This is well out of "fine tuning" territory. This is "your basic model doesn't work" territory.
1) Villagers should always have at least one buy offer available. That way, you can always sell something
to them.
Your first idea to fix the system is not a change to the basic model, it's fine-tuning the current system.
And yes, that would probably work.
Although frankly speaking it would make more sense to always have 1 buy option AND 1 sell option, and then have a third which could go either way.
Thank you for testing this out. I had never considered that you would wear out your selling options. To me, trading is a method of getting emerald blocks and cheap glowstone, the rest of the offers are pretty unreasonable.
I think it is an oversight on jebs part, and once he is made aware of it he will surely change the system. I think the word 'broken' is a bit extreme, but certainly it needs attention.
I think they should delay 1.3 enough so trading would be in some form stable. As it is the only way to get emerald blocks without extreme mining, I think it would be best to increase buying prices, but keeping selling prices, so you could keep getting emeralds for ~20 wheat, but the price of glowstone should rise so I could not get them so fast.
Your first idea to fix the system is not a change to the basic model, it's fine-tuning the current system.
And yes, that would probably work.
Although frankly speaking it would make more sense to always have 1 buy option AND 1 sell option, and then have a third which could go either way.
That's why I made two suggestions. Without refreshing, you'll still wind up with utterly absurd trades being offered like 5 diamond for 1 emerald and 12 emeralds for a diamond pick. "Convenience" really isn't a good descriptor of that kind of trading.
Which, brokenly enough, hurts players who are trying to play "fairly" more than people how are mass farming, as the former aren't going to have an entire inventory full of something to sell to a villager.
Actually, I can't wait for people to start exploiting this with the help of a friend, who keeps tossing new stacks of stuff to sell on the ground right next to somebody who is keeping the trade window open so that they can sell hundreds of stacks in one go before the trade is taken away.
Actually, there is one thing that needs to be fixed for it to work fine, as is. Right now, if a testificate attempts to learn a trade it already knows, it fails. If it instead ignores known trades and always learns a new trade, then you would be able to avoid buying items you don't want, therefore making it so that the only trades it can learn are for selling items. The only exception to this is priests who only purchase gold anyways.
Actually, there is one thing that needs to be fixed for it to work fine, as is. Right now, if a testificate attempts to learn a trade it already knows, it fails. If it instead ignores known trades and always learns a new trade, then you would be able to avoid buying items you don't want, therefore making it so that the only trades it can learn are for selling items. The only exception to this is priests who only purchase gold anyways.
How will that help anything? The options to sell to villagers will still disappear after 3-15 trades. It won't have much of an effect on anything, really, because the villagers will only have 1-2 trades (due to the old ones disappearing) and are not that likely to duplicate one.
I've been observing a Village since the last snapshot on Hard difficulty, and I realized that any sufficiently sized Village gets culled enough by Zombies that I can never run out of trades like this example. Eventually Villagers are going to die and get replaced with new Villagers. The only limiting factor is the number of doors destroyed each night (which leads to my opinion that Zombies should only open doors instead of breaking them).
I'm in survival testing it out and it pretty much works like this for me:
*collect coal/paper/wool
*sell for emeralds
*buy random things I need
Whenever a sell option disappears, I try to expand the city, because the things they want me to buy are usually things I don't want(shears, iron shovel, crap enchants etc.). It doesn't seem too bad to me considering it gives incentive to make the village bigger.
How will that help anything? The options to sell to villagers will still disappear after 3-15 trades. It won't have much of an effect on anything, really, because the villagers will only have 1-2 trades (due to the old ones disappearing) and are not that likely to duplicate one.
Wrong. Old trades disappear after you use those particular trades 3-15 times. It doesn't work where you trade 15 emeralds worth of paper and an older trade such as glass disappears. If you never use all the buy trades, then the sell trades will be all that the villager learns, even if it is also the only thing the villager forgets. The only exception is the Priest, who only has one buy trade, and a numerous number of sell trades it can learn, due to different variations of enchantments.
This. This is the purpose of trading. If trading were at all as efficient as getting stuff for yourself, players would buy all their things from NPC's, while whining about how the game is too easy and they wish there was no NPC trading.
While I can't say exactly what motivated Jeb to introduce trading, this is one of the most lopsided views of what trading is all about that I've ever see written.
