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TheArmyKing10
13th March 2016, 18:06
==============================CURRENCY============ ==================
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So i was thinking why there isn't any way to get /money.
Maybe there is but i just can't find out how.

So i came up with a in-game currency idea an old server used.
They used specific ingots as money and i will explain down bellow how this works.
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:goldingot: INGOTS VALUE:

1 Platinum Ingot 4120 = 20$
1 Gold Ingot 4115 = 15$
1 Silver Ingot 4123 = 10$
1 Bronze Ingot 4113 = 5$
1 Copper Ingot 4114 = 1$

NOTICE: only these 5 can be used to gain money (placeable)
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:painting: HOW IT WORKS:

1. Place 1 or more ingots down (shift + right click).
2. Put a PRIVATE sign on it so none can steal.
3. The ingots you placed will show in /money but only if it has a PRIVATE sign on it.
4. You can have multiple stacks/piles of ingots with PRIVATE signs to store more cash

NOTICE: If you have a PRIVATE sign on it and add someone to it, it wont transfer to /money
NOTICE: 32 ingots in 1 stack/pile
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:notch: HOW TO TRADE:

1. Pick up some ingots to give to somebody for what they offer in return.
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Rainnmannx
13th March 2016, 18:19
Can you give an example of how this would work, go through the steps each person would do.

TheArmyKing10
13th March 2016, 18:29
Can you give an example of how this would work, go through the steps each person would do.

What do you mean by give an example? i put a "how it works" in the post, can you specify what exactly i need to explain more?

Rainnmannx
13th March 2016, 18:49
1. What plugin is used to show money for the piles you put a sigh on?
2. If you are going to give them ingot in return for something why would you need the plugin for money?

TheArmyKing10
13th March 2016, 18:54
1. What plugin is used to show money for the piles you put a sigh on?
2. If you are going to give them ingot in return for something why would you need the plugin for money?


1. I dont think there is a plugin for it but if theres a good developer in the staff team maybe he/she can somehow code it to work

2. Ingots are a way to show people your currency and how much effort you put into tfc, you dont need to pay people with ingots but some people might request it to raise their money. Economy is a great thing to have because sometimes people dont know what to pay with if someone is offering you something.

Rainnmannx
13th March 2016, 19:05
Ok, say someone has hides and wants food, and some has food and wants hides, how would that work?

TheArmyKing10
13th March 2016, 19:33
Ok, say someone has hides and wants food, and some has food and wants hides, how would that work?

Then they just trade those 2 items, but sometimes people maybe wants to ask for ingots to increase their /money. Maybe the ingot can be traded for stuff at a shop at spawn?

TheForestHermit
13th March 2016, 23:15
Not sure how I feel about the ingot stacks, but I have seen the forge money aspect integrated into the system nicely.
Using the signshop plugin. Players were able to set up 'shops' and sell anything that didn't decay/wear out.
New players were able to gain currency by selling gems, flowers, zombie meat. bones.. things that have no real use in TFC to the server / admin shop.
( this would also be a great way to set up buying saplings or flowers for decorative purposes.)

I thought it added a great deal to the general experience of the server at the time. ( unfortunately for it, it wasn't happydiggers and was run on weak hardware with no staff. poor thing)

azariven
24th March 2016, 01:56
yeah, i think the server could benefit from having currencies.

sign shops are a great application, we should have one.
It's impossible to be on 24 hr to trade with the right people with the right resource.
For a huge town, this problem becomes very apparent. we have a bunch of commodities and need a huge quantities of something else.

So a signshop/currency would greatly help us speed up the town build when it comes to buying mortar and cobblestones.

Rainnmannx
24th March 2016, 04:58
Lets say hypothetically we install the Sign Shop plugin.
1. How would people make money?
I see selling junk as a possibility, what would prices be and what would the items be that where bought?

azariven
24th March 2016, 05:42
Lets say hypothetically we install the Sign Shop plugin.
1. How would people make money?
I see selling junk as a possibility, what would prices be and what would the items be that where bought?


I think the commodities should be sold to the players not the system.
So if you have something that people want, despite its junk, you can still make money.
For example, i'm buying alot of flowers, sands, dirts....

The price should be set by the player themselves. so if it;s too expensive no one will buy, too cheap, it runs out fast

the player should setup shop somewhere near his town spawn, or have the town spawn inside the shop so customers
can obviously tell where it is.

Rainnmannx
24th March 2016, 06:00
No one starts out with any money, how do people get this money to spend?

azariven
24th March 2016, 06:51
Good point.

