The economy of a Minecraft world is pretty fascinating because everything about the world is fabricated players using resources mined from the same world, a feature not present in most games. There are no swords that enter the marketplace through some simulated marketplace, and there isn’t a strong need for such a thing either. Recently, I wrote about an hour’s worth of code for my small Minecraft server in order to allow players to setup shops from chests they owned. They’d place their items to sell in the chest and put a sign above declaring what they’d give for what they’d take. It made trading much easier and an entire trading district blossomed overnight (literally). Because each chest store could only sell up to two items (because two signs can fit above a double-width chest) and each chest took up physical space, it meant that there was a need for players to construct buildings (perhaps large in some cases) for their store. As there was not a “global” market that you could access from any in-game location, that meant that factors that you’d find in the real world such as location had an effect (it’s potentially profitable to start up a series of remote outposts to sell food and arrows). The area of the town at spawn doubled that day.
A shop with in stock and out of stock chests
But there was no currency. I deliberately avoided establishing currency because a number of friends were adamant about not having one, but their disdain for currency isn’t unreasonable. I’ve been around and how “economy” works on many Minecraft servers (as well as other in other games) is through a combination of periodical welfare payments, game-powered shops with rates set by the game, and in the case of roleplay servers, virtual employment. In the case of the shops, rates for multiple items were set by the server owner manually or through a list of item rarities (generated by finding the distribution of materials in a given world). I find the latter particularly farcical – value is very much not simply determined by rarity. On more than a few servers, it seemed as if everyone’s business was to farm sugar cane en-masse – and it worked, because sugar cane as bought by the server’s shops at a fixed price. I didn’t want that and I got the feeling that my server’s players didn’t want it either.
There was, of course, another choice – have algorithms dictate the exchange rate based on the volume of trades by players. A player had suggested this as well, but that meant that I’d have to dedicate time to researching and tweaking the algorithm (although the player said he had some experience with this), plus it’d be open to market manipulation due to the small volume of trades that happens when you only have a smaller server. If I made an error, it could significantly tip the balance the wrong way and I’d have to deal with the aftermath (and after taking a one or two week leave, as it tends to happen). Instead of all of this, I was anticipating that a currency might develop on its own (commodity money). Two different groups of people did setup currency exchanges, but their exchange ratios were not properly fair. One diamond-for-gold exchange ran out of diamond in an hour because the diamond was too cheap for the amount of gold. Beyond that, there wasn’t enough trust to be had for the exchanges and they didn’t catch on.
While bartering has been enjoyable, trading can be challenging because you may not have the item the seller seeks, and you’re also encouraged to delay trade until the real necessity arises. With bartering, some items are impossible to sell because the effort involved in trading for them (and calculating the right barter ratio) is significantly greater than crafting the item themselves, even if prices are as low as you can go. That leaves us with need for an official currency, and probably one that’s driven by money a la a credit card (to lubricate the process even further). We spent a bit of time discussing what to do about that, and I had considered giving everyone a set amount of credits (perhaps 10,000 per head) – something that I can do because it’s a computer game – but I think the currency would never come into use nor stabilize. What we probably will do is setup a certain number of one resource for a certain amount of money at a game-controlled exchange. It’d be a fixed currency backed by gold or something, mostly likely to be something like iron ingots or gold ingots. It seems no one wants fractions either (although decimals is merely a representation), so we’re thinking about having the exchange rate at a large whole number such as $32 for an iron ingot. It has to be high enough to make it possible to trade lower-value items – a great analogy for that, as a friend said, is if the lowest currency denomination suddenly had to be $20 USD, you could no longer trade a large number of objects unless it was in excessive bulk quantities. Another friend suggested using factors of $8, because most items have a stack size that’s 64 or a multiple of 8 – that’s an interesting idea. The question also arises whether we’d want a floating exchange rate in the future too.
