonds are hard to obtain, so they're more valuable than coal, which is easy.
If a good was created called gold coins, that stacked to 1000 or took up no inventory space at all, all it does is facilitate trade by making it simpler to engage in barter... rather than bartering iron for wool, we're trading iron for coins, and then coins for wool. Yes, the coins may suffer inflation... but so could the wool! Or diamond! EVERY good on an infinite map can be overproduced, and there's no reason to believe that everyone would overproduce coins any more than they overproduced something else. That's how economies work.
Why would I want to give away iron for "Imperial florps"? Iron has a use. You can make tools with it. "Imperial florps" have no practical use. You cannot make imperial florp swords, nor imperial florp soup. The only value in imperial florps is the value that other people see in them. Suppose, one day, people realize that imperial florps are, in fact, useless, and decide to stop trading them. Suddenly, my florps are even more worthless. Adding currency is just adding another layer of complication and unstableness to bartering. Why do we even need it? We already have useless gold, why not barter with that and have your silly currency?
I've set up a rather simple, yet innovative, way of handling trade.
1. Private trade is handled by barter. People can trade for whatever they need with their next door neighbor for whatever THEY need.
2. Buying from the "government", or in this game the city coffers, costs something we've come to call Redstar.
ID 55. It's the redstone trail block itself, not the dust. This is handed out in small numbers to the OPs, while the city itself will hold most of it. We aren't able to fully implement it yet, as we can't really have a wallet for the city itself until we get chests, but once implemented it could allow for a more stable trade than bartering, albeit possibly more expensive.
Advantages: The mint retains its value, as long as the government doesn't go overboard creating Redstar
I do believe this is another point which hasn't been brought up. While I do like the idea of a currency, I think there would have to be better server-protection devices in play before it could be implimented. A player could hack himself a few stacks of cash, and quickly upset the value of purchesable products.
But, this next point is a side note. How would someone make sure everyone wanted money? If there was no way to enforce money's acceptance... then currency would be useless, not because it was plentiful, but because no one wanted it.
However ending with a positive point, I think every server would, at first, begin by using a barter system. But once it grew to a larger size players would most likely establish some form of currency on their own, without need of pre-established in-game cash.
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Mankind a sespit of hatred and lies! - Castlevania quote
Why would I want to give away iron for "Imperial florps"? Iron has a use. You can make tools with it. "Imperial florps" have no practical use. You cannot make imperial florp swords, nor imperial florp soup. The only value in imperial florps is the value that other people see in them. Suppose, one day, people realize that imperial florps are, in fact, useless, and decide to stop trading them. Suddenly, my florps are even more worthless. Adding currency is just adding another layer of complication and unstableness to bartering. Why do we even need it? We already have useless gold, why not barter with that and have your silly currency?
Do you understand currency? It's a fairly simple idea. It holds value in terms of exchange- on its own it's valueless, but merely is a stand-in for wealth in an exchange. It is the universal bartering tool.
Quote from Mataku »
<snip>
First of all, who the hell is Chequevara?
More importantly, your plan blunders into the same issue as most of the other ones here- price fixing. Let me say this again, in big letters this time.
PRICE FIXING IS A BAD IDEA
Seriously. Setting prices denies their active market value. No government or active player can set a price as well as the given exchange of goods between two individuals, because price is relative per exchange. If you start saying "THIS IS WORTH THIS MUCH" then people are undercharged or overcharged, because price isn't a flat thing- it's a function of how much you or I value it.
I think tradeing is a good currancy. But If we don't have a real curancy then Gold is both useless and valueless. Inorder for us to have a curancy we would have to have a system of goverment. I think Goverment would make Minecraft Gay and stupid.
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They don't surve breakfast in Hell due to the lack of bread.
^Yes. This. I think some people might be talking past each other here. Some people are thinking in terms of NPC shops and currency drops from mobs. But that is not true currency, but rather an incentive system (most multiplayer game currencies are incentive systems e.g. WoW, Everquest, etc. and they all see massive inflation.) But an -actual- honest to goodness currency would be, just as greenknight04 says, indistinguishable from any other resource, except that it would be designated as a medium of exchange.