Maybe each person start with an initial fund of say 100 bucks and then there is an admin shop that you can sell items back to to get money? Also get money for playing minigames and quests? I don't know, there could be many options.

As for what each item is worth to sell to the admin shop, i would say we need to think about the abundance of the item and how hard is it to obtain/refine it. Ideally it would be calculated based on how much time an average person will have to spend to get certain item.

There should be a buy option for the shop too. So for example, we can sell red steel ingot for 1200 bucks, but the cost to buy is 1800 or 2400. How much each item is worth to buy from the admin shop, i would say it would depend on how much it benefits the player. so naturally graphite will cost alot because it saves so much of a person's time to find it. etc

As for the items sold in the admin shop, we can start simple with accepting only ingots. So you can sell your metals, etc. The shop can start selling basic stuffs like leather(painful to make), graphite(essential for teching), decoration items, etc. We start small and gradually increase the items accepted and sold based on server testing.

Also, if possible, we could add a counter to the items bought/sold by the admin shop and have a dynamic price. i.e, if the shop takes in too many gold ingots, gold price will drastically drop, etc.

It's not an easy solution because we're trying to create an economy that's going to work well for years to come.
we have to think of all the possible exploit people are gonna have before we get a ruined economy.
Each item sold/bought will have to be looked at in detail too. tfc is notorious for item duplication.

The last thing we want is a hasty decision that cause a market crash and ruins all the fun.

Jiro_89
24th March 2016, 19:35
What's the point? Bartering will still be much more efficient and geared towards the needs of the two players trading. People have tried setting up currency 5 different times that I can remember and they all failed in less than a week. From our experience there aren't any chest shop plugins that work correctly with tfc/cauldron. We tried many, many plugins. Towny has its own currency but would require server backing which I'm not comfortable with because once again, what's the point?

Rainnmannx
24th March 2016, 23:33
People may set up a shop in Highrock, and I would facilitate trades when the owners are not on.

Chogata
25th March 2016, 09:33
From our experience there aren't any chest shop plugins that work correctly with tfc/cauldron. We tried many, many plugins.

Did you test any plugins that allow simple bartering? Stuff for other stuff, without any currency involved? Or only ones that require currency?

grizzle
25th March 2016, 17:48
I'd also be in for buying otherwise 'useless' things, such as flowers and certain raw stone blocks. Possibly gems. Also sequoia saplings, maybe some other saplings. I'd say ideally the player exchanges precious metals and gems for some sort of digital currency (digital meaning it doesn't exist as an object). That serves the purpose of allowing people to trade where one doesn't have actual items the other desires - the same purpose actual currency serves irl. Bringing more usefulness to gold, platinum, and gems would be cool. If possible it'd definitely be good to make the system dynamic, so it lowers the price given for an item, the more of it people sell. In such a case it'd be good to have a 'server store' possibly, so people could buy those things back from the server, to better simulate an actual economy. Certainly understandable if there's no good plugin options though.

How would it work to have you broker it Rainn? We set up a shop with one or more locketted chests with ours and your name on it? Some signs stating what we'd trade (signs locketted so people couldn't mess with them and replace them with a lower price)? Then someone arrives, tells you what they want, gives you the purchase price, you put it in the chest (or lockette it with yours and the seller's name on it if the purchase medium is ingots), and get the item(s) out, and give the purchased item to the buyer? Sounds doable, if more clunky than a currency system. And of course and extra burden on you.

In either case, I'd be interested in a shop system of some kind for sure. Both buying and selling.

InsaneJ
25th March 2016, 17:51
We have reserved a row of plots around the spawn area. The idea was that towns could request one of these plots as an embassy plot. They could then turn this into advertisement for their towns, or trade shops.

So basically what we've had on the previous servers :)

grizzle
25th March 2016, 17:56
We have reserved a row of plots around the spawn area. The idea was that towns could request one of these plots as an embassy plot. They could then turn this into advertisement for their towns, or trade shops.

So basically what we've had on the previous servers :)

But how is that supposed to actually function? Is it treated as an outpost? Or does it have different permissions somehow? The key is facilitating trade when players aren't on at the same time. Is such an embassy plot basically just a place to put signs telling people what you're selling, and what you're buying, and then they have to get on at the same time and contact you (the seller) and work out the details to do in an in-person trade? I mean that's great, but it's clunky.