One of the currency exchanges
Someone abusing the in-game 'tablet' image board app to advertise
Overall it’s been pretty fun trying to stimulate trade and there has been many analogies to history and real life. Because new versions of Minecraft also continue to come out, the value of items can change. Gold’s value may change in v1.9 because of new items added, and one could currently move money into or out of gold ingots in anticipation, depending on how they expect the value of gold to trend. There’s also been some clever people really working the market (perhaps quite in an evil manner), by, for example, buying out a shop and reselling with higher markup. Some of the guys on there are younger too, and some of them have really sharpened lately.
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Whats the IP of the server? I liked the millenaire trading in single player but the most I have seen on multiplayer is me and my friends just giving each other tools and whatnot. That works on small scale but with a big server I have wanted to see something like this work.
I put a thread in the MC forums about the server. I have a small server, although perhaps not small by your standards. We had trading by friends too, but they have to be on and you’re not going to constantly declare what you sell to chat, so trade doesn’t happen that often.
sk, you are a minecraft legend. This is a really neat idea. I look forward to hearing where you go with it and how it evolves.
We had problems like that too on our economy-driven server. We had a central bank in cities that would buy diamond and gold (so backing the system with real items, since we kept the gold and diamond that was sold to us), and simply left the users to do their own thing. It worked, too, although diamond inflated pretty sharply since no-one was efficient at mining.
However, two problems then arose. It was way too easy to get money (all you really had to do was knuckle down and do some intensive branch mining), so inflation ran amok – we increased plot protection prices (antigrief, the only way money ever drained out of the system) to compensate. This priced lower-tier, casual users out of the market. We never did find a good solution to this problem.
The second one was of chat. We ended up with global chat filled with people offering their deals, and no-one ever read it.
Also, as a side note, people in Minecraft are really, really lazy. I ran an experiment before I became a moderator on the server I play on, and I basically built up a reputation to be a person that sold everything. What happened then was, rather than people walking around to find the best deal, they just private messaged me in chat, gave me the money, and traded. Nothing other than a cursory check on normal prices.
The reason, I guess, is that people just can’t be bothered to gain the fraction of a percentage by spending minutes walking around. They want thing now, and that’s how it goes.
In our case, a lot of players are prolific builders and so most of the money eventually ends up back in the world. Because the item we chose was iron, you still have to use the iron ingots to replace your broken tools. I’m thinking with gold and diamond, as in your case, the items never have a use and do never disappear. Overall, the whole thing works out more or less for us because some people play the game differently – one person might prefer building underground, so s/he’d have an excess of cobble that could be sold at lower prices.
I considered ways to allow players to advertise their prices, but most people get items from the shops as they need them. I do also have a smaller server. However, in your case, perhaps allow advertisements only in a local area? I wouldn’t travel 1000 blocks away to get a cheap deal, but if it’s right next door, I’d hop in right away. Another idea is to have a “global marketplace” where any player can search for goods and find the cheapest (and closest) buy, which will probably work much better, but it’d also drive prices down a lot.
I’d say most people in real life do minimal checking on prices too. You’d at most check 1-3 stores, not literally seek out the best deal. Time is money, and honestly sometimes figuring out the best deal is more work than getting the resource yourself in Minecraft. As long as the monetary cost is less than the perceived time cost, I consider it a worthwhile buy.
Ours is more of a survival server than yours is, I suspect, so people wanted a “safer” way of having wealth. We’re currently experimenting with using taxes as a way to produce an outflow from the economy (preventing inflation), which is in early days yet but theoretically should produce a stabler economy.
The chat problem, we never resolved. There was no way to offer a global chat without some people hijacking it to advertise, and we didn’t want to be so tyrannical as to enforce it – neither did we want to take away global chat from our users.
The problem with people not checking prices was more serious than you’d think. Most people in real life, although they might not check every store in the vicinity, have a pretty good idea of what costs what – they know the approximate price of a sandwich they want for lunch, for example.
This isn’t the case in Minecraft. How do you decide how much a stack of wooden sticks costs? How much ten uncooked (or cooked) porkchops will cost? In this case, I actually ended up defining, quite literally, the costs of a lot of items.
