Thanks all for commenting on the last post. This was really interesting and gave me some insights that I want to share here. I think the big learning here is that we want people to USE the money instead of just buying something with it (such as a lot) and then don’t do anything with it. The next learning is that I want to stay away from people buying things that affects everyone else too such as switching the weather, warps or similar stuff. These items should be otherwise extremely expensive since they really have a huge effect. The other topic is about who is rich and who is not. The cash is only one sign. you would have to add the purchase value of every kingdom lot and then what they bought from the market minus what they sold and on top of that all the diamonds etc they hoard in their chests. So a realistic picture here is very difficult to paint.
Let me group the different expenses one can have a bit:
- Lots: If someone buys a lot, be it in the Kingdom, Empire or a new world, the issue is that they buy a space, but not necessarily do something with it. We see that currently in the kingdom. It’s not about the one person that has 5 street lots. It’s about every user that has one lot and does not build or even only mines there. It’s dead land that only causes admin efforts and server space. So we have to make sure that people buy this only because there is nothing else better to spend money for and because they really want to build something big and will do so.
- Vanity goods ( = name titles, hats etc): This is something I like a LOT. Why? People can rent those. People can show off an achievement. If rented, the money is out of the system and people have a reason to vote again to get more. They use the money, it does not affect others and the economy or the game. I will most likely do those.
- Services ( = /home etc): We could sell services that otherwise are not available such as /tppos. You could be taxed Uncs for every block that you are transported for example.
- Virtual assets ( = lot members, homes etc): These would be charged only when set, so the impact is not really big.
- Taxes: Everyone likes to avoid taxes as we know. People feel taxes are generally unjust, and it simply breeds behavior. So if I charge people on cash, they will just buy lots, and then we are back to square one. Same goes for a cap in cash. Unless we find a tax that makes people do something we really want them to do, I would avoid those. One interesting tax could be on the ownership of a kingdom lot. Not too much, but if you do not vote regularly for example, one should not be able to keep a main lot. The question is what to do if someone runs out of money when they go on holiday? Reset a whole city? Does not seem fair. It would require a complex system so people do not keep one without paying and not too quickly lose everything…
- Consumables: The XP- market and other consumables can be interesting, but this is a sometimes a bit like “pay to win”. It can have very difficult dynamics, so I would have to think about how that can work and which blocks/items are good sellers. Player heads is one easy option here for example.
- New consumables: Lottery tickets is definitely something we can do. I am also working on a new skyblock system as soon as the lot manager is finished that will encourage spending.
Not to crazy on the Taxes. What about people like Pine , Jonno , and the others who have large cities. They will have to vote on several accounts a day to keep up with this , but the average player with 1 or 2 lots could possibly manage.t I like the rest of the Ideas , even more so the Lottery and Vanity Goods.
– 1 question. Will the cost of a /tppos be variable *cost per how far the tp is* or 1 set price + the amount of blocks tp’d?
This^
I bought those lots to build, and I have followed thru on that. If I were taxed on all those lots, I would have to give up some of it. That would be heartbreaking. I am using something on all those lots, and have plans to expand on ALL of them. A huge sprawling city and empire in the Kingdom. Unless you grandfather something in to those of us that bought lots before a fee is imposed, how can it be fair to people like Pine, Owl and I?
I really like the idea of vanity goods. Titles and hats would take money out of the system, yet I would continuously spend on them.
Side note/not a side note: Player heads would be a great re-addition as a large number of us have been wanting to claim them from the Hunger Games. Possibly a higher price, but they would sell.
I would prefer the vanity items idea to the tax on a lot idea. Unless the tax is a set number of votes or something.
The tax on Kingdom really frightens me, and I fear if this implements, I will have just wasted months in the building of my cities. Most of which has been done by just myself and only like 2 others.
As I wrote above, I do not think it’s a good thing to do on lots. Unless we find a proper thing to tax and a good way to do it, there will be no taxes.
Gotcha. Sorry Unc. I got worried. lol
And referencing the luxury tax, yes people would buy stuff before they voted f they were approaching the amount that would trigger the tax, but they would then be buying, which is what we want right?
Yes there may be a hoarding of diamonds, but they are so cheap right now, the price should be higher anyway. If diamonds get too expensive, people wont pay the high price, and will buy other things.
I like the idea of a luxury tax. Of course if you do that, then increasing the price of lots would be a catch 22. You have to save more money, and then you get taxed extra because you are saving up to spend more money.
