An Old Player Talks About The Economy

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NanaChan__

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Hello guys,

Most of you won't remember me, I am a really old player who has quit for a long time, coming back every now and then.

I always been focussing on the economy part of massivecraft and as some of you might remember I made lot of regals (silvers for the older players) by being a merchant.
I wanted to share my opinion about massivecraft economy at the moment since it changed a lot through the years.

When I started to play the community was really small and we were all in one world, it wasn't overcrowded and everyone could do whatever they like :)

The economy was awesome I believe, everyone was buying and selling and the shops were HUGE.
How is now? I think now the economy is broken, there is not much market for eveyone and lot of people complain that they can't make money. The richers are becoming even more richer and the poor are staying poor.

Diamonds are so underpriced and ores lost LOT of value over the months. Why? Cause there are too many worlds and too many ores and diamonds to find. And now with massiverestore plug in there are going to be even more ores around which will cause the price to drop even more.

I think there are too many regals and ores on the server. I want to know what the others think about this and if anybody else is with me I want to ask to the mods to find a way to reduce the number of regals and ores on the server and doing it in a smart way.

I really miss the time when diamonds were expensive and was really worth to go mining.

Thoughts?
 
AND! I would like to see the market the way it was before, now there are too many shops that are all the same, too small to look around freely and too crowded with signs everywhere. I think it was beautiful how the market district was in the first Ceardia, where you were buying a chunk and then you could build your shop however you liked it. That was just awesome, you could recognize your favourite shop from far and the shops were large and not overfilled with chests and signs everywhere.
 
Fishing ruined the economy, and will never recover unless a diamond/gold sink is made. Currently with /fix you rarely need to use diamonds besides for making the items themselves.
 
Oh ok thanks for clarifying what made the economy sink, that for sure helped to make it sink lol.
I really want to see a development team focussed on the economy, cause the way it is now it's crap.
 
In a world were you can be self sufficient, the economy is always doomed. Players can grow their own food and gather their own materials but can still sell stuff to make money.

It can't be fixed, money sinks can be made but they only put dents in rich players money piles.

It was always going to happen, just certain things like fishing sped up the fall of the economy.
 
Yawn to people who still perpetuate the idea that an economy stuck in the primary sector is a good thing, and that any other sector development is a sign of a breaking down economy instead of an expanding one.
 
The only way I see this possible to fix is by the richest players removing diamonds from circulation (via /trash or other disposal) from their own fortunes. Which is highly improbable
 
I didn't say that the economy that is not focussed in primary sector is broken, But atm there is no way to make money out of primary sector! Which is really bad cause is on of the most "active" thing that u can do in the game. I rather see a server where the economy goes better and people are mining then an economy where u can only sell role items to make money and people are just killing skeletons in dark rooms cause the other way is to sell god equipments
 
NanaChan__ said:
I didn't say that the economy that is not focussed in primary sector is broken, But atm there is no way to make money out of primary sector! Which is really bad cause is on of the most "active" thing that u can do in the game. I rather see a server where the economy goes better and people are mining then an economy where u can only sell role items to make money and people are just killing skeletons in dark rooms cause the other way is to sell god equipments
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you can do other things too to make money.
sell skins, sell art, etc....
how can teh first sector not be broken if everything you can buy, you can get yourself easily, why spend money on doing something you can do yourself? charity? nah, if i buy something it is cause i can't get it myself. ores? i can get that myself, no need to buy it.
Art? ohgod i can't draw stuf to safe my life. If i wanted a drawing i woulld be happy to spend 1K regals for a good piece of art. making money is easy, you just have to find where you can get it.
 
Honestly an easy way to help the economy would be to remove /fix. I know a lot of people would hate it myself included but it would help merchants that sell god gear A LOT. I personally have about 8 DCs of my own personal god gear and about 1/8th of that never gets used cause I just /fix everything before there is ever a need. With how overpowered enchanting has become after the 1.8 update we honestly don't even need /fix anymore and if it's not removed god gear will eventually become worthless.

