Minecraft Forums

I've played on a few RPG servers on XBL and was wondering if anyone has had any experience with a purely player-based economy? No set 'currency' and no items carried over from creative to be sold. I've been toying around with the idea of hosting my own server and I need opinions and/or advice on what would work best.

Here's what I've been thinking:

There will only be two jobs to choose from: Miner and Farmer/Hunter. Miners are the only ones who can mine ores and stone and Farmers are the only ones able to grow/gather food, wood and non-hostile animal drops. Having a wide selection of jobs sounds good at first glance but there isn't a good way to balance them without paying a 'salary'. In my experience, everyone goes for miner, farmer or hunter anyways; they are the most profitable and nobody wants to chop wood all day. This way the two are varied enough to be fun and interdependent on each other.

Trading will be done player to player or in a modified auction house with a bulletin board. There will be a box of signs in the trading posts for requests and offers. Items can be put in the auction house for a set price and will remain until sold or removed. This helps with different play schedules (so you're not screwed if everyone on at a given time has the same job) and leads to competition among players. I expect a LOT of undercutting and price-gouging to go on. That's the point.

PvP, theft and general griefing will be allowed outside of the city only.

What do you guys think? Would you play on a server like this?

I think the way you've split it and with the hunger bar in the game, the farmer/hunter group will have a huge advantage over the mining group. In theory they could survive completely without doing any trade at all with the miners - just limiting themselves to wood farming and hunting tools and building solely out of wood. If they trade once for diamonds for a sword, they're pretty much set. The mining group wouldn't even be able to make any tools without access to some wood. Therefore, I would give the wood rights over to the mining group. Then, the mining group would still have to trade with the farmers for food and the farmers would have to continue to trade with the miners for wood products at the very least.

Unless you're playing with adults, any economic system other than simple barter-trade is likely to fail. An arbitrarily imposed division of labor, made for the purpose of forcing inter-dependence, is also futile when faced with the fact that players are inherently self-sufficient. Supply and demand should determine the jobs players should do, i.e. if people need coal, some people will mine coal to fill the supply.

Normally in games I've played, the vast majority of outposts use either communism or bartering, while the city uses money.

Clay bricks could be considered copper money, iron ingots can be the higher value like silver coins, and gold ingots would be most rare and valuable. Maybe like ten clay bricks make the same value as one iron ingot, and ten iron ingots count as much as a gold ingot. No one could get rich and money would be obtainable and not super rare, this makes for an easy to manage currency. Imagine it like the brown clay bricks are pennies, iron ingots are silver coins, and gold ingots make dollars, you can price items to be specific costs like "this tnt costs 3 silver and 5 copper" meaning 3 iron ingots and 5 clay ingots. You find a few stacks of clay at a time so it makes sense for it to be the lowest value since it is sort of common and easy to find. Maybe miners get a small profit as motivation to become a miner, and miners give the host what they find so the host can manage the money and distribute it when others work or build useful stuff.

Quote from azantilon

Unless you're playing with adults, any economic system other than simple barter-trade is likely to fail. An arbitrarily imposed division of labor, made for the purpose of forcing inter-dependence, is also futile when faced with the fact that players are inherently self-sufficient. Supply and demand should determine the jobs players should do, i.e. if people need coal, some people will mine coal to fill the supply.

I agree with this. Why would anybody limit themselves in the game to one activitiy? Especially if cheating made things easier and they weren't likely to get caught? Or if the supply of a material was tied to somebody else and was too hard to get? Screw that, chop a tree and solve your own problem.

Quote from MettleLust

Clay bricks could be considered copper money, iron ingots can be the higher value like silver coins, and gold ingots would be most rare and valuable. Maybe like ten clay bricks make the same value as one iron ingot, and ten iron ingots count as much as a gold ingot. No one could get rich and money would be obtainable and not super rare, this makes for an easy to manage currency. Imagine it like the brown clay bricks are pennies, iron ingots are silver coins, and gold ingots make dollars, you can price items to be specific costs like "this tnt costs 3 silver and 5 copper" meaning 3 iron ingots and 5 clay ingots. You find a few stacks of clay at a time so it makes sense for it to be the lowest value since it is sort of common and easy to find. Maybe miners get a small profit as motivation to become a miner, and miners give the host what they find so the host can manage the money and distribute it when others work or build useful stuff.

The problem with that is that clay is so much harder to find than iron. At least on the worlds I've seen.

I did this one time with miner, blacksmith, farmer, hunter, builder, and woodcutter. One cool thing that I did is that the miner actually has to go to the blacksmith's shop to smelt his item, and pay a small fine. We used feathers as money, since they were fairly in between common and hard to find. Especially in 1.8, where zombies no longer drop feathers, only chickens. It was actually really fun, until there was a thief in our group...