Also, just to re-emphasize: infinite maps do not mean infinite resources. When you're playing Minecraft, despite the fact that the map is infinite, you don't have immediate access to all infinite resources. You still have to go and get stuff, which takes time and effort. Thus, at any one point in time, there are a finite amount of resources that you can access. In other words, Minecraft may be infinite, but scarcity is still an issue.
One thing that I think will make currency more desirable to those who don't currently feel a use for it are more Minecraft features such as more recipes, more mobs, etc. (as Notch seems to plan.) Currently in MP, there is a rather small selection of goods and services to render, so people will often rather do and find things themselves. With a greater array and variety of activities, people will be more inclined to speed things up by trading with one another.
I posted this idea a while ago.
It handles currency with already in game gold, and explains how to use block ratios to prevent inflation while keeping prices fair.
Everyone kinda just ignored it, so I figured no one cared *shrug*
I would still love to see it made as a mod, it would be fantastic.
One post up from you, lol. Explains how to implement currency without anything being added by Notch, without inflation issues.
Isn't there already a "drop x" option? Pick up a stack of x resources from the inventory pane and drop it outside the inventory pane? But I mean, you're right in terms of people already being able do currency if they want. Although it would be convenient if you could split certain things further in order to allow for smaller transactions (it's admittedly a lower priority than, say, mobs, or anti-griefing, but I think we're all just talking here for our own amusement.)
I read your post. Everything seems pretty fine, except the bit about referencing a map tool to see how many resources exist in the map to determine pricing and exchange rates. The problem there is that the amount of gold/iron/diamond etc. in the map doesn't matter nearly as much as how much there are of those things in people's inventories. It's not that they don't matter at all, but the fact that there is a 2:1 ratio of gold to diamond in the server doesn't matter if, among all the people on the server, everyone has happened to find gold and nobody has diamond. In that case, 1 diamond is going to demand much more in terms of gold than 2. In fact, it will be either available to the highest bidder or too precious to consider trading. Engaging in price fixing just causes problems. Better to let people decide what their own personal exchange rates are based on what they need and what they have.
Check out my Let's Play Series:
It's the best of both worlds. Those of you that don't want a currency, don't run the mod. Those of you that do, get all the benefits of a currency, with out Notch having to code anything extra.
If you really wanted a cool mod, player made shops, which are featured in some MMO's, would be awesome. A store made by a player, that would stay there even when they weren't. You can just throw up a "store block", put items in it, put your asking price in gold, log out. Other people could come by, click the block, and buy stuff. When you logged in, you can click your block, recover what did not sell and your gold.
EDIT: I added both the idea for player run shops and trading posts to that other topic at:
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=27178
Trading posts, if they could be implemented, should be a suitable alternative to make people happy as well.
So thats now three different ways to implement some form of trading/currency/economy. I believe that there is a suitable options for all sides of the conversation there now.
I love your ideas about how barter economy is inefficient.
My server has it set up as such:
1. Private trade, between any two people, is simply handled by barter.
2. However, buying from the "city" will use a form of currency, which we (the leaders of our server) have yet to decide upon. By buying from the city, I largely just mean plots of land within the city itself...however, as we later gather many resources we will start selling materials and supplies, as well as buying them.
What do you think?
In the future of our city, I think this would work out. People work hard to get materials, which they sell either to us to get currency to buy land or various materials, or they can engage in barter, and get materials that might otherwise be too expensive to afford.
What your original post said back on the other thread was that you're tying the in-store values for exchange to information gleaned off a map tool. The problem is, this deals with theoretical resources rather than actual resources. It would be better for the mod to just let each individual mod shop determine the rate of currency exchange, like in any real market. This allows flexibility for the millions of little adjustments that would go on in a player-run economy. You wouldn't always have twice as much gold as diamond in the economy, regardless of what is in the map. During some periods, gold extraction will outstrip diamond extraction and vice versa. And even if the mod ratio accounted for player inventories, you would have some players who were, let's say, holding on to some diamond to save up for a large project, and have no intention of trading it or exchanging it or whatever. The way any market works, people have individual valuations for each and every commodity depending upon what they have and their personal aims. Thus, one gold bar in Minecraft is worth a different amount to me than it would be to you, depending upon how many units of gold I have left, and what I plan to do with it. Likewise, imagine that I have fifty units of diamond. The first unit of diamond that I decide to trade is going to be worth a lot less than the fiftieth, regardless of any outside factors like how many units of diamond that there are in the server, or how many you have. This is why this aspect of exchange should be left up to individual traders rather than some hard and fast exchange rubric that fixes the rate: prices are subjective.
