I've seen this implemented before, successfully, on a MUD that I used to play, and still occasionally log in on. And it works pretty nicely.
The setup: First, you seed a little database with default values. Say, the rarity values for different stuff, from map generation rarity. Then, players build access points somehow. Land claim flags, shop chests, whatever. Not important.
How it works: Players access the exchange, and sell materials for "exchange credits." The rarer the material, the more expensive it gets. The more quantity gets dumped in, the cheaper it gets. With an initial seed of approximately correct data and quantity, this should work.
So, a player can buy/sell loads of stone at a half-credit or so per unit. And buy/sell diamond for several thousand per unit, ore for a few hundred, etc. The materials (other than maybe an initial seed) are all what players chuck in, in exchange for credits... for stuff. Maybe tools too? I dunno.
Then, you have a potentially usable money system. Doesn't NEED any input/output of credits other than materials in/out... that would complicate things.
But as a base exchange, with deposits lowering the cost, and as supplies dwindle, the price climbing higher, it would be an interesting way of getting rid of stuff, and getting stuff you actually want. Or, toss some credits to a new guy who hasn't been mining for long, when you have more than you know what to do with.
For examples, if there was one unit of diamond left, it would cost THOUSANDS of credits. And if there were 50,000 stone in it, they would be less than one credit each. (Approximate guesses). The less stuff, the more motivation to mine some, toss it in, and buy cheaper stuff to mass-build with. This is all taken care of by server side math and a relatively small database of the various materials, and the available quantities.
Opinions-
Would it be a good idea to combine this with money? Drops from monsters, used up to hire guys or buy special stuff?
That, and tools might also be included in the system. They would worth more (but not much more) than their components, out of necessity. (If everyone takes materials, processes them, and sells it back, they stop being rare, and therefore decline in value, down to the combined materials of manufacture.)
So people who like farming would be able to sell wheat in exchange for tools, and a miners could sell ore/stone in exchange for wood, and people who enjoy killing trees wood, etc.
There should probably be a slight tax built in though, to represent the convenience of having a ubiquitous material exchange system. That and it should be slightly harder to access than chest stores, via non-instant material arrival times, and the system only being accessible at one point per player (their main claim flag, or something).
More like crashes of generally every month.
But do you trust the community to self govern the stock market?
Money no, drops if proccessed, and no special stuff, makes the effort bland and clunky.
...The system is entirely automated. Zero player interaction other than "put materials in for credits" and "take materials out for credits." What it does, is establish worth for materials. It relies on players wanting one thing more than another, and other players with different wants. There's no way (and no NEED) to "govern" an automated system like that.
Then, the credits obtained from this system could be used for other things. Stuff to be determined at a later time. It provides a currency with a base value, yet does not provide an infinite source of material- all the crap you buy was put in by someone else, and all the crap you sell goes into storage. Yet the game doesn't reward sheer spam TOO much, because the bulk stuff- dirt and stone, will be very low-worth, compared to other ores.
And it would certainly simplify if if the system omitted all crafted items. Leave that to player-run shops, I suppose.
What the system could do, is have a base pool of money. Money (the amount possessed by players) could be removed from the system by buying special things, and added by their mining efforts, dumped into the exchange. As the total grows, the prices go higher. As the pool of player money dwindles, stuff gets cheaper. The system is tuned to keep things at a more or less fair rate.
And there should probably be a soft cap- if a player hoards enough cash, they can still dump stuff onto the exchange, but the exchange stops giving money, and money sinks go up to a maximum amount. This prevents one player from hoarding enough to start seriously affecting the others.
So there's a conservation of mass, so to speak, and it isn't alchemy because everything in the system for you to buy must be placed by someone else... Perhaps certain block types shouldn't have any value, so you can't stripmine dirt to make a full diamond set of armor tools and weapons at all. In fact, maybe natural blocks shouldn't be worth anything(Excluding resources).