However

The god gear market being in shambles isn't necessarily a bad thing. For one people are more inclined to PvP when gear is so easy to come by because I mean who really cares about losing a weapon it took very few regals to buy or 10 minutes to make and some potions that took even less time to make. Also as stated earlier in the thread everything you could ever really wanna buy is pretty easy to get yourself so beyond owning a faction and paying the faction taxes there really is no need for regals if you have a DIY attitude.
 
Honestly I think basing the ruined economy is based on the amount of ores that you find is ignorant. I can go mining for hours and come back with a stack maybe a little bit more. Fishing ruined the economy by far the worst. I used to be able to fish A stack or more of diamond blocks in a few hours. And staff have made money sinks, such as locking items with the /lock plugin for 10 regals per chest/door locked. The economy will not be fixed for a long while unless people trashed their fortunes which wouldn't happen.
 
krios41 said:
you can do other things too to make money.
sell skins, sell art, etc....
how can teh first sector not be broken if everything you can buy, you can get yourself easily, why spend money on doing something you can do yourself? charity? nah, if i buy something it is cause i can't get it myself. ores? i can get that myself, no need to buy it.
Art? ohgod i can't draw stuf to safe my life. If i wanted a drawing i woulld be happy to spend 1K regals for a good piece of art. making money is easy, you just have to find where you can get it.
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But that's not playing anymore!! Before people would buy ores cause there was more diversification! Before who had ores were miners, and they were mining all day, who had food were farmers and so on, people would buy diamonds even if pricy cause they didn't have the skills to mine, they had a too low mining to be worth to go get diamonds, now the price is ridicolous!
 
The god gear market will sink too for sure c mon, now there are dark rooms everywhere and people can get a god weap or armor in a couple of hours! The price will just keep dropping!
 
TBH there are lots of in game services you can do if you are creative enough

And god gear has always been way overpriced
 
While this graph was made for de-industrialization, it works roughly the same way.
Clark%27s_Sector_Model.png


Primary sector:
  • Mining
  • Fishing
  • Digging
  • Lumberjacking
  • mob grinding
These are all basic activities that have been exhausted, reason being that anyone can do them and most of the resources are in excess due to the fact that most players tend to play upwards between 3 months to a year on the server.

Secondary sector:
  • Armor production
  • Weapon production
  • Stained clay production
  • Various rare stone production like Diorite
  • Quartz production
  • enchant sales
This sector is still very much alive and kicking, and making thousands of regals at any given time. When I start a building project, I build in stained clay, and I spend thousands of Regals just buying shops empty with them. My best bet people don't harvest these in large quantities because they are difficult to find and it's easier to mine for diamonds and then complain that you're not getting a good wage. It's the difference between being a trash collector and a banking clerk to me. Diamonds being the trash.

Tertiary Sector:
  • Rare item sale such as voting items
  • Faction protection services
  • Skin production
  • Art production
  • Base/building service
  • Writing production
  • Digging Darkrooms
  • Building Schematics for other people
  • Real estate in Regalia
The service economy is /the/ place to be right now for money making in Massive. Thousands of regals are popping off left and right. The auction has received fairly little PR since it's inception, but one art auction is going for 20,000 regals tomorrow. That is the largest single purchase that has ever been made on Massive at least to my knowledge. I am literally swimming in cash as any time I want any I just sketch a quick 20 minute thing and easily fetch 3,000 regals for it. I've been offered services for construction as well exceeding 10,000 regals and more.

The point is, Massive's economy isn't breaking down, rather it's a sign that the economy has developed to the point where it resembles an actual economy instead of some fake construct. The fact that you can't earn much money at all with diamonds is a good sign, it means the economy has progressed to the point where knowledge base becomes more important and skills of trade. But Marty! I don't have any skills! First of all, that's a lie, second of all, there is plenty of "brainless" work in the tertiary sector like faction protection and building for others. If I get hired to build a castle for a faction, I sell the blueprint, I don't build it for them because I totally don't have the time to do that. They usually hire others to build the blueprints into their factions, similarly how people offer darkroom diffing services.