If someone mined half the gold on a map without touching a single diamond, the rate of exchange would certainly not be 1:1. Why, if all the sudden I found 1 diamond, I might decide that I wouldn't trade it for all the gold in the world, and I would be justified.
I think this may have lost me on the idea. Are you saying that the store isn't actually a place for players to trade their goods, but that goods are essentially being transmuted into other goods? If so, that's not so much commerce as alchemy. What happens to the gold that you're turning in? That gets used up when the diamond gets summoned? That would cause eventual deflation, since your gold supply would diminish as everyone
tradedtransmuted it into diamond. Then the price of everything in terms of gold would drop, causing constant price instability. For gold, or whatever people choose as a currency, to work as a medium of exchange, it needs to be just that - a medium of exchange, not a reagent with which to summon something out of thin air. (I think) I know that you're trying to have two currencies so that you can trade up and down like different denominations of a paper currency, but this is, in essence, similar to bimetallism. The problem with fixing the exchange rates between two scarce commodities is that whenever the commodity supplies (that is, what people have rather than what they could have) fluctuate in relationship to each other you have price instability, as everyone scrambles to figure out what things are really worth, regardless of the official exchange rate (c.f. America in the late 1800s.)Except...this is minecraft, not a real place. The trading for currency that magically disappears and makes goods appear from no where is a staple of every RPG or game with a store in it. You are trying to apply real world logic to a video game. Gold is not easy to find. When you do find it, it is mostly worthless. All my store idea does is give a use for gold. If players run out of gold, they could just farm materials themselves....what they where doing in the first place when they stumbled on some gold. When gold 'ran out', diamond and most of the other rare materials would already be in short supply as well...it would be time to move on and expand the map. You confusing the store ratios, which are mostly unchanging, to the games current supply and demand. These are two different things. Take WoW for instance. NPC store prices don't fluctuate with Auction house prices, these are two separate things.
The ideas I am offering are based of off what has worked in video games for a long time...they will not translate to a proper real life economy.
If you wanted to get picky about it, you could make the store have a stock, based off of what exists in say, player inventories, to give it a more supply/demand feel. With some ironing out you could work it in properly, but thats not what the idea is for. You would mostly likely like the player run trading post idea.
In this case, though, the real world logic still applies in regards to inflation, fluctuating prices, etc. since there are multiple actors involved and a limited amount of time and supply. In a single player RPG, coins or whatever are used as an incentive, which is what you, and I guess other people here are talking about. You collect money in order to buy new perks and abilities, furthering you towards the end of the game. In a single player RPG, the entire world isn't a resource as much as series of challenges.
For multiplayer games, it's a bit more complicated. WoW, the example you used, has constant inflation because it has an incentive system rather than a currency system. Also, since the mats in that game are constantly outmoded by new and better mats with each patch, no player-made store of value has emerged. If you stopped playing WoW before Burning Crusade and came back for Cataclysm, you'd find that the gold you'd amassed was not worth so much in comparison to what people are trading for now. I like to think that if I logged off of a Minecraft server with a ton of diamond and then logged back in a year later, that diamond would still be attractive in a trade. For a pay service like WoW, this is great for the developers because it gets people to have to constantly log into the game to acquire more gold (or whatever; I've been off WoW for a while. My friend tells me that the end game currency has more or less changed to dungeon tokens or something.) I like to think Minecraft won't come to that.
But, in WoW, NPC stores that use gold as currency are mostly useless, precisely because their goods and prices don't change. Like, have you ever gone into Orgrimmar or Stormwind and decided to shop at one of the stores for a gun or whatever? They're charging like 10 gold for white items. And sometimes, this leads to weird exploits too. Like for instance, there was one point in BC where cloth was trading so cheap on the auction house (because, even though it's a video game, tons of people were getting tons of it, flooding the supply) that you could turn around, turn that cloth into bandages, and sell the bandages to an NPC vendor for more than you paid for the cloth.