This seems like it could work out well, but on the other hand, I'd hate to see it everywhere, maybe only used in specific circumstances, or not come into effect until X amount of ClaimFlag groups have reached a specific milestone in development. This could be determined by requiring them to build a kiosk to facilitate this ability.
I'd go so far as to say if something was implemented, granting the ability to block off access to it altogether in server parameters.
Everything has value. People would very likely be willing to buy stone en-masse to make large constructions, and trade a few diamonds/gold/iron for it.
Others might mine excess stone, and WANT diamonds/gold/iron- natural match there!
It's how the economy of the MUD works- there's a central pool of money, some LARGE number. Spawned monsters take a share, delivering it to players. Money is removed, and put back into the pool when players spend it on various things which effectively destroy the money- basically anything but giving it to other players.
This would use a similar system, it would be easier to get credits initially, but as the stockpiles grow, and more players remove credits, the payouts decrease. The system self-regulates, to keep things more or less balanced. One thing it might do is ignore money carried by players who are deemed inactive by last-login or something.
That central credits store could ALSO be used to pay out, directly or indirectly, money to players who would rather kill monsters than mine/gather. At that point however, more credits are appearing than disappearing, so the game needs ways to leech money out of the general player-store. It's economy stuff, this is actually pretty basic stuff. You want complicated? Go start an EVE-online trial, you'll can't even see the entire thing if you play the entire 14-day trial. (Entire hidden markets for capital ships and nullsec alliances...)
And optionality depends on dependency, a base money system might be needed for other options. Players might need money for other stuff, and a non-arbitrary worth system is nice. Otherwise you wind up with magical MMO currencies that don't mean a whole lot in most situations.
I seriously think you are overcomplicating things. This isn't an MMO. Just let people trade normally and have the ability to set prices themsselves. Theres no need to have such complex stock markets. Sure you could have NPC's who might sell stuff and the price could vary ther, but i think a simple barter system is best.
That's the maximum potential map size, not the actual map size. The disk space one map would take up is multiple petabytes, which is a hard drive capacity that is yet to be commercially produced. So, no, each map won't be that large. It won't be an MMO as I doubt there'd be more than 50 people on one server at one time.
I seriously think you are overcomplicating things. This isn't an MMO. Just let people trade normally and have the ability to set prices themsselves. Theres no need to have such complex stock markets. Sure you could have NPC's who might sell stuff and the price could vary ther, but i think a simple barter system is best.
Only the back end is complicated. All the players see is a list with each type, and the price for each. As they sell stuff, the price gradually decreases. And as they buy out the market with credits from selling stuff, the price on what they buy gradually increases. This allows player the option of being able to trade materials, fairly, with any other player, online or offline.
And it also provides a currency that can be used for OTHER money systems, rewarding players for other activities- monster hunting and farming come to mind. It could be designed with a slight bias to allow players to accumulate a certain level of wealth, and a counter-weight once players reach higher levels, to prevent one player from accumulating a disproportionate "slice of the pie."
This actually isn't a bad idea. Essentially what you would see would be a list of materials of everything ever, The more of something someone sells, the lower the price of that material goes. Dirt/stone would be naturally cheap (everyone has excess, so everyone would want to sell them) while diamond, gold, tnt and mob drops would all be more expensive, due to everyone needing them and no one having excess. No one would be trading dirt for diamond, because dirt might be worth a credit(for simplicity) and diamond might be worth millions. The system would automatically balance itself to make sure every price is fair.
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Quote from dorsidwarf »
whut would you actually se them for? other than other implausibkle suggestions?
But then you might get people trying to hike the price of dirt by buying it up in mass quantities, tricking the system into thinking it's valuable, and then reselling it in bulk at the newly increased price, which would end up pooling large amounts of 'money' with that player in particular.
I had a similar idea myself a while back for implementing a global market for MMOs. In my model, individual towns would have a "market." The market would keep track of how many of each item is on the market, and have a pool of funds to draw from. An item's "value" is the value of the total market's pool divided by the number of those items currently on the market. Items would be bought and sold individually (or a simple calculation would be done beforehand to simulate this if items were bought and sold as stacks) and would be sold at a rough estimated future price rather than the current price. Having multiple markets per town was simply a way to allow players to become "merchants" since they could travel from town to town, buying items where they were cheap and selling them where they were more expensive. If the system was used in Minecraft, there would likely be only one market per server for simplicity.