This is definitely complicated.
If people want extra perms. by paying uncs i think it should be temporary since they might abuse it or something.
I agree with your point on taxes. When people realize that one town has less taxes then their current town they leave the town or in our case, the server. And when people see that they pay less taxes on smaller spaces they’re influenced to build dirt huts.
I vote for lots. Vanity items may work but I personally don’t like it. If buying but not using a lot is a bad investment, then buying vanity items is even worse.
Land in real world is the most valuable asset, but not on this server. The major reason is teleporting. In the real world, the best land means the best location. But on our server, location doesn’t really matter. I only need to walk there once, and next time I teleport.
To make thing worse, teleporting makes people less interested in building. No matter what I build, nobody’s gonna pass by and see it, because they all teleport directly to there own lot.
Ideally, I would like to see: 1) Teleporting is mostly disabled. The only teleport destination is my home, which needs to be purchased. 2) There is a town center that I must be physically there to do something, like buying/selling, using deposit, using portals, etc. 3) Lots can be traded between players at any price. 4) If I’m rich, I can buy a lot/house near the town center. I want to make it look pretty because there’s a lot of traffic there. If I’m poor, I can buy a lot/house in the countryside. It’s cheap and big, but I have to spend time commuting. Horses, minecarts and boats will become useful. 5) The town center lots can be as small as 16×16, 24×24 or 32×32, or even 8×8 apartments with only a chest and a bed in it for the poor. They are surrounded by public areas that only higher rank players can edit. Countryside lots are big. 6) One player can have multiple lots but only one can be set as home, e.g. can be teleported to.
Then the land at good locations will become very expensive and you can easily take money out of the economy system by adding and selling new lots.
Oops, I don’t know how to edit my post. “e.g.” -> “i.e.”. Sorry for my limited English. :)
Hmm… charging money for various things seems like a good idea. Taxes sound bad, but everything else sounds great. Right now im mostly just piling up money to save for that inevitable lava-lose-everything death. Sounds great!
I agree, as we’ve had this discussion in the past, and tried out various scenarios… Taxes are bad. They are hard to manage, put stress on big builders, confuse players that want to help, but don’t want to donate Uncs to the build just so it can survive another month. What happens when a build is complete? It becomes a huge sink that will eventually just vanish.
Vanity items, special items, and special, limited permissions would be good Unc-holes to sap some of the loose Uncs from the economy. I liked the mob disguise we used for a while. I used it all the time. It was fun. It also encouraged us to interact more with each other. I think buying spawners or rights to build certain types of ridiculous farms would just off-balance things again. (Let me pay 10k Uncs so I can throw off the gold economy of the server and make back that 10k in 2 days. Nah.)
Limiting /sethome, rather than /home, and charging for changes to your /home location sounds fair, except to the newest of players.
A lottery would be fun. It could be similar to a 50/50 raffle where a player can buy x tickets @ 100 Uncs per ticket. The value of the winnings could be figured at about 50 Uncs per ticket purchased. If 20 people each buy 10 tickets in an hour (That’s 20,000 Uncs spent) and the reward could be a tier system that returns items like a Dragon Egg, Nether Star, Beacon, Diamond Block, etc. randomly. We could even include a page on the website for people to ask for certain items to be added to a particular tier, etc.
I think the hat, mob disguise, /sethome fee, and lottery would work out to be the best options to remove unused Uncs. I think taxes would move people to bartering and limit the need to vote. I’m not sure I like the ideas of permanent or rented portals to/from city except in exceptional circumstances (like some of Pine’s builds).
Just my 0.02U.
One area I think could be charged on is the arena type things, like the wither arena and PVP arena, and an entry charge to Hunger Games. It doesn’t have to be a huge charge, but just enough to drain some money. For example, maybe 50-100 uncs per Hunger Games, and 500-1,000 uncs for the wither arena, as I know that one seems to be in more demand, and it would slow down those who tend to be killing the wither 14 times in one day. Also on the vanity options, I am very much supportive of this, maybe you could have a 5-10 unc postage fee on letters, I mean even though they are unreliable, those enderman postal workers deserve to get paid at least sometime or another. Just another thought, this could be a bad idea since I am no survival expert, but charge a darklands entry fee each time you enter, to make you plan out your trips a bit more. Also, you could look into adding PVP events such as spleef or something, that tends to be sort of popular, you could make it so users pay 100 uncs to play each, winner gets 150, and loser gets none, then 50 is taken out of circulation each time, and you could have other people pay to spectate and bet on the players and the winner can pay for a trophy head of the other player like Hunger Games, I know heads are in demand.
