Shop prices

As most of us know if a shop sells a item they must also buy the item but neither of the prices are set at any number creating some variance. I think it might be a good idea to set the amount a item must be bought for at a certain percentage of the selling price it is sold for in the shop. For example if a shop sells a doodad for 100 coins it would be required to buy the same doodad for say 20% of their selling price or in this case 20 coins but whatever the percentage a shop owner buys back for it should be set for the following reasons.
In minecraft when a player becomes successful at a given task be it mining or farming they have three options. They can open a shop to sell whatever item they have; they can sell to individual players as needed this includes shops or they can just give the item away. These outcomes are entirely undesirable in the current system. With the first choice average players are forced to open a shop with limited wares selling only one or two items they happen to have to many of; second option they can sell a item to the rare player who asks in chat or to a shop for .0001 coins and finally if they opt to just give the item away it takes customers away from the shops thereby weakening the game economy.
Some players will argue setting the price they must buy items at in anyway will create an unsustainable business model where they end up buying more than they sell. However for every item they buy they are promised a profit of 80%(using 20% buyback) assuming their shop was viable in the first place. Furthermore, assuming the shop owner does not wish to buy any items they can still do so legally by keeping there shop chests full. In the event a particular shop becomes non-viable the shop owner can of course close the shop at their leisure to prevent lose of coin.
The primary benefit of setting the percentage a shop owner must buy items for would be a stronger in game economy where having x amount of coin becomes more than x amount of items from the admin shop.

We have tried something like this before Vamp, It is a pain to keep on top of as it means a constant check of all shops (which at the moment can be anywhere). We used to have a shop world, which even then was annoying as people still didn't listen.

The main problem at the moment is we have many players who can spawn items, some of these players will give other players items (so they can "help"), but some of these players also set up shop (and why shouldn't they, they are a player, so should be able to), to which it's only purpose is too make money, as money for them as no value, as they can spawn items.

Before we introduce the money system, players would trade item x for item x and basically;

"I need this, but i have this"
"Oh i need that, and i have what you need"

In some ways this worked better, but also cause augments as some people thought the stuff that they had was worth more, also some people didn't need anything, but wanted to offload there stocks.

So basically now, this is the same thing except now it can be done when the other person is offline, for example.

Person X is selling Stone, but doesn't want stone so B 10:0 S - why because they don't want it, so why should they buy it from people?

You also get people who only sell stuff to shops and never buy anything, this will cause problems as these people will end up with all the money.

Money will always make people greedy, it does in RL so why shouldn't it IG.

There are ways of fixing this, We can either be insanity harsh and tell people,

"if you gonna sell something you need to buy it as well for Xth of the price or you will be ban for a day"
"if you can spawn you can't have money"
"if you not willing to buy, you can't sell"

these would probably fix it, but wouldn't be a friendly atmosphere.

or we can go for the..... only staff can have shops - but this would defeat the purpose of having the shops.

Either way, at the moment the point of money is merely to have something to trade with, as other then that you can't spend it on anything

So why do people want money - cause it's money and money = greed.

IF we pretty much change the whole set up of the server.. (i.e - you wanna build there, then it will cost you X) - then it might work a little better, but then you wouldn't see as many nice, or big buildings as people could afford it. so it's really catch 22.

As long as there is a standard "currency" of which people use to trade then that will be what people want, even if they don't want anything that it is used to buy.

bit of a ramble,

On another note, if everyone who had a shop was to buy and sell, which would you do more of? given that you want need a lot of the materials, chances are you will farm a lot yourself... (like most)

It is completely impossible to ruin the economy of Oasis because each new player spawns with 30 coins, so there is theoretically an infinite amount of income with no cost(beside if you count banned people) so there is no economic problem.

mickdude2 wrote:It is completely impossible to ruin the economy of Oasis because each new player spawns with 30 coins, so there is theoretically an infinite amount of income with no cost(beside if you count banned people) so there is no economic problem.

Really? There are many ways to ruin an economy, I took economics and business in Grade 11 for god's sake. This is a prime example of inflation. Printing more money to get out of debt. It's what RUINS economies. Obviously you haven't the slightest clue what Business is, just look at the American economy, or the Greek! I could spend all day teaching you about Economics but I'd like to go do better things like staff the server.

I think as long as the adminshop is still there, if you mine you still have a steady income, thats where i made all my money. (about 40k)
so I dont worry much with that around.