Let's assume the market has 2000 dollars and 19 iron ores. (Dollars and Iron Ore are used for example purposes only; I personally would like to see a crafting table recipe for breaking single gold bars into 5 gold coins.)
-Selling one iron ore would give you 100 dollars, or 2000/(19+1). The market would then have 1900 dollars at 20 iron ore, meaning selling another would give you 90 dollars, or 1900/(20+1) rounded. The third would give you 82 dollars, or 1810/(21+1) rounded.
-Buying one iron ore would cost 111 dollars, or 2000/(19-1) rounded. The market would then have 2111 dollars and 18 iron ore, meaning buying another would cost you 124 dollars, or 2111/(18-1) rounded. The third would cost you 140 dollars, or 2235/(17-1) rounded.
-A % modifier to buying/selling can be added so that the market naturally grows as it is used, becoming more stable with more available funds and stored goods, and able to keep up with the growing demands of players (increase prices and reduce sell value by an additional x%). The actual percentage can be left up to Notch. Without this modifier, buying and immediately reselling before another purchase is made on the market will return the exact same value, since after buying the new selling price is the old buying price.
The above examples use relatively low numbers to demonstrate the system's automatic price adjustment; in actual application you would likely be using millions of dollars and thousands of items to "seed" the market, meaning price adjustment would be much slower. While the system itself seems complicated, the end user sees none of this; they only see that as they sell a hundred units of dirt, the value of dirt goes down (since the market has less money to give out, and more dirt to depreciate it's value). Essentially, the system is a way to automatically analyze the value of items within the game. Values are not actually "fixed" by the computer; all that really matter's is the players' perception of value. This is because the market self-adjusts to player perceptions of value. If the market "overprices" an item (greater value compared to effort to attain), players will sell that item to the market, reducing its value. Likewise, if the market "underprices" an item (lower value compared to the effort needed to attain it), players will buy that item rather than gather it themselves, increasing its value. Obviously, rarer items (and thus more difficult to attain) will always be more valuable on the market than more common items.
I actually thought about creating my own thread to describe this system before I ran into this one; though I feel this system could use a thread of discussion by itself, I'll respect the forum rules of "one thread per suggestion type." Really, a lot of the specifics of implementation are the same for both systems anyhow, like the proposed kiosk used for accessing it.
EDIT: Edited to correct faulty logic in market growth.
But then you might get people trying to hike the price of dirt by buying it up in mass quantities, tricking the system into thinking it's valuable, and then reselling it in bulk at the newly increased price, which would end up pooling large amounts of 'money' with that player in particular.
In my version of the math system for implementing this, that sort of artificial market inflation is impossible. Get a pen and paper and play around with the numbers (or if you're like me, create a spreadsheet or write a simple program to do it for you); if your math is correct, buying massive quantities of an item to inflate its value and then re-selling it will always put you at a net loss.
But then you might get people trying to hike the price of dirt by buying it up in mass quantities, tricking the system into thinking it's valuable, and then reselling it in bulk at the newly increased price, which would end up pooling large amounts of 'money' with that player in particular.
Uhm, not unless the person who programmed the system was terminally retarded.
As you buy something, it goes expensive, yes. And as you sell it, it gets cheaper. There obviously shouldn't be any way to sell in bulk without the price automatically changing.
Besides, it'll be in stacks for bulk materials, they go back in at the same price they came out. As more stacks go back in, the price drops back down, and if there is a decent economic model, players will probably get less than 100% of their investment for repeated buying and selling of the same items. And lose money instead.