In real life, you eventually get the ability to judge prices quickly once you become familiar with buying a product, but when you have to initially buy something you’ve never bought before, you do have to search around. It applies the same to Minecraft in my opinion — if you rarely buy something, you definitely won’t know the price off your head; however, if if you buy a lot of logs, you will definitely learn what to pay (on my server, I know who to get logs from — he’s cheap and well-stocked). That said, you mentioned that your economy suffers from inflation, so that means people can never get comfortable with knowing prices because they know that it’ll change.
Personally how I figure out if something is worth the cost on my server, because of the 10:1 credit to iron ingot ratio, is to consider whether the time I spent finding that number of iron ingots is worth the cost of the item. I do this comparison because buying saves me time (allowing me to play MC in more enjoyable ways). A part of your problem may be the items that you chose to trade for — I chose iron ingots because at least you need them still to craft essential items, which helps fight back inflation.
Regardless, if you want to make prices easy for people to judge, you may want to try that global marketplace idea. Prices should stabilize quickly because players will always pick the cheapest store, however also weighing in the time to travel to the store. It’d be a very competitive marketplace though.
My opinion is that we’re meddling with the existing economy as-is, so I prefer to leave the market up to itself. If something is happening that I don’t want, it’s probably because of something I did in the past that is wrong. Before we put currency into the game, value still existed — people wouldn’t trade a diamond for a log. A money system is supposed to make trading easier because you don’t have to make the barter decisions anymore.
On another note, I haven’t played 1.9 yet, but if you haven’t either, you may want to consider whether the new ways to obtain gold in 1.9 may negatively impact your currency.
Also, if you only administrate your server and don’t play, you may want to flip your role for a bit. That’ll probably tell you the problems you face if you’re trying to build a home and need materials, and give you a feeling for what needs to be done.
I would say that in terms of extremes, people know what’s worth what (you gave the example of the log not being worth a diamond). However, on a smaller scale you can get away with a lot based on people’s apparent inability to do rapid mental calculations, let alone accurate estimations of time to gather items.
I’m interested to know how your server dodged the problem of inflation – unless all resources in the server go to building, there must surely be a slow increase in the average resources per player, and thus inflation occurs.
On the idea of the global marketplace, I’m quite intrigued by it. A central listing for goods and items would certainly be great, and would provide another method for money outflow (via “paid” advertising to be higher on the list, perhaps). I’m doubtful of my ability to produce that in any useful timeframe, though.
I don’t think that adding virtual currency is meddling (to any significant degree). What it does provide is a more authoritative and administrative method of tracking and (potentially) modifying player wealth.
I hadn’t considered the 1.9 issue, but it seems obvious now. The simplest solution would be to adjust the central currency to diamond… but I will have to talk to the others – this is a serious issue.
I have been told that I should play the server more before, but something always seems to get in the way – some dispute, or out of control PVP, or some bug or config problem with the plugins.
It appears I hit the thread depth limit.
We have primarily two types of players: most of them are builders, and the others are explorers. Builders never have enough resources, especially when most people use iron tools too, because everything they gather or buy ends up in a build. I tend to build, so I may have a personal balance high of 4,000 credits, only to have it drop to 10 the next day. As for explorers, they do rack up credits; however, because they don’t build, they never need to buy anything, so their influence on the money supply is fairly minimal.
Averaging everyone’s wallet balance (with a balance greater than 0) a week ago gave me ~1,400 credits. Now It’s only 1,200 credits, so it has in fact gone down. That’s not with removing outliers either.
Perhaps get some friends to help administrate? Playing (or really “eating your own dogfood” in general) is a really great way to see how poorly (or great) you’ve done sometimes.
So you have :) maybe something to fix, although to be fair long conversations were never the focus or design intent of comment systems.