InsaneJ
25th March 2016, 19:02
That's the general idea yes. Two players exchanging items when they are meeting face to face. Here's how embassy plots work:

Embassy Plots
Embassy plots are designated with /plot set embassy
A mayor can use /town set embassyprice {$$} to set how much embassy plots are sold at by default. This can be overriden when a mayor puts the actual plot up for sale with /plot forsale {$$}. A mayor can also charge an additional embassytax with /town set embassytax {$$}. This tax is charged in addition to the normal plottax.
An embassy plot can be bought by any player, whether they are in a town or not. The townblock remains owned by the host-town and a mayor from the host-town can take the plot from the owner at any time. Embassy plots can also be changed into shop plots, allowing for larger shop towns, where many different towns' players can set up shops.
When a player leaves a town they do not lose ownership of their plots if those plots are set to be Embassy plots.

sauce (https://code.google.com/archive/a/eclipselabs.org/p/towny/wikis/HowTownyWorks.wiki)

As for economies and TFC. We've never had economy on TFC for a couple of reasons.

The first one is a technical one which pretty much prevents us from running a reliable shop. TFC is notorious for messing up player inventories and how item transfers are handled. There also is a problem with TFC items having all sorts of NBT data that make spawning in items a pain and very unreliable. And yes, we have tried a lot of plugins. Ranging from sign/chest shops to command driven shops and villager traders. You name it, we've tried it. And all of them had trouble with TFC. Either the items are corrupt, don't get transferred correctly or are prone to duplication.
The second one is that we think players shouldn't be able to exchange a ton of cheap low tier stuff for expensive high tier stuff. In essence the whole digging-up-a-mountain-of-dirt-to-get-red-steel-armor thing isn't something we like. It basically allows players to skip TFC progression. Players who aren't willing to put in the time or effort to learning how TFC works can manage to get end game stuff quite easily. Red steel armor is something we think players should be proud of. Not something you can get by grinding something simple.
The third one is that we don't want to have any kind of economy with Towny where it's most commonly used. If you have a town, it will exist for as long as the server exists. There is no upkeep and the amount of plots a town can have depends on how many players are in a town. Meaning better and more popular towns grow while bad towns (sorry :B) do not grow.


I have no problem with people discussing economies or other ideas. In fact, I encourage it. However so far I haven't heard a compelling argument for us to revisit the horror that is item spawning in TFC (shops) and try to get it to work reliably. What I also don't like is the idea of having a dynamic economy where the players who sell stuff first get a better price than players who sell stuff later. I think that's just unfair and TFC is not a race.

So if you want us to seriously reconsider implementing an economy, then you need to come up with some kind of brilliant idea for it. Give us an idea we simply can not say no to and we'll do it.

grizzle
25th March 2016, 20:15
I'd definitely agree with the worthless item not being an initial exchange. The notion of selling zombie meat for money is ridiculous. I don't know what's technically possible, so forgive me if I'm talking about things not technically feasible.

Within the scope of a digital currency, Rainn correctly pointed out that nobody starts with digital currency, so there has to be a way for it to be created initially - i.e. selling items 'to the server'. This indeed would need to be carefully controlled, with only certain items saleable. Hence the notion of limiting to 'money metals' like gold, silver, and platinum, and also gems. These are all things that require mining, and so they should be balance-able I would think, in terms of effort vs reward. The server would only buy these items, and only sell these items (if that were a thing). ores, ingots, and gems do not contain nbt data to the best of my knowledge, so I'd think they'd be safe in that sense. But these would really be just to inject the initial digital currency into the system. Once there's sufficient currency, the server market could be throttled to reduce the attractiveness of selling to the server - and conversely loosened up again if the digital currency supply runs low (which would happen, due to players ceasing playing, with a bunch of currency in their account).

Now outside of the server market, players would set the prices for anything else, including dirt, flowers, saplings, and other low-grade items - the server would not deal in those. The concern about buying into high-grade metals would, I would think, not be such a concern in the player market. for one, players can already trade these things. If I want to trade a red steel anvil for a stack of flowers, I can do that. I don't think a more 'code facilitated' market would change that much. Speaking for myself, I'm not going to be selling high tier metals for pittances (or at all). I have a hard time believing anyone would. By the time one has colored metals, what would a lower tech player have that you would want? I could see there being a glut of bronze on the market though possibly. I've seen bronze tools change hands for pretty low sums already, so again, I'd wonder how much that would change things. Obviously you admins have infinitely more experience in this regard, I'm just kind voicing a train of thought here.