So someone trying that stunt should lose like 5% of their money, and if other players NOTICE the stunt, they could toss some extra dirt stacks on the exchange themselves, and get money at the guys expense. :tongue.gif:
edit> Dammit, qlmmb2086 beat me to it. :tongue.gif:
Besides, it'll be in stacks for bulk materials, they go back in at the same price they came out. As more stacks go back in, the price drops back down, and if there is a decent economic model, players will probably get less than 100% of their investment for repeated buying and selling of the same items. And lose money instead.
So someone trying that stunt should lose like 5% of their money, and if other players NOTICE the stunt, they could toss some extra dirt stacks on the exchange themselves, and get money at the guys expense. :tongue.gif:
edit> Dammit, qlmmb2086 beat me to it. :tongue.gif:
Sowwy... *crawls into a hole and hides* ._.
But to elaborate on what Smoo is saying... as you buy items the price goes up, generating a "ramp" of prices, meaning you buy some cheaply, and later on more expensively. When you start selling, you get that same "ramp" in reverse, meaning if the market has even a little buy/sell adjustment, you'd only be able to lose money.
Now imagine, if you will, halfway through artificially inflating the market, someone else checks in and says "Woah, the price of dirt is really high right now!" and immediately begins to sell their dirt. Now, while you resell, you get an even lower part of that "ramp," meaning your losses are even greater.
... I said I was going to hide, but apparently a good math-systems debate is too juicy for my nerdiness. :geek:
I'd like to know if your talking about a universal 'market' spread across all servers where the servers all pool resources, or a single market per world.
I'd like to know if your talking about a universal 'market' spread across all servers where the servers all pool resources, or a single market per world.
Overall, though, I like this idea.
I would say it would be almost required to have it be server-specific just for the sake of making it easier to implement. (Notch can correct me if I'm wrong.)
Also, since multi-player servers are managed by individual users, it makes sense to isolate their markets; you could totally screw up a global market if -one- person mods their server to give themselves a full inventory of 64-stacked diamonds. That, and a per-server market system means that the market goes back to its default state if ever the server owner presses the reset button (and probably would also give mod-happy owners more control over their market's initial values for the same reason).
The setup: First, you seed a little database with default values. Say, the rarity values for different stuff, from map generation rarity. Then, players build access points somehow. Land claim flags, shop chests, whatever. Not important.
How it works: Players access the exchange, and sell materials for "exchange credits." The rarer the material, the more expensive it gets. The more quantity gets dumped in, the cheaper it gets. With an initial seed of approximately correct data and quantity, this should work.
So, a player can buy/sell loads of stone at a half-credit or so per unit. And buy/sell diamond for several thousand per unit, ore for a few hundred, etc. The materials (other than maybe an initial seed) are all what players chuck in, in exchange for credits... for stuff. Maybe tools too? I dunno.
Then, you have a potentially usable money system. Doesn't NEED any input/output of credits other than materials in/out... that would complicate things.
But as a base exchange, with deposits lowering the cost, and as supplies dwindle, the price climbing higher, it would be an interesting way of getting rid of stuff, and getting stuff you actually want. Or, toss some credits to a new guy who hasn't been mining for long, when you have more than you know what to do with.
For examples, if there was one unit of diamond left, it would cost THOUSANDS of credits. And if there were 50,000 stone in it, they would be less than one credit each. (Approximate guesses). The less stuff, the more motivation to mine some, toss it in, and buy cheaper stuff to mass-build with. This is all taken care of by server side math and a relatively small database of the various materials, and the available quantities.
Opinions-
Would it be a good idea to combine this with money? Drops from monsters, used up to hire guys or buy special stuff?
So people who like farming would be able to sell wheat in exchange for tools, and a miners could sell ore/stone in exchange for wood, and people who enjoy killing trees wood, etc.
There should probably be a slight tax built in though, to represent the convenience of having a ubiquitous material exchange system. That and it should be slightly harder to access than chest stores, via non-instant material arrival times, and the system only being accessible at one point per player (their main claim flag, or something).
Tell me how this isn't basically the stock market.
More like crashes of generally every month.
But do you trust the community to self govern the stock market?