Your economic model sounds a lot more stable than ours, although if I’m honest it does sound like it’s stable because nobody has bothered to amass a huge fortune yet (I am inferring from your example that 4000 credits is not a lot of money, or that it’s fairly easy to earn 4000 – if not, then perhaps you’ve got a different attitude to money than me). Then again, if people had no money to trade they would fall back on bartering, so my guess is that for you guys it wouldn’t be so much of a problem.
We’re having a rough time at the moment in administration – a lot of immature players logging in, feuds and rage flying around. Not a time to be leaving the helm, even though we have a dozen people moderating now.
I might stop by your server if I have a chance, though – maybe catch some piece and quiet, see what you guys are building all the time. Mind dropping me an address, or a thread I could apply on?
Thread is: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/112354-skcraft
Applied.
On my server I decided to definitely go with the currency route. However, I chose to award players currency based on the three “activities” that exist in minecraft, namely killing monsters, mining and building. That way you gain money by playing, and more active players are rewarded proportionally to lesser active players, but lesser active players still aren’t “punished” at all.
Basically you get currency when you mine an ore (not stone), place a certain set of building blocks, like stone brick, or kill any aggressive mobs. I carefully balanced the amount of currency you get per activity so you get roughly the same amount of currency per hour no matter what you are doing in game (besides just standing around).
To avoid inflation over time I will also add currency sinks through area protection. Again, the idea is that a lesser active player will be able to protect an area that’s more suited towards their activity, and a really active player will be able to afford to protect a much larger area.
Because I am rewarding building (rather heavily) I’m adding two more things to prevent abuse of the system. 1) To discourage mass placing of blocks I will set up a shop to buy blocks for 70% of the reward for placing them, so players can sell their blocks for money if they don’t want to use them and other players aren’t buying. 2) You will be penalized equally to the placing reward for removing a block. So if you place a stone brick then you’ll get money, but if you move it then you won’t double your money, and if you remove it then you lose what you gained.
I chose to stimulate things a bit in the beginning by “buying” a large amount of some basic items, and so far the system seems to be working well. Players are learning to place shops, plan ahead, and they’re learning the ways that they like most to earn money when they need it. =)
Just a note, the reason I was on your site in the first place was to say that using a block pattern for mossy/cracked stone brick doesn’t work in single player. //replace 1 98 30%98:1,30%98:2,60%98 will use only plain stone brick.
I’m not spamming, but this is the command I used (I screwed up what I typed before)
//replace 1 30%98:1,30%98:2,60%98
Are you planing on releasing your shop plugin shown in the image? i’m looking for a simple shop plugin with no currency support or one where it can be disabled with a simple sign based interface some thing like put the sign above chest then put lines like
[shop]
Release is a lot of work, so I probably won’t get to it.
I too have been very interested in the depicted barter shop plugin. I feel like my server is not yet ready to have a currency, but it would benefit from a barter mechanism.
I am considering trying to remake the plugin myself, and while that would be a good learning exercise, it would be a lot of duplicated effort. What issues are left keeping it from release? If you put it on github, even something rough, I could try to help.
Also, I am wondering, how did it go on your server with the currency that you moved onto after the barter phase? Is it still backed by gold?
Never mind about my previous request. I am going to try going the currency route, although I feel it should be tangible, so I will try PhysicalShop with sponge or other unobtainables as a currency. Where that currency comes from is another matter.
my post got cut off
*[shop]
{number of items to buy with}{Item to buy with}
{number of items to sell}{Item to sell}
I must say you have made some valid points. I based my economy off of one material, wood. Almost every thing in Minecraft comes from wood, so if wood is $5, then use the crafting recepie to determine price to make item and add 15% to make it worth creating the item.
In addition, I use server shops and player shops to prevent the price from being jacked uo to high. But the server shop is an added 25% of the cost to make it thus allowing players to make a profit. It well for me.
How do I change the price of arrows when you do the /sell. KNOW ONE WILL TELL ME HOW TO CHANGE IT!!!!!!
If You`re still thinking about prices of items, You should check
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1010170-minecraft-economy-manager/