I agree with Ivasold, lottery is fun, it makes you want to use your money because you “may” have a chance to win. hat, mobdisguise and /sethome fee, is also something that would remove unused uncs. So Ivasold is right bout all that, at least that’s what i think.
It seems that consumables and vanity goods would be popular. I, for one, wouldn’t use them too much tho, except for maybe Daiyamondo’s head. I’d like to have that one. Over my fireplace.
I also love the idea of lottery, and I must admit that lottery is the only uncsink that has come up that I would spend my money on occasionally.
The ideas of /warp and /sethome etc. costing some uncs is good, but doesn’t really change the situation, because the costs are so tiny.
I also still think that the cost of buying more than one kingdom lots should rise about 20-30% per lot.
I don’t think that the kingdom lot rents would be any good, as someone already pointed out.
The luxury tax seems ok imo, jonno’s points were good.
leizh’s ideas aren’t bad, but the changes it would take would be way too much. The ideas themselves are okay tho, but not for this server imo.
I think it’s awesome that unc makes us all think about this kind of stuff and throw ideas at him, and he doesn’t just change things on a whim. He’s awesome.
I for one really appreciate that uncs taking the time to look into this for us all, much as Estebanismo is. We all owe him a great debt of gratitude for that.
The unc hoarding issue is a topic that affects the top 20 players mostly with over 20k in their banks (rough figures)
Of these top 20 players most are ranked up, have more lots than time to develop and vast stockpiles of wealth both unc and item based.
They’re largely interested in things that make their game easier / faster / more rewarding / showing off. This is what we want to encourage, not taxing them or making it harder to build or create or attract new players.
Let’s think additional functionality instead of thinking of gimping existing functions.
::: TITLES :::
I think vanity prefixes and suffixes and on names could be a really big sink for people
ie Daiyamondo the impatient
ie Lord pinebenj of HR
ie Azkedar, coder extreme
and could be handled through the story signs interface, ie you put down
/story TITLE
prefix
suffix
and when right clicked it takes x uncs and gives you the titles and is handled via the chat plugin (which allows for that if i recall right). If you wanted to limit the availability of titles etc you could make it that only signs placed in the city give the titles, so you could make a title purchasing shop.
::: ADDITIONAL SETHOME BUDGETS :::
I think incrementally increased sethome costs are a GREAT uncsink. you get x allowed per rank, then you can purchase additionals at incrementally increasing costs. So even an elder who has 8 homes set might drop another 2500,5000,10000,20000 to buy themselves additional homes. Usage costs on the actual warping to homes im not that keen on since this unfairly disadvantages players who use store rooms (most the same 20% we’re talking here) as it is very impractical to store goods in every world with any sort of order. Also gimps new, unc poor players.
::: PURCHASABLE WARPS :::
These were presented earlier but really do raise an interesting point. The worlds are so large now that transit via traditional walking / running is quite impractical. I miss the warp houses the original empire world had. They worked. Having expensive warps usable from the city spawn even if they use a different command (/playerwarp NAME) would be a great thing to be able to be purchased. Think 20k+ uncs each, as a start.
::: PURCHASABLE PORT TO LOT X :::
A set charge to warp to a lot in any world would see a lot of use even if it was 250 uncs. This would let players without the tp commands visit friends. It could also be set up in a similar manner to the titles as above, handled by the story signs and charged each time right clicked so you could set it up once and use it to warp between worlds.
/story WARP
FLAT
K
9
::: CHALLENGE MODE PLOTS :::
As mentioned previously by Unc these have a lot of potential. Basically a set design / environment with a goal of achieving set outcomes. Not only fun, but an uncsink for each attempt / reset.
::: LOGIN / LOGOUT CUSTOM MESSAGES :::
goes off to chase squirrels.
returns to this world, with squirrels.
price tag? 5k ish should work while leaving it accessible to most players.
::: DECAY ON LISTED GOODS :::
This is a contentious item but one that I really have to bring up. A lot of the issue with the shop we have is that listings never expire and never need to be maintained. The auctions of sticks I put up 6 months ago, still there. Blinkydudes 500 trazillion melons, there for months after he got banned, so on so forth. Endless, accessible supply devalues and trivialises the acquisition of material wealth in minecraft as in real life.
