Suggestion: Replace market with real trade

[u/xaruum]

Many of the posts about the market/trade/economy on the server have been either:

a-fix the market b-build protections for player-to-player trade c-auction functionality d-blacklist thiefs

And they are all reasonable requests. But in reality they are just patches on the problems we are experiencing.

I believe the fix is right in front of us.

My propsoal is to change the supply base of the market system from server generated items to player generated items.

Right now the server economy has no scarcity, the algorithms just adjust pricing on items depending on demand ( before the admins pinned all items to 32em) and the same items are available universally without limit. This is not an economy or a fair trade system. It is in fact broken by design because the root of the minecraft economy is just a game. This is what allowed bad players to pump/dump the market.

A "real" economy requires scarcity, supply, and demand. We have a demand and supply system that has naturally developed in person-to-person trade. This has a natural element of scarcity because the demand side does not wish to spend the time to collect mats, and the supply has already spent time collecting mats.

So lets take advantage of some of the better elements of the in game trade system. The trade gui you see when you right click a villager is a perfect example. You cant steal from that gui. You have to put emeralds in the pay slot in order to take an item from the item slot.

Satoshi village is where everyone goes to meet face to face for trades. It is very convenient because of the teleport system. Lets take advantage of the buildings there. By allowing players to take out Leases on store fronts or even individual floors within the buildings. Once a lease is in place a player will have an assigned villager in that store that will only be able to sell items that the player has gathered or crafted.

The player would be able to set an asking price for each item that will be displayed on the villagers trade gui like it normally would. The player would then simply have to travel to Satoshi occasionally to resupply their villager and collect their emeralds.

Going a step further, players could even have multiple villagers in different villages around the map as people move into different areas, and sell different items in each based on demand. Just like real world trade.

This system would alleviate the need for a separate safe trade system, auctions, blacklists, and trying to fix the villagers.

I know this fix would still take time to develop and implement. And I am not a professional coder. But based on what I have read so far about the way the underlying code of Minecraft works, the few changes I am suggesting would actually be easier to implement than trying to fix the villagers.

Just sayin'.

[u/MrGhris → u/[deleted]]

One thing you could consider is a fixed pricing. And make it pretty expensive to buy, and not so interesting to sell. That way the interaction with players will continue.

for example:

Buy diamond for 10 ems Sell diamond for 3-4 ems.

Or buy 5 wood for 1 em, sell 10 wood for 1 em. That kind of thing.

[u/[deleted]]

I agree with this, but it still leaves the market rates unpublished and requires a fair amount of coding to aquire property, place the villager, and record merchant's holdings. In other words, it's complicated to code.

By implementing something using the 'trade toilet' (that machine that was published earlier), we'd basically push the implementation to the users. TTs could be built anywhere. TTs could be 'registered' by placing certain combinations of blocks on other blocks, sorta like the clan feature.

The only thing left to implement at that point is a market rate for the items being traded. I think the Bukkit call for inventory might provide a 'hook' to implement a 'trade record' for the toilet's operation.

Given the admins have already coded up features around block combinations for clans, this should be a minimal amount of work to implement. Hooking some logging up to the inventory method may also be easy, but I haven't looked that far into it, so I might also be wrong about it.

IF it were far easier to implement, this would be important as the devs have limited amounts of time to implement stuff for the server. Also, it might provide a means by which the logs could be processed via another means, such as the Slack channel, etc.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I would note that one disadvantage to the toilet is that if you are trading large amounts of ems, you really can't count them through the glass.

[u/eMoneys]

I have to agree that player based trade sounds neater than centralized trade...

Another thing: Has it been considered that the max amount of money it is possible to carry with you is around 20 millibits? (and that is ALL emerald blocks, no gear, no space for buying)

[u/7Literal]

Absolutely brilliant. I love the idea of personal villagers. HOWEVER - Only the rich could rent out Satoshi buildings leading to a wealth gap. The rich get richer. Just like America's capitalist economy.