Alternatively, skills can also be acquired. Pay a building expert to train you how to do minecraft building on a more professional level, or join a build team or something like that. You can pay others to pass down knowledge to you, which is proof of the following:

The growth of the Quartiary sector, the information sector.
 
MonMarty said:
While this graph was made for de-industrialization, it works roughly the same way.
Clark%27s_Sector_Model.png


Primary sector:
  • Mining
  • Fishing
  • Digging
  • Lumberjacking
  • mob grinding
These are all basic activities that have been exhausted, reason being that anyone can do them and most of the resources are in excess due to the fact that most players tend to play upwards between 3 months to a year on the server.

Secondary sector:
  • Armor production
  • Weapon production
  • Stained clay production
  • Various rare stone production like Diorite
  • Quartz production
  • enchant sales
This sector is still very much alive and kicking, and making thousands of regals at any given time. When I start a building project, I build in stained clay, and I spend thousands of Regals just buying shops empty with them. My best bet people don't harvest these in large quantities because they are difficult to find and it's easier to mine for diamonds and then complain that you're not getting a good wage. It's the difference between being a trash collector and a banking clerk to me. Diamonds being the trash.

Tertiary Sector:
  • Rare item sale such as voting items
  • Faction protection services
  • Skin production
  • Art production
  • Base/building service
  • Writing production
  • Digging Darkrooms
  • Building Schematics for other people
  • Real estate in Regalia
The service economy is /the/ place to be right now for money making in Massive. Thousands of regals are popping off left and right. The auction has received fairly little PR since it's inception, but one art auction is going for 20,000 regals tomorrow. That is the largest single purchase that has ever been made on Massive at least to my knowledge. I am literally swimming in cash as any time I want any I just sketch a quick 20 minute thing and easily fetch 3,000 regals for it. I've been offered services for construction as well exceeding 10,000 regals and more.

The point is, Massive's economy isn't breaking down, rather it's a sign that the economy has developed to the point where it resembles an actual economy instead of some fake construct. The fact that you can't earn much money at all with diamonds is a good sign, it means the economy has progressed to the point where knowledge base becomes more important and skills of trade. But Marty! I don't have any skills! First of all, that's a lie, second of all, there is plenty of "brainless" work in the tertiary sector like faction protection and building for others. If I get hired to build a castle for a faction, I sell the blueprint, I don't build it for them because I totally don't have the time to do that. They usually hire others to build the blueprints into their factions, similarly how people offer darkroom diffing services.

Alternatively, skills can also be acquired. Pay a building expert to train you how to do minecraft building on a more professional level, or join a build team or something like that. You can pay others to pass down knowledge to you, which is proof of the following:

The growth of the Quartiary sector, the information sector.
Click to expand...
Click to shrink...


Talk economics to me

*pulls out saxophone*
 
Hey nana, I remember you, I was kind of a noob back when you played so I didn't have much interaction with the Alamut/pvp crowd but I remembered I ran into you in the desert outside of PariahFolk when you were training your excavation :p . I would like to say I agree with you on almost everything you outlined in your post. I made the vast majority of my wealth on the server through being a merchant as well, and while I haven't followed the economy closely in terms of prices, I have seen some startling things, some that you have talked about and others that you haven't.

One of these is when the conversion of silver and copper to regals occured. While the prices on the chestshops may have converted immediately after, I feel that now things are a lot cheaper just because to new players, and to people making new shops, things seem more expensive since now instead of selling something for say, 20 silver, you have to put 200 regals. That can be more intimidating and dissuade people from buying. Anyone can disagree with me, but why do you think most prices in real life end with 99 cents? There is a subconscious factor when looking at a price and evaluating it, and something that may have the same actual value may seem more expensive just because of the number. Also, actual money isn't worth anything. Money is only worth something if people believe it is. We could use animal crackers for currency, we don't for obvious reasons but we could if our society believed they had value. So when we changed from regals to silver, while immediately after prices may have translated accordingly, I don't think the staff accounted for what would happen much later down the road. Now, whats to say that 10 regals= 1 silver? Nothing. So combine this with the fact that things seem more expensive if they were charged at the 1 silver to 10 regal value that was intended, and you will see why prices have plummeted.