Money no, drops if proccessed, and no special stuff, makes the effort bland and clunky.
...The system is entirely automated. Zero player interaction other than "put materials in for credits" and "take materials out for credits." What it does, is establish worth for materials. It relies on players wanting one thing more than another, and other players with different wants. There's no way (and no NEED) to "govern" an automated system like that.
Then, the credits obtained from this system could be used for other things. Stuff to be determined at a later time. It provides a currency with a base value, yet does not provide an infinite source of material- all the crap you buy was put in by someone else, and all the crap you sell goes into storage. Yet the game doesn't reward sheer spam TOO much, because the bulk stuff- dirt and stone, will be very low-worth, compared to other ores.
And it would certainly simplify if if the system omitted all crafted items. Leave that to player-run shops, I suppose.
What the system could do, is have a base pool of money. Money (the amount possessed by players) could be removed from the system by buying special things, and added by their mining efforts, dumped into the exchange. As the total grows, the prices go higher. As the pool of player money dwindles, stuff gets cheaper. The system is tuned to keep things at a more or less fair rate.
And there should probably be a soft cap- if a player hoards enough cash, they can still dump stuff onto the exchange, but the exchange stops giving money, and money sinks go up to a maximum amount. This prevents one player from hoarding enough to start seriously affecting the others.
This seems like it could work out well, but on the other hand, I'd hate to see it everywhere, maybe only used in specific circumstances, or not come into effect until X amount of ClaimFlag groups have reached a specific milestone in development. This could be determined by requiring them to build a kiosk to facilitate this ability.
I'd go so far as to say if something was implemented, granting the ability to block off access to it altogether in server parameters.
Others might mine excess stone, and WANT diamonds/gold/iron- natural match there!
It's how the economy of the MUD works- there's a central pool of money, some LARGE number. Spawned monsters take a share, delivering it to players. Money is removed, and put back into the pool when players spend it on various things which effectively destroy the money- basically anything but giving it to other players.
This would use a similar system, it would be easier to get credits initially, but as the stockpiles grow, and more players remove credits, the payouts decrease. The system self-regulates, to keep things more or less balanced. One thing it might do is ignore money carried by players who are deemed inactive by last-login or something.
That central credits store could ALSO be used to pay out, directly or indirectly, money to players who would rather kill monsters than mine/gather. At that point however, more credits are appearing than disappearing, so the game needs ways to leech money out of the general player-store. It's economy stuff, this is actually pretty basic stuff. You want complicated? Go start an EVE-online trial, you'll can't even see the entire thing if you play the entire 14-day trial. (Entire hidden markets for capital ships and nullsec alliances...)
And optionality depends on dependency, a base money system might be needed for other options. Players might need money for other stuff, and a non-arbitrary worth system is nice. Otherwise you wind up with magical MMO currencies that don't mean a whole lot in most situations.
Warning: Metawarning
Only the back end is complicated. All the players see is a list with each type, and the price for each. As they sell stuff, the price gradually decreases. And as they buy out the market with credits from selling stuff, the price on what they buy gradually increases. This allows player the option of being able to trade materials, fairly, with any other player, online or offline.
And it also provides a currency that can be used for OTHER money systems, rewarding players for other activities- monster hunting and farming come to mind. It could be designed with a slight bias to allow players to accumulate a certain level of wealth, and a counter-weight once players reach higher levels, to prevent one player from accumulating a disproportionate "slice of the pie."
spell check died today...
Let's assume the market has 2000 dollars and 19 iron ores. (Dollars and Iron Ore are used for example purposes only; I personally would like to see a crafting table recipe for breaking single gold bars into 5 gold coins.)
-Selling one iron ore would give you 100 dollars, or 2000/(19+1). The market would then have 1900 dollars at 20 iron ore, meaning selling another would give you 90 dollars, or 1900/(20+1) rounded. The third would give you 82 dollars, or 1810/(21+1) rounded.
