Active Market

[MasterAegon]

What would it take to create an active market in spawn town? Perhaps something that allows players to set up shops in a very limited space based on the exchange rate of ores we already have in place. Would that veer too much from our aims or would it be plausible. I think it would be more proactive than dead threads on market or random chat "WTS" or "WTB".

It'd be nice to ignite an economy for those of us that want active buy/sell/trade. Maybe it could be based on emeralds alone somehow. Just a thought. Not sure the options at our disposal without going too far toward the standard plugins already in use elsewhere.

 

[Zor95]

Oh yeah... I forgot about that place...

So when Iria and Albion got together to play FTB we found a server that had a really cool mall at spawn. Upon reaching a certain rank you could pay a one-time fee and then a smaller, weekly fee to rent a shop. Players were responsible for building, organizing, and setting the prices for their own shop. Besides the massive lag it caused it was really fun. But that server had a constant 100-150 people on it so meh.

 

[Psychedelic98]

I like this idea, there should be different sizes of shops, though. The biggest ones would be closest to the tower, and have a large startup cost in addition to weekly/monthly costs to make sure that they aren't abandoned. The medium and small ones are further away, and cheaper, with no starting costs, just the weekly/monthly costs. It would be cool if a generator like structure controlled the plots so you could buy for large periods at a time.

There are some potential problems that I see happening though. Bugs in the plugin could lead to one party losing or gaining(both abusively and unintentionally) quite a bit. Also people might try to use shops as safe storage from raiders. For example, one could put diamond blocks for sale at a stack of emerald blocks each. No one could buy that, and I'm assuming the shops would be covered under the stealing at spawn rule.

 

[Zor95]

It should be possible to record all transactions in a document so if there is an error it will be visible.

 

[Cryptite]

I've never been fond of prioritizing who gets what 'stall' based on wealth, first come first served, etc. This creates an unfair advantage for early adopters or wealthy towns and leaves less room for new players or towns to be able to strive.

Something similar has been in the works for an.. upcoming.... thing... for the server. It's tough to say that towns just can't have their own stall, but while we do emphasize our town system, not everybody lives in one. We need to see about creating the fairest possible system. The other issue with personalized stalls is the ugly ones. I like the idea of having a market but I also like the idea of being able to sort of visually control it. Could be persuaded otherwise though.

In my 'market system', it wasn't so much that you had your own stall, but there were chests and each one represented an item or group of items. Take, for example, a "food chest". You could sell any of the cooked foods that minecraft has to offer and if you know you specifically wanted food, you'd know where to go rather than be forced to search among many shops just to find something you wanted (no problem with this, really, because it does encourage some exploration and work on the part of the consumer). This would also ensure you have the ability to comparison shop for the best price on items instead of having to find out which 5 random stalls are selling cooked steak and then buy from the cheapest one.

As for the chests, the way I think of it (and this has flaws I'm sure) is something like below:



In this example, all players who choose sell (steak, in this example) will have their specific stack of steak visible in the left column of the chest. All other players' steak is also in that column (or both columns if enough is being sold). Now at this point, either the steak is ordered from top to bottom either randomly, by name of player, or by lowest price. Hovering over the steak, one can see perhaps the seller and certainly the asking price. Because emeralds aren't necessarily important for everyone in the server, perhaps the asking price could be whatever you want, iron ingots, glass, something weird... We'd probably need to limit some of the things that could be used, but it's an idea. This makes the system more of a trade economy than a simple bank with items.

Taking the steak out and putting in your inventory will complete the transaction and, providing you have the proper items in your inventory, you can complete the purchase. Some of the harder to figure out things about this are the actual mechanics of selling things. I guess I envision a 'sell menu' much like with /menu whereby you put in the item(s) you wish to sell and then immediately after put in the exact amount you're selling it for. So if you're selling 64 steak for 2 diamond blocks, you put in the full stack of steaks, then you put in 2 diamond blocks, then you click a final item (option) to confirm the sale, then it'll show up.

As for recovering your successful trade... stuff, either there is some central repository double-chest in which all of your profits are stored for your recovery, or there is an additional menu within each chest you're selling at that you can do so at. Probably the "mailbox chest" would be the easiest for everyone.

Anyway, long winded, but those are my thoughts on the matter. Thoughts?

 

[andrekeroxd]

I think your market system is innovative and allows for the easy selling of unique items such as named or enchanted gear, books and brews. It sounds like a derivation of /menu. I say go for it!