This has also contributed to the rich getting richer. Now because prices are cheaper because of the reasons previously stated, those of us who had made our money in the times of silver and watched as it was converted to regals are realizing money now goes a lot further, so we can spend less at chest shops and preserve our money, all the while making more from the areas of the economy still functioning on the 10r=1 silver basis, for instance the 750 regals for premiums and the faction tributes.

This is just one of my THEORIES as to why things have gotten cheaper. I don't think I explained it too well, it didn't translate as I wanted it to from my head to this post. Let me know if you have any questions.
 
Also I made a ton of money from chest shops in spawn. I was too poor for Silveredge real estate, but when Regalia came out I quickly took advantage of that and rented a merchant tent, and later moved up to the front booths right in front of Igel_son's tavern (ChaChing), and one of my ventures was buying god apples at a really cheap price off to the side, and selling them at my high traffic shop location for a massive, massive profit. This was also during the Solaris vs Magnanimus war I believe, so they were going fast and I had players constantly mailing and messaging me placing orders for more and more, even when I raised prices. When the new market came out, (not the current one) I started a book shop selling books written by players (with their permission) and that is where I made a lot of money, much more than I was expecting. I had a decent location on the inner ring, not a richshop but players who went around looking at the shops easily saw it. Now, I haven't even bothered to rent a market stall. It is not accessible through Regalia, and even though the second market location was out of the way of spawn, it still had players exploring Regalia coming through. While I understand that the market district was moved for lag reasons, it has made it hard to get visibility, especially when the only way to get there is a tp, and then also /tp market is laggy af, more laggy then the shops near spawn ever were. This makes me avoid it, and I know lots of others do too for this reason. The only time I go there is to pick up/deliver items purchased/sold in trade chat. The reduced visibility of the market shop makes me doubtful that it is a good investment for someone to open a new shop in, especially in a location that is not on the main inner ring.
 
I just feel obliged to note that taking Regals out of the economy would drop prices further, as the value of Regal:Anything changes based on how much of each side there is. Remove regals and they become rarer and thus gain value. If you want to "fix" the economy (jumpstart the primary sector) you'd need something that sucks out resources and pumps in Regals.
 
SenorWorkman said:
Anyone can disagree with me
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ohnais, i can safly disagree
SenorWorkman said:
I feel that now things are a lot cheaper just because to new players, and to people making new shops, things seem more expensive since now instead of selling something for say, 20 silver, you have to put 200 regals. That can be more intimidating and dissuade people from buying.
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this.
The fact that 1silver became 10 regals was a good think i think.
i'm going to use myself as example.
when there where stil regals, the first thing i did was put it all on Mecharics bank so i wouldn't use it all up and got a passive income. When it got converted Mecharic sended me the money back and i suddenly found myself with my money back, but tenfold. While in fact the value of the regals where teh same as when i had them in silver and copper, it just seemed i suddenly had loads of money wich encouraged me to buy more stuf because hey! i had loads of cash! I'm an autistic person and i shold have tremendous trouble with such change but no, i was one of the first to stop thinking in copper and silver, you should stop comparing it to real life money (because admit it, you did o that somewhere in your way of thinking) realy stop doing that! Before i became premium i alway's managed to gather 1K regals and then i bought some expensive things with it dputting me below that 1K mark. so i stated to safe a bit until i had 1K again. Rinse repeat.
If all i think the conversion where for the better.
 
To be honest except for paying taxes, I see no reason to even have money. Anything I/My faction needs, we have or can easily just go get it.I am sure people will disagree with me but I only use money on useless things I dont feel like making, Fireworks mostly and on many occasions I have made them also.
 
Graves said:
To be honest except for paying taxes, I see no reason to even have money. Anything I/My faction needs, we have or can easily just go get it.I am sure people will disagree with me but I only use money on useless things I dont feel like making, Fireworks mostly and on many occasions I have made them also.
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Things that cost money specifically:
  • Regalian houses.
  • Market shops.
  • Creating a faction.
  • Faction taxes
  • Sometime surrender tribute. (I say sometime because people opt for other surrender terms sometime, but max tribute in regals is always an option to surrender with.)
 