The way I see it, there's about 4 tiers of market:

1 - players set up a shop in their town, with signs saying what they want and what they'll buy. This is what we could do without any support, or embassies.

2 - embassy plots at spawn. Basically the same as tier 1, but with the added convenience of the 'shops' (really advertisements) being all in one spot for ease of perusal. It's better than having to hope town to town and find if the town has a market. I might also be nice if, beyond each town having their own embassy, there were communal plots for certain items - so for instance there's a 'sapling' plot, where anyone can post signs stating what saplings they're selling, or want. That way a player looking specifically for saplings can look in that one plot. Which is even more convenient.

3 - 3rd party facilitated - this is where Rainn or someone trusted facilitates trades between people not online at the same time, in a market area - whether in Rainn's town, or at spawn embassies. All the conveniences of tier 2, but the added benefit of trading with people who are not online at the same time. Still requires the third party person to be on, and spend their time administrating it. Everything up to here doesn't really require any code support beyond lockette, I'd imagine.

4 - coded shops. This would be some kind of coded addon that automatically somehow allows a player to buyer from another who is not online, without requiring an intermediary. Whether through a digital currency or some other method. It sounds like this is the tricky one, due to code imperfections in tfc itself, and the addons available.

SHOP ADDON IDEA
I'll toss this idea out there, as to what an ideal shop system might look like, though I know it surely doesn't exist, and might suffer from some of the same problems the other addons tried have. Just for the hell of it. Maybe some coder see this discussion and come up with a new addon that solves it all! :rolleyes:

It seems like maybe due to the problems with servers spawning items, the best addon would basically store a digital phantom currency on the player, and a shop would simply consist of some sort of shop container, similar to a double chest, but distinct. Patrons can remove items, but every time they remove one, it deducts an appropriate amount from their digital currency. Once they're out of money, they can't remove any more items from the container. This would appear to solve the spawning problem? Because all items would in fact exist inside the container. So they would have any nbt data intact, since they will be actual stored items. This container would probably need to accept ingots. Players would need to pay attention because if they remove an entire stack, it will instantly deduct the entire price of that stack (or the max amount it can based on the player's money). They cannot pick up a stack, divide it, and put some back. Patrons cannot in fact every put anything in these merchandise chests - only the owner (or others they somehow designate?) can do so.

Separately, there would be chests for patrons to place items inside, to sell them to the shop. Ideally this container might have a few slots for the shopkeep to place items the container will accept. Patrons simply place one of the allowed items in the container, and the offline shopkeeps' currency is deducted appropriately and given to the patron. If the shopkeep has no money in their account, patrons cannot place any more items inside. Ideally the shopkeep could control how many of a given item they will buy. For instance The chest might have 18 'compare' slots, and 18 item storage slots. the player puts one example item in the 'compare' slot (each compare slot will only accept 1 of any item). This allows patrons to sell up to one stack of that item to the container. Each compare slot would need some way for the shopkeep to set the price the shopkeep is willing to pay - perhaps simply a number field. If the shopkeep will buy multiple stacks, they have to put an example in multiple 'compare slots', and set the price for each. one container might be able to purchase 18 stacks of the same thing, 18 different stacks, or anything in between.

The items sold to the chest are stored in the chest till the shopkeep picks them up. If the chest is full, patrons can't sell those items to the shop. Patrons cannot take these items out. So the shopkeep can sell only what they want, and buy only what they want. This means patrons must be careful not to buy more than they wanted, or sell more than intended - they won't be able to get the items back automatically. That would seem like an ideal system to me, one which does not depend upon spawning items. Whether it would avoid any other problems you guys have had, I don't know.

Marius49
25th March 2016, 21:58
Added the spoiler you required to your post.

InsaneJ
25th March 2016, 21:59
It seems like maybe due to the problems with servers spawning items, the best addon would basically store a digital phantom currency on the player, and a shop would simply consist of some sort of shop container, similar to a double chest, but distinct. Patrons can remove items, but every time they remove one, it deducts an appropriate amount from their digital currency. Once they're out of money, they can't remove any more items from the container.
You are describing every (chest) shop plugin in existence. They all give players a virtual bank account with virtual currency.


This would appear to solve the spawning problem? Because all items would in fact exist inside the container. So they would have any nbt data intact, since they will be actual stored items.
I'm afraid not. Yes, you can place items in the chest. A vanilla chest accepts all TFC items, that's not the problem. The problem is that you can't have a server shop spawn TFC items in a chest, container or player inventory and expect them to be reliable. Also if you put an item in the chest that has NBT data, then every item that has slightly different NBT data would be a completely different item. Since TFC likes to store timestamps, counters and damage values on all sorts of items this is a huge problem. Plugins can't tell that two almost identical items are in fact identical to the player. So you would have to sell two separate kind of items in your shop for basically the same item. And by two I mean hundreds.