 

[MasterAegon]

@Crypt, that sounds pretty spot on from what I could ever imagine. It is reminiscent of say...the WoW/GW2 auction system. It eliminates the argument of unfair shop placements if I'm reading it right. Correct me if I'm wrong:

A large, fixed marketplace with one/multiple chest(s) coded with the plugin you're describing. Patrons place items in the respective chest(s), setting the appropriate buy/sell price, and collect their resulting transaction in a mailbox of sorts at the front. This would keep people from capitalizing too much on the market when everyone else's prices are there. It would also mitigate people using it for storage if their sell price is insane, like Psy suggested. Then you could easily pinpoint people trying to do this.

It sounds way out of my league in terms of code but outstanding in the way of spiking the economy and promoting a little more community participation. If it can be done the way you're describing I think it sounds great (assuming, again, that I read it correctly).

 

[Cryptite]

To allay some of the fears Psy brought up about people using shops as a means of 'safe storage', one thought is that you cannot sell certain (valuable) items like: ore blocks, player heads, diamond gear, etc. A good way to measure this is to ask what would be sold at an auction. We don't really want this system to replace auctions necessarily. Things sold at auctions tend to be rarer (gear, heads, enchantment books maybe, rare blocks). The market should serve to be a place to buy other, more material goods perhaps.

Some other things we should consider:

• If you put something up for sale, notice that you get undercut, can you immediately withdraw your sale and re-post in order to undercut? Would this force a race to the bottom with people? Perhaps you can only withdraw a sale after x hours to ensure this can't happen?
• Should there be limits on what quantity of items can be sold? Will someone try to put up 20 stacks of an item in order to effectively drown out the other sales? I could probably limit this by only displaying the stack of items, but upon hovering over the item, you could see that there are actually, say, 10 stacks of the item available.

Like all things on Loka, we need to think hard about how the system could be exploited so we can ensure it doesn't or at least can't be easily exploited.

 

[Psychedelic98]

To allay some of the fears Psy brought up about people using shops as a means of 'safe storage', one thought is that you cannot sell certain (valuable) items like: ore blocks, player heads, diamond gear, etc. A good way to measure this is to ask what would be sold at an auction. We don't really want this system to replace auctions necessarily. Things sold at auctions tend to be rarer (gear, heads, enchantment books maybe, rare blocks). The market should serve to be a place to buy other, more material goods perhaps.

Some other things we should consider:

• If you put something up for sale, notice that you get undercut, can you immediately withdraw your sale and re-post in order to undercut? Would this force a race to the bottom with people? Perhaps you can only withdraw a sale after x hours to ensure this can't happen?
• Should there be limits on what quantity of items can be sold? Will someone try to put up 20 stacks of an item in order to effectively drown out the other sales? I could probably limit this by only displaying the stack of items, but upon hovering over the item, you could see that there are actually, say, 10 stacks of the item available.

Like all things on Loka, we need to think hard about how the system could be exploited so we can ensure it doesn't or at least can't be easily exploited.

I thought about it a bit last night, and the easiest way to avoid stuff like this happening is a maximum price, and a small deposit. The maximum price will keep the good stuff for the auction, while also preventing people from storing their good stuff, because someone could just buy it for the maximum price(I'll leave the number for discussion).The deposit will also cover the constant undercutting that may occur. You could withdraw your item, but you'd be forced to pay another deposit.

[*]Should there be limits on what quantity of items can be sold? Will someone try to put up 20 stacks of an item in order to effectively drown out the other sales? I could probably limit this by only displaying the stack of items, but upon hovering over the item, you could see that there are actually, say, 10 stacks of the item available.[/list]

I'd say this is a good idea, but it would also be cool if we had the choice to sell items in the amounts we want, say up to a single chest per lot.

 

[Cryptite]

I thought about it a bit last night, and the easiest way to avoid stuff like this happening is a maximum price, and a small deposit. The maximum price will keep the good stuff for the auction, while also preventing people from storing their good stuff, because someone could just buy it for the maximum price(I'll leave the number for discussion).The deposit will also cover the constant undercutting that may occur. You could withdraw your item, but you'd be forced to pay another deposit.

How do we measure this though if we allow items to be sold for any other item? If somebody is selling wheat for the price of iron or golden apples for enchanting tables or something weird. Or do we limit what things can be sold for?

 

[Psychedelic98]

I don't think it would make sense to allow things to be sold for anything other than iron, diamond, gold, or emerald.

 

[Cryptite]

I guess that's true. Would make my life easier. I was struggling with how, when creating your sale, to indicate what the buying price and item were. I didn't necessarily want to copy that other server's "type into the chat" feature, but it might be easiest. Especially if you want to just indicate sell price by typing simple things like "1i, 2d, 4g".

 

[MasterAegon]

This all sounds sensible to me. Sticking to ores for currency or even simply emeralds would alleviate a lot of problems. I don't know if you would consider implementing the bank again for such a purpose but that's a thought. All transactions could be executed through the bank balance and people can't simply store everything in it anymore because the ore exchange is one way now.