-Buying one iron ore would cost 111 dollars, or 2000/(19-1) rounded. The market would then have 2111 dollars and 18 iron ore, meaning buying another would cost you 124 dollars, or 2111/(18-1) rounded. The third would cost you 140 dollars, or 2235/(17-1) rounded.
-A % modifier to buying/selling can be added so that the market naturally grows as it is used, becoming more stable with more available funds and stored goods, and able to keep up with the growing demands of players (increase prices and reduce sell value by an additional x%). The actual percentage can be left up to Notch. Without this modifier, buying and immediately reselling before another purchase is made on the market will return the exact same value, since after buying the new selling price is the old buying price.
The above examples use relatively low numbers to demonstrate the system's automatic price adjustment; in actual application you would likely be using millions of dollars and thousands of items to "seed" the market, meaning price adjustment would be much slower. While the system itself seems complicated, the end user sees none of this; they only see that as they sell a hundred units of dirt, the value of dirt goes down (since the market has less money to give out, and more dirt to depreciate it's value). Essentially, the system is a way to automatically analyze the value of items within the game. Values are not actually "fixed" by the computer; all that really matter's is the players' perception of value. This is because the market self-adjusts to player perceptions of value. If the market "overprices" an item (greater value compared to effort to attain), players will sell that item to the market, reducing its value. Likewise, if the market "underprices" an item (lower value compared to the effort needed to attain it), players will buy that item rather than gather it themselves, increasing its value. Obviously, rarer items (and thus more difficult to attain) will always be more valuable on the market than more common items.
I actually thought about creating my own thread to describe this system before I ran into this one; though I feel this system could use a thread of discussion by itself, I'll respect the forum rules of "one thread per suggestion type." Really, a lot of the specifics of implementation are the same for both systems anyhow, like the proposed kiosk used for accessing it.
EDIT: Edited to correct faulty logic in market growth.
In my version of the math system for implementing this, that sort of artificial market inflation is impossible. Get a pen and paper and play around with the numbers (or if you're like me, create a spreadsheet or write a simple program to do it for you); if your math is correct, buying massive quantities of an item to inflate its value and then re-selling it will always put you at a net loss.
Uhm, not unless the person who programmed the system was terminally retarded.
As you buy something, it goes expensive, yes. And as you sell it, it gets cheaper. There obviously shouldn't be any way to sell in bulk without the price automatically changing.
Besides, it'll be in stacks for bulk materials, they go back in at the same price they came out. As more stacks go back in, the price drops back down, and if there is a decent economic model, players will probably get less than 100% of their investment for repeated buying and selling of the same items. And lose money instead.
So someone trying that stunt should lose like 5% of their money, and if other players NOTICE the stunt, they could toss some extra dirt stacks on the exchange themselves, and get money at the guys expense. :tongue.gif:
edit> Dammit, qlmmb2086 beat me to it. :tongue.gif:
Sowwy... *crawls into a hole and hides* ._.
But to elaborate on what Smoo is saying... as you buy items the price goes up, generating a "ramp" of prices, meaning you buy some cheaply, and later on more expensively. When you start selling, you get that same "ramp" in reverse, meaning if the market has even a little buy/sell adjustment, you'd only be able to lose money.
Now imagine, if you will, halfway through artificially inflating the market, someone else checks in and says "Woah, the price of dirt is really high right now!" and immediately begins to sell their dirt. Now, while you resell, you get an even lower part of that "ramp," meaning your losses are even greater.
... I said I was going to hide, but apparently a good math-systems debate is too juicy for my nerdiness. :geek:
Overall, though, I like this idea.
I would say it would be almost required to have it be server-specific just for the sake of making it easier to implement. (Notch can correct me if I'm wrong.)
Also, since multi-player servers are managed by individual users, it makes sense to isolate their markets; you could totally screw up a global market if -one- person mods their server to give themselves a full inventory of 64-stacked diamonds. That, and a per-server market system means that the market goes back to its default state if ever the server owner presses the reset button (and probably would also give mod-happy owners more control over their market's initial values for the same reason).