A few potential methods of encouraging a more…. fluid market would be things like the following:
Items listed quantities decay by 1% if they have not been purchased in a week (decay)
Listing charges so people arent just listing the 1 bonemeal they have in their bank but 500 at a time (also deals with the 0.0025 unc a piece issue noted earlier, why bother at that)
::: MULTIUSER PLOTS :::
One of the issues I see a lot of is kingdoms that are empty. bought, stripped at y5, and otherwise forgotten and abandoned. This points to them being too accessible for resource stripping. We dopn’t want to unfairly prejudice active builds however. One method of resolving this issue is to add a multiuser based expiry to the kingdom plots that resets only when visited. This means projects that have even (2-3?) semi active (once monthly) members would not have an issue but the kingdom lots bought by single players would not be worth buying for resource stripping as this is not the intent of the world and reduces unc hoarding by limiting the income generation ability of richer players. Indirectly this would force more users into multiuser builds / land ownership which would in theory cause players to expend more resources on the builds.
::: A NEW CITY :::
Im just kicking stuff around here, but I would also like to put some mad props out to leizh’s comments earlier up. A centralised, warp free world based on small plots (32×32) could potentially be a great way of eating up some free cash. Some of the higher ranks on the server have been commenting that the city could potentially use a refresher, with the existing world becoming effectively a contest storage and build showoff world. If you made a new warp free world where proximity to the centre had value you could potentially sink a lot of uncs as “daiyamondo road” “lilroc17 avenue” “drea parade” streets etc began popping up. If you also could devise a system that would allow users to transfer builds they are very proud of onto these locations that they own you effectively build a capitalism / showcase city that has value and players could trade between themselves for lots / positions.
::: MULTI-ACCOUNT VOTING :::
Certain users are generating / hoarding wealth largely driven by voting rewards and unc rewards across multiple accounts. Votes are made, routers reset to cycle the IP and voting on the next account continues. While the extra votes are good for the server, the influx of “printed” uncs and goods do not do good things for the market which is something that affects the server much more than the extra votes on a site do. Try and sell a jukebox for example based on the cost of materials that went into it. Currently the unc flow into the server is too high for the sinks available and II believe we may need to be looking into the oversupply of uncs, not just the sinks for them.
Apologies for the long post,
Psi.
There are some very good ideas in psiber’s post. Although I think for the ports/warps/custom messages a daily/weekly/monthly rent would possibly be better than a one-time payment.
I also agree on the unc flow problem. Maybe we shouldn’t have 4-5 vote options with 100 uncs for free each. Maybe 3 with 100u each or 4 with 75u each.
The problems with resource-stripping in kingdom lots are that:
1) They’re kinda cheap in a sense. If diamond ore sells for 400 a piece, it makes 10000unc kingdom lot profitable after 25 diamond ores found. You should find (correct me if my math went wrong here) 144 chunks * 3,097 diamond ore/chunk = 445 diamond ores – the ones that don’t appear because of lava, bedrock, gravel, caverns…. so you should actually find at least 200 diamond ores in total from a single kingdom lot. Well worth 10000 uncs financially thinking, even after you take into account any and all expenses and time needed to get them. And thats JUST diamonds, you’ll also find some iron, gold, redstone, lapis, coal, obsidian (lava), etc, maybe even emerald.
2) No-one actually supervises the use of kingdom lots, nor should anyone have to. But it’s not simple to implement a foolproof way to prevent the “wrong” uses of kingdom lots. Psiber’s idea of the lot expiring after a month is an okay one, tho it doesn’t prevent the resource-stripping, only frees up the lot a month after it.
I’m not saying the lots should cost more, but I am saying that a way to try and prevent that kinda behaviour should be figured out.
A lot of excellent ideas are being brought out through this discussion. I am not the most experienced player and have taken time to begin interacting with other players. The central city idea makes a lot of sense because it promotes interaction and idea sharing as well as goods. Maybe not requiring a new city just an addition to the current one. Even new players can get some uncs to let them immediately begin purchasing their wood starter kit and simple items for their journey to their lot. This will get them interacting with other players and the store immediately. Familiarity will encourage use.
Another idea for unc usage is to set a simple edited list of goods that are able to be purchased in the Dark Lands and Nether. The items could be picked but have a huge price…ie; 1 bread=750 uncs, 1 stone sword=2500 uncs. and so on. These will be bought because players won’t want to lose what they have worked hard for.