Alj23 said:
Things that cost money specifically:
  • Regalian houses.
  • Market shops.
  • Creating a faction.
  • Faction taxes
  • Sometime surrender tribute. (I say sometime because people opt for other surrender terms sometime, but max tribute in regals is always an option to surrender with.)
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and you can do without all of them except faction taxes. Edit: you can even do without faction taxes if you find a faction that doesnt have tax kick, but I do understand why people have money and try to make more. RP reasons and just to buy things without having to make them or get them.
 
Last edited:
krios41 said:
While in fact the value of the regals where teh same as when i had them in silver and copper, it just seemed i suddenly had loads of money wich encouraged me to buy more stuf because hey! i had loads of cash!
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This is exactly what I am talking about. People who had silver and got it turned to regals suddenly felt they had way more money. But what about players who were just starting? There are more of them for sure than the people who have a lot of money from the silver days. To them, it seemed that stuff was extremely expensive. Prices dropped because the people who have the shops can afford the price drops to get customers. Players buy stuff at a price lower than it would have been in silver. More money goes to the richer people. Those rich people have all the in game items they could want, with the exception of lore items which there are few of and sell in trade chat. How often do you think the people on /money top 1-10 actually go to the market to find a decent price on an item? I'll give you the answer, rarely. They really only spend large amounts of money on premium, which has created a lot of new wealth for sure, but for very few people, or on stuff like potion machines and base designs, which typically aren't done by super new players. New players who need to go get items because they are new and don't have much go to the market, but who owns those shops? Not other new players who need the money, but the rich players who control the shops. So new players have to grind the slow and hard way to get money, dark rooming or becoming rapidly and quickly involved in the more complicated work side of the economy, which is often hard to do as a new player. It takes forever to mine darkrooms without a god pick and no superbreaker, and not many players have the talent or desire to build bases for people. Otherwise, they stay poor or it takes a ton of time to acquire a half decent amount of money.
 
@SenorWorkman NO
i completly disagree with you, they don't have to grind slower or harder.
if all, you got money more money for the same work.
sure, one silver equals ten regals.
but break that down will you?
one copper is zero point one regals!
If you killed a monster you had a chance of gaining one copper, or zero point one regal. now after the regal conversion you have a chance to gain one regal, equal to ten copper.

I'l put in simple words
Prices tenfolded, so did the money you get from darkrooming and voting.
 
krios41 said:
@SenorWorkman NO
i completly disagree with you, they don't have to grind slower or harder.
if all, you got money more money for the same work.
sure, one silver equals ten regals.
but break that down will you?
one copper is zero point one regals!
If you killed a monster you had a chance of gaining one copper, or zero point one regal. now after the regal conversion you have a chance to gain one regal, equal to ten copper.

I'l put in simple words
Prices tenfolded, so did the money you get from darkrooming and voting.
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Why do people even still argue about silver?
 
I mean, I remember when Silver became Regals.
Got like 300 regals from that.
Whateve.
 
krios41 said:
@SenorWorkman NO
i completly disagree with you, they don't have to grind slower or harder.
if all, you got money more money for the same work.
sure, one silver equals ten regals.
but break that down will you?
one copper is zero point one regals!
If you killed a monster you had a chance of gaining one copper, or zero point one regal. now after the regal conversion you have a chance to gain one regal, equal to ten copper.

I'l put in simple words
Prices tenfolded, so did the money you get from darkrooming and voting.
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Click to shrink...

Nevermind. I'm done arguing. This isn't what I was even talking about anyway, you're clearly missing my point.
 
SenorWorkman said:
Nevermind. I'm done arguing. This isn't what I was even talking about anyway, you're clearly missing my point.
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hm, yea aperntly i am, feel free to shoot me a PM to explain me your point.
but, i was talking about a very specific point of your post for that very reason.
i also would apreciate it if you removed that rating, i have read it again, same conclusion.
 

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