Don't get me wrong. Now I understand what you're going for, and I'm not trying to be the jerk who shoots down your idea. Basically, you're trying to make gold a wild card resource. I'm just saying that even then, because different people are going to mine at different rates and value things at different levels, that a static exchange ratio is just going to lead people to overvalue or undervalue x resource. Because even though it's just a video game, people are still going to pursue their own goals in it and value their own time in it.
Although, if gold is going to be a wild card resource because you feel gold is useless, why not just have a game mod that turns all the server's gold ore into diamond ore for you? Then it would be valuable, and you could trade the diamond for other things. Not being smarmy, genuinely curious.
Let's say that money would not be craftable. Let's also say that each player has a set amount of money, and that money cannot be bought outside of the game. It would be completely optional to use it, and not necessary to play the game at all. People would be able to set up shops, and use it to buy (or even help their trading) or things. We should also go with that currency does not need to be made more of, as with every new user puts 1000 more cash into the existence. Whether it goes used or not, is up to them. If soemone runs out of gold, they have ways to replenish their supply, by selling things.
Like I said, if it sticks to the rules of not being able to be bought outside of the game (look at gaia online as an example of why we shouldn't do that) and it being entirely optional, and every user gets 1000 to work with, it should be fine, shouldn't it?
At the very least, I hope there's an actual trading system put into place eventually, if no currency is made.
But that would become very stale, and one person could easily horde all the money, leaving nobody with any more money.
PLUS if nobody wants to buy or sell, the money will have no value whatsoever...
Craftable money means that money will be worthless. We should use barter instead.
That is a silly statement. You're telling me that because we can mine gold, any currency we make from gold will have no value... but we can mine diamonds, so why would a barter of 'want to trade diamonds for redstone' have any meaning? We can mind infinite diamonds too! And infinite redstone! Hell, there's infinite everything!!!!!
But that doesn't matter, because we have to put effort and time into acquiring these goods, just like we put effort and time into getting diamond, or wheat, or glass. All money, whether it's diamonds, gold coins, or imperial florps, is just a stand-in for work done. The more work we put in to acquire things, the more value they have. Diamonds are hard to obtain, so they're more valuable than coal, which is easy.
If a good was created called gold coins, that stacked to 1000 or took up no inventory space at all, all it does is facilitate trade by making it simpler to engage in barter... rather than bartering iron for wool, we're trading iron for coins, and then coins for wool. Yes, the coins may suffer inflation... but so could the wool! Or diamond! EVERY good on an infinite map can be overproduced, and there's no reason to believe that everyone would overproduce coins any more than they overproduced something else. That's how economies work.
1. Private trade is handled by barter. People can trade for whatever they need with their next door neighbor for whatever THEY need.
2. Buying from the "government", or in this game the city coffers, costs something we've come to call Redstar.
ID 55. It's the redstone trail block itself, not the dust. This is handed out in small numbers to the OPs, while the city itself will hold most of it. We aren't able to fully implement it yet, as we can't really have a wallet for the city itself until we get chests, but once implemented it could allow for a more stable trade than bartering, albeit possibly more expensive.
Advantages: The mint retains its value, as long as the government doesn't go overboard creating Redstar
Note: I just skimmed through the thread so hopefully this hasn't been mentioned yet.
But, this next point is a side note. How would someone make sure everyone wanted money? If there was no way to enforce money's acceptance... then currency would be useless, not because it was plentiful, but because no one wanted it.
However ending with a positive point, I think every server would, at first, begin by using a barter system. But once it grew to a larger size players would most likely establish some form of currency on their own, without need of pre-established in-game cash.
All hail the tail? I guess... I dunno, I just like S&W.
Suicune is awesome BTW.
Do you understand currency? It's a fairly simple idea. It holds value in terms of exchange- on its own it's valueless, but merely is a stand-in for wealth in an exchange. It is the universal bartering tool.
First of all, who the hell is Chequevara?
More importantly, your plan blunders into the same issue as most of the other ones here- price fixing. Let me say this again, in big letters this time.
PRICE FIXING IS A BAD IDEA
Seriously. Setting prices denies their active market value. No government or active player can set a price as well as the given exchange of goods between two individuals, because price is relative per exchange. If you start saying "THIS IS WORTH THIS MUCH" then people are undercharged or overcharged, because price isn't a flat thing- it's a function of how much you or I value it.