The rest of your post continues to describe how chest shop plugins work. It's all been programmed several times before by different people. The problem is that they are Bukkit plugins. Bukkit only knows vanilla Minecraft blocks and items. It can deal with other kinds of blocks that are added by Forge mods but is limited in what it can do. As soon as blocks and items have NBT data, which TFC loves to use, then it quickly becomes unpredictable and unreliable.

The only way to properly solve this issue would be to make a server side Forge mod that behaves like a Bukkit plugin to players. A Forge mod could be made aware of TFC's quirks. For example it could 'freeze' food and set it's decay counter to when a player buys the item. That way food won't rot in a chest waiting to be sold. A Forge mod could use the ore dictionary to look up items and decide if they are of the same kind or not. This way you can sell all kinds of tools with different kinds of metal that are essentially the same thing. Same goes for wood, lumber and planks. A Forge mod could also hook into TFC's messed up inventory system and reliably move items around or facilitate trade between players.

I don't think anyone is going to program this though since Minecraft 1.7.10 is coming to an end and TFC 2 won't be out for a long time to come. Then again, you never know. We might get lucky :)

Rainnmannx
26th March 2016, 02:23
How would it work to have you broker it Rainn? We set up a shop with one or more locketted chests with ours and your name on it? Some signs stating what we'd trade (signs locketted so people couldn't mess with them and replace them with a lower price)? Then someone arrives, tells you what they want, gives you the purchase price, you put it in the chest (or lockette it with yours and the seller's name on it if the purchase medium is ingots), and get the item(s) out, and give the purchased item to the buyer? Sounds doable, if more clunky than a currency system. And of course and extra burden on you.

I would let the person have an embassy plot in my town.
no need to lockette chest, since you can set the perms how ever you like.
Things the shop would need.
Specific trades, i use You Get / x / I Get / y. ie line 1, You Get, line 2, 1 Gold Ingot, line 3, I Get, line 4, 2 Copper Ingots.
A Dropper as a trade bench, can see Highrocks trade center, just can be 1 dropper near the front. (This is for easy prism tracking)
A place with the items to be traded, A place for the items received.
Its not perfect of course, it could give someone more time, and could be a cetral place for people to come shop.

Towns could also set up there own trade centers, using droppers with lockette.
posted signs with trade.
dropper with both names on the sign
someone wants to trade / they could put the items in the dropper and mail the person saying what they want based on the sign
the other person when on could remove the items and put the trade inside then mail.
the other person picks it up.
if the trade doesn't go or wait is to long they can always remove the items.

Bofgirn
26th March 2016, 02:45
What about just using droppers, the above money metals and prism. We could simply give all players access to the command to see whom removed/ inserted items in the dropper, this will allow the players to determine without staff if something is missing. players would set prices for the items in the dropper, then have a dropper next to it for the money metals to go into. Players would only be allowed to have say 4 sets of droppers (decided by staff), the money metal values would be the same as used above or what is set staff. An entire mob protected area around spawn would be where the droppers are setup. players could buy droppers from staff, other players, or make their own.

Rainnmannx
26th March 2016, 03:47
Anyone can use prism already :)

azariven
28th March 2016, 04:24
how about....

Limit the amount of things you can sell to the server shop? Like, you can only sell metals?

Also, an embassy in highhold would be fun too for the time being. I would love to set something up like that rain.

The way i see this shop working is.. I have a bunch of items I want to sell and a bunch of items i want to buy. I assign an arbitrary value to each item, say if i'm selling seeds, bronze tools and buying bushes, cobble. i assign: seeds: 10, tools: 100, bushes: 50, stack of cobble: 10. Then someone comes with cobble can buy 1 tool for 10 stack of cobble or buy 10 seeds for 2 bushes. This way we don't need to have a universal price, but each player can setup their own trading rules.

something like that.

Rainnmannx
28th March 2016, 14:23
Plugins don't work well with tfc, meta data and how the inventory works makes it possible for it not to work properly. It would be time consuming when stuff goes wrong, doubt people would want a plugin and if it messes up its on them, it wouldn't work :).

See a few posts up to see how I explain the shop setup in highrock, and how a town could set up its own.