None of this is about the quantity of money that can be obtained its about making the money more valuable currently your 40k represents represents the ability to buy items. However the items themselves determine the worth of the money. In other words the most valuable item in game should be scarce currently you able to buy 800 diamonds at the current price of 50 coins per but you've been playing a long time and separate from the econ based on your post. I have been playing for maybe a month now and i have over 60k i do not know why but money is too easy to obtain currently. I think with some changes to how we operate the economy items like diamonds for example will become worth more. im not an expert by any standard but i think having shops buy and sell items with the sell point at a fixed percentage is a step in the right direction to a more realistic and therefore more rewarding economy in game. in a ideal econ the admin shop would only sell items that can not be obtained because but we are a ways off from having the needed econ to do that.

So here's my 2 cents on the topic:

So you all know I ran the MegaMart for the longest time, and I based my prices partly on what I thought was reasonable and party on what the /shop function relayed (that is, when we actually had it). Prices looked something like this:

Diamond: 100 coins apeice
Iron: 1 coin per ingot
Gold: 10 coins per ingot
etc. etc.

Also another thing I did was selling and buying things for relatively the same price, to encourage selling as well as buying without cheating the system. Sure, the Megamart made no huge profits that way, but in that way, people always wanted to sell there and there was always stuff in stock.

Another thing is the chest shops. The megamart had people sell/buy custom orders for an agreed on price, especially when things were like 1/4 of a stack or whatever. The chests take away a certain aspect of the store in which the employees can bargain/haggle prices for certain goods. This also went for random uncommon items, such as a jukebox or power rails.

Im not insisting or demanding anything, but I think the economy would be more stable if we DIDN'T have chestshops, because yes, they are convenient, but now anyone can run a store anywhere and as kevo stated: "...Lead to inflation"

Once again, just my 2 cents.

-Commander

I like the idea of haggling but by forcing it shop owners would need to be online when a player wants to buy which is problematic because oasis players live anywhere from the western most part of the USA to East Europe. Furthermore haggling is still a option with the current system, when i make a shop selling x amount of wool for a given price nothing is stopping a player from sending me a message they would like to pay less because they are buying in bulk or buying less then the shops sells. two maps before the 1.2 map i even sold a player the access to my farm for a given amount of time because i was working on my temple. In short i think limiting the ways a customer can buy a item creates a barrier to economic participation that if implemented would reduce our servers economic flexibility.

vampiresfire wrote:I like the idea of haggling but by forcing it shop owners would need to be online when a player wants to buy which is problematic because oasis players live anywhere from the western most part of the USA to East Europe.

Well, hopefully there wouldn't just be one store running at time x to time y.

But back to the topic, having player stores would limit the ways people could buy stuff. But that wasnt the case with the MegaMart cause I put a damn lot of time and effort into it to make sure it was stocked with stuff everyone needed at any given time. The chest shops do allow for a lot of variety, but the current prices allow for exploitation of the economy, for example, someone said they had 40k on them. That was crazy back a few moths ago where like the richest people had about 10k tops and I as the owner of the store had maybe 5k on me at any time. The chest shops just dont help that cause either. But, I will admit, the megamart was like an omnipotent kind of store, cannibalizing other ones that tried to start up, but not intentionally, simply because we put in the most effort.

i should probably learn how to use the quote system but i haven't so

When you say hopefully there wont be one shop open at a given time that is the reality. i have only been here about a month but i can not think of more than 10 viable shops Ive seen my entire time on the server and there is little or no overlap between these shops as far as what items are sold. To exemplify i hold a monopoly on wool for all intensive purposes because im the only one willing to put the time in for wool on the scale required to meet demand; we cannot very well force people to open shops and supply them with legit items. I think we are moving toward a 1 store system that is owned by the active shop owners which i think is a improvement over what Ive seen in my time assuming the owners conduct the econ in a way that is fair to the consumer population. quintessentially the shop world can be viewed as a mega mart with multiple owners but if this happens its important these owners are regulated to avoid money hoarding the key will be to find a balance between selling prices and buying prices which is what i think setting a shop owners buying price at a percentage of their chosen selling point will help do.

If this could even help in anyway, but to make sure the shops have dedicated owners and people we can trust as a community, maybe we should make it so only x rank and above can create shops.

Hopefully once shop world is done we'll have plenty of shops again.

Well right now no one is completely broke, and if it ain't broke dont fix it. perhaps we are completely blowing this out of proportion and a solution is as easy as reopening shop world.

Yeah the obvious thing would just be to open the shop world back up, that way with all the shops in one place you can browse for both better selling and buying prices, which creates competition and better prices for the patron, that being said the shop owners would most likely not be losing out as long as they where not negligent of other shops prices, as well as the fact that if you own a sho pin the first place you most likely have a bit of money anyway.