I also think selling in mass could be a good thing. Some people could specialize, so to speak, in being a provider in specific materials. One person may be particularly adept at gathering or farming one thing than another. So if I were to go produce 48 stacks of obsidian a day, people could buy it for a price. However, I would need redstone to do that on a regular basis. This would create regular trade and would correlate to a lot of other things.

 

[Zor95]

Which items would actually be worth selling with all the new villager trades opening up in 1.8? Building blocks?

 

[Cryptite]

To me the idea of a market based off selling and buying from/with other players is more attractive than with harnessing villagers which have the ability to be killed off, zombied, etc.

I'm not very familiar with the 1.8 villager trading updates though.

 

[MasterAegon]

Which items would actually be worth selling with all the new villager trades opening up in 1.8? Building blocks?

I'm in favor of player-to-player market than just villager trades also. That aside, won't all villager trades change after every 'x' amount of trades? Granted, I love that they've revamped the system and you get XP as well as fresh trades but I'd be much more drawn to a player market if I know I can go somewhere for a steady supply of what I need.

That being said, did you (Crypt) say you'd limit trades not to include valuable items? I have no argument for epic enchants and rare/named items, player heads, etc... However, are you thinking to limit the buy/sell/trade of valuable ores/blocks? I don't mean this to include something like endstone, but say diamond bocks or iron blocks. It wouldn't have the limitless potential that the ore exchange used to have but people could make transactions to get valuable building/crafting materials. It's often done in-game so I assumed it would be plausible in an actual market.

 

[Zor95]

All villagers of the same type will now have the same trades with only the enchantments to applicable items varying. They will never change and to reset a locked trade you simply need to use any other trade once.

White robe:
Librarian (now buys stacked written books, can now offer different enchanted books)

Purple robe:
Cleric (now sells 1-4 pieces of redstone, sells lapis, buys ender pearls and rotten flesh)

Brown robe:
Fisherman (buys string, coal, cooks normal fish, sells enchanted fishing rods)
Farmer (no longer sells melons, buys melon blocks, pumpkins, potatoes, carrots, sells cake and pumpkin pie)
Fletcher (buys string, sells bows, converts 10 gravel into about 7-10 flint *does not work in 14w02c*)
Shepherd (sells colored wool, buys normal wool, and sells shears)

White apron:
Butcher (buys raw meat, sells cooked meat)
Leatherworker (buys leather, sells leather armor, enchanted leather armor, and saddles)

Black apron: (note, all villagers with a black apron still buy iron ingots, diamonds, and coal)
Armorer (sells enchanted diamond armor, iron armor, chain armor)
Tool Smith (sells enchanted iron shovel/pick and enchanted diamond pick)
Weapon Smith (sells enchanted iron sword, enchanted diamond sword, enchanted diamond axe, iron axe)

 

[Cryptite]

It wouldn't have the limitless potential that the ore exchange used to have but people could make transactions to get valuable building/crafting materials. It's often done in-game so I assumed it would be plausible in an actual market.

If we go with what Psy suggested whereby you can only buy from the market with iron/gold/diamond/emeralds, then it might be weird putting up a stack of goldblocks for sale for.... diamonds?

 

[MasterAegon]

@Zor: I don't deny that villagers will be an invaluable resource. I've already started converting zombie villagers to have a free roaming villager town. However, for some people it seems it would be a very difficult venture to harness villagers in high enough quantity to have access to all of those trades. New players would find a market much easier to take part in trades as well. Again, I agree with you completely. I'm gonna enjoy having villagers. I just hope to see more involved buy/sell/trade between players.

@Crypt: I see what you mean. This is another reason I figured implementing the bank again might be plausible. If transactions came out of that with a flat exchange rate then it would be much easier. This of course would resemble iConomy but with distinct differences. Everyone would have to gather the resources to deposit into the bank. We also wouldn't be able to trade ores for diamonds again like in the past. So essentially we'd have a quantitative representation for the resources we deposit.

The only hole is being able to deposit everything you have (i.e., for safe storage). This could be done but it would be mitigated by either making it so that one cannot withdraw the balance at all or can only withdraw it in the form of emeralds. I wouldn't deposit all of my diamonds for safe keeping if I could only get them back as emeralds.

 

[Cryptite]

I think I'm gonna start building this system tomorrow. One thought. Should seller's names be visible on sold items? With the culture that is Loka I can see how unnamed items might make for a fairer system. Then again all of the cheapest sales would always go first... Thoughts?


Perhaps an an anonymous black market for such anonymous markets?