I'll admit that one significant role of trading can include getting some items that you would otherwise not want to be involved with obtaining, a slightly more realistic NPC trading system can and indeed should be developed. What Jeb is doing here is just random crap thrown against the wall as a quick and dirty solution simply to show trading can happen.
Engaging in mass slaughter of villagers simply to be able to "earn" enough emeralds should be seen as not only evil, but that the villagers should stop trading with you as well. This is the case in Millenaire if you start to kill off villagers using that mod (with a much more developed economy and reasons for engaging in trade).
As a side note (particularly since I didn't start the thread), I'd recommend reading the ideas in this thread about how trade could be balanced out:
Wrong. Old trades disappear after you use those particular trades 3-15 times. It doesn't work where you trade 15 emeralds worth of paper and an older trade such as glass disappears. If you never use all the buy trades, then the sell trades will be all that the villager learns, even if it is also the only thing the villager forgets. The only exception is the Priest, who only has one buy trade, and a numerous number of sell trades it can learn, due to different variations of enchantments.
If you mean what I think you mean (You aren't explaining things clearly at all), then your scheme would require having the villager already having all of this sell offers developed. This would take an excessive amount of time and emeralds to do for even a single villager.
It would be much simpler to just replace buy offers with buy offers, or to not delete a buy offer if it is the last buy offer available.
Both of these still leave us with the problem of a villager who has decided that he wants to buy gold, forcing us to sell a few stacks of gold for a handful of emeralds to get a decent trade out of him again.
While I can't say exactly what motivated Jeb to introduce trading, this is one of the most lopsided views of what trading is all about that I've ever see written.
I'll admit that one significant role of trading can include getting some items that you would otherwise not want to be involved with obtaining, a slightly more realistic NPC trading system can and indeed should be developed. What Jeb is doing here is just random crap thrown against the wall as a quick and dirty solution simply to show trading can happen.
Engaging in mass slaughter of villagers simply to be able to "earn" enough emeralds should be seen as not only evil, but that the villagers should stop trading with you as well. This is the case in Millenaire if you start to kill off villagers using that mod (with a much more developed economy and reasons for engaging in trade).
As a side note (particularly since I didn't start the thread), I'd recommend reading the ideas in this thread about how trade could be balanced out:
Cool. Now make a mod that makes trading better. Couldn't be that hard to do.
This is something Mojang needs to fix. It's an issue of proper balancing with their game.
If Mojang stops caring about the balance and quality of the base game, then nobody's going to want to play the game anymore to mod it. Players and modders will eventually get sick of installing and creating mods to fix every little thing that's done wrong.
I've gone into details on how to get that to happen, with the hopes that a popular mod might, just maybe, get the attention of the Mojang staff enough to get them to try and fix their sofware.
The hard part isn't writing the mod, it is convincing those who look at this situation that it might need to be fixed. BTW, I do agree that simply saying "get a mod" isn't the right thing to do. Game balance is a key part of overall design, and while I may not agree with every decision Jeb is making, making a game actually playable should be one of those issues.
Something just seems creepy to me that the only real solution to this issue is simply killing off villagers in hopes that their kids might permit you to engage in the village commerce system.
Funny how stupid people on this subforum are not to understand the problem.
I prepared 24 villagers for 1.3, each boxed in nicely according to his profession. Pity that I will have to replace that with a villager breeding system were I get new ones so I don't run out of emerald buying options if that's not being fixed.
Sounds cool. I don't think Mojang would do anything quite so complex (they tend to do things very simply.) The extent I think Mojang would take it to is having a chance to increase/decrease price each buy/sell, and then have the price normalize over a period of time (perhaps instantly each morning or gradually every hour.)
Up to now I've gotten about half my items from trading but now I'm trading just to get a full set of chainmail and it's a total emerald sink. I've built a second larger village but none of them sold chaimail so I've started sniping villagers and doing hit-and-run's so that new villagers spawn.
I'm okay with not having the selling options after a couple of tries because I always find more villagers that sell, but my problem is getting that one full set and I have to do a lot of dumb trades just for a hope of getting what I want. It's really my fault for wanting the armor though, it's not a balance issue.
Your first idea to fix the system is not a change to the basic model, it's fine-tuning the current system.
And yes, that would probably work.
Although frankly speaking it would make more sense to always have 1 buy option AND 1 sell option, and then have a third which could go either way.
I think it is an oversight on jebs part, and once he is made aware of it he will surely change the system. I think the word 'broken' is a bit extreme, but certainly it needs attention.
I think they should delay 1.3 enough so trading would be in some form stable. As it is the only way to get emerald blocks without extreme mining, I think it would be best to increase buying prices, but keeping selling prices, so you could keep getting emeralds for ~20 wheat, but the price of glowstone should rise so I could not get them so fast.
That's why I made two suggestions. Without refreshing, you'll still wind up with utterly absurd trades being offered like 5 diamond for 1 emerald and 12 emeralds for a diamond pick. "Convenience" really isn't a good descriptor of that kind of trading.
Thanks for the good idea =)
How will that help anything? The options to sell to villagers will still disappear after 3-15 trades. It won't have much of an effect on anything, really, because the villagers will only have 1-2 trades (due to the old ones disappearing) and are not that likely to duplicate one.
*collect coal/paper/wool
*sell for emeralds
*buy random things I need
Whenever a sell option disappears, I try to expand the city, because the things they want me to buy are usually things I don't want(shears, iron shovel, crap enchants etc.). It doesn't seem too bad to me considering it gives incentive to make the village bigger.
Wrong. Old trades disappear after you use those particular trades 3-15 times. It doesn't work where you trade 15 emeralds worth of paper and an older trade such as glass disappears. If you never use all the buy trades, then the sell trades will be all that the villager learns, even if it is also the only thing the villager forgets. The only exception is the Priest, who only has one buy trade, and a numerous number of sell trades it can learn, due to different variations of enchantments.
While I can't say exactly what motivated Jeb to introduce trading, this is one of the most lopsided views of what trading is all about that I've ever see written.
I'll admit that one significant role of trading can include getting some items that you would otherwise not want to be involved with obtaining, a slightly more realistic NPC trading system can and indeed should be developed. What Jeb is doing here is just random crap thrown against the wall as a quick and dirty solution simply to show trading can happen.
Engaging in mass slaughter of villagers simply to be able to "earn" enough emeralds should be seen as not only evil, but that the villagers should stop trading with you as well. This is the case in Millenaire if you start to kill off villagers using that mod (with a much more developed economy and reasons for engaging in trade).
As a side note (particularly since I didn't start the thread), I'd recommend reading the ideas in this thread about how trade could be balanced out:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1250632-a-case-for-perfectly-balanced-trading/
Version 2.1 now updated for MC 1.6.2
If you mean what I think you mean (You aren't explaining things clearly at all), then your scheme would require having the villager already having all of this sell offers developed. This would take an excessive amount of time and emeralds to do for even a single villager.
It would be much simpler to just replace buy offers with buy offers, or to not delete a buy offer if it is the last buy offer available.
Both of these still leave us with the problem of a villager who has decided that he wants to buy gold, forcing us to sell a few stacks of gold for a handful of emeralds to get a decent trade out of him again.
Cool. Now make a mod that makes trading better. Couldn't be that hard to do.
If Mojang stops caring about the balance and quality of the base game, then nobody's going to want to play the game anymore to mod it. Players and modders will eventually get sick of installing and creating mods to fix every little thing that's done wrong.
"Get a mod for it" is not always a valid excuse.
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
I am making a mod to make trading better. That mod thread can be found here:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1307762-wip-village-economics-plus/
I've gone into details on how to get that to happen, with the hopes that a popular mod might, just maybe, get the attention of the Mojang staff enough to get them to try and fix their sofware.
The hard part isn't writing the mod, it is convincing those who look at this situation that it might need to be fixed. BTW, I do agree that simply saying "get a mod" isn't the right thing to do. Game balance is a key part of overall design, and while I may not agree with every decision Jeb is making, making a game actually playable should be one of those issues.
Something just seems creepy to me that the only real solution to this issue is simply killing off villagers in hopes that their kids might permit you to engage in the village commerce system.
Version 2.1 now updated for MC 1.6.2
I prepared 24 villagers for 1.3, each boxed in nicely according to his profession. Pity that I will have to replace that with a villager breeding system were I get new ones so I don't run out of emerald buying options if that's not being fixed.
That seems to be the only reasonable solution.
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
I'm okay with not having the selling options after a couple of tries because I always find more villagers that sell, but my problem is getting that one full set and I have to do a lot of dumb trades just for a hope of getting what I want. It's really my fault for wanting the armor though, it's not a balance issue.