Every few weeks I get the suggestion “we should have X Admin Shop”. Out of habit I try to explain why that idea is bad, but recently I’ve clearly failed to get my point across. It doesn’t help that, after 50 or so separate suggestions, I now get pissed off immediately when it’s brought up. So now this thread is a thing. I'll break apart the common arguments for Admin Shops and just link players here when they inevitably bring the topic up in the future. There aren’t enough ways to make money. Quests. With the current state of quests (still missing woodcutting), you can earn 8.3k per day outside of a town, and 16.1k per day as part of any town. That alone is far more money than we want players getting per day, which is fine because it’s ludicrously hard to pull that off on a daily basis. Quick reminder, towns now take 6k to start and charge 50r/plot/day. One day of quests can give enough to start a town, claim 3 plots, and pay upkeep for 15 days. Admin Shops will make more people use the economy. By supplying an infinite source of rupees, the first superficial problem is that no other shops can compete with the price. It has effectively been fixed. More importantly, any game changes to the rarity of that item will directly impact the value of the rupee. Remember when mesa gold was added? We had to create a hacky method of disabling it just so rupees wouldn’t tank in value. How does this work? Let's say gold is the primary source of rupees, and mesas made gold 10 times as common. That would mean rupees are 1/10th as difficult to get as they used to be, and implies that all shops should multiply their prices by 10 to keep up with the new value. This is clearly a pain to shop owners and encourages predatory behavior to shops that don't update quick enough. But if the price is low enough players can still make shops. Seems reasonable with current items. Pick some value for an item, let's say 50r for gold, then have sell price be 1/4x and buy price be 4x, so 12.5r and 200r respectively. But oh no, gold just became 10 times more common like above, and 10x is outside the range of values we set for gold. Existing market value would be 50r/10, or 5r, while the sell-to price would still be 12.5r. It's not as bad as the factor of 10 above, but it's still 2.5 times the market value, which would cause rupees value to drop 60%. We have too much of X and we should be able to sell to get rid of it. In the case of non-farmable, the two points above cover why this is a bad idea. For farmable resources, this would lead to massive inflation as the rupee value sharply drops. Take leather for example. The most efficient way to get a lot of money would be a lot of cows. This would lead to every player owning massive cow farms and constantly pulling in money proportional to the amount of cows killed with no upper bound. If you try to set the value extremely low, there would be no point to players just selling the spare junk leather they have because there would be practically no return. These two sides cannot be balanced and will never work. For automated resources: Oh dear god no! Get paid to sit afk. Rupee value drops to zero. Entire economy destroyed, reset required to fix. No. New players don't want to do quests. The mining quests take resources you've mined and give resources. This is functionally equivalent to Cash4X shops, but with a limit that makes them reasonable to balance. If you want, you can make a shop that buys or sells quest resources in a way that is valuable to the trader and makes you money. But ultimately, think for a second. Are Admin Shops really so desirable that they would retain players that would otherwise leave? Those players tend to be the ones who want to sell farmable or automated resources, which I talked about above. Without that particular kind of admin shop (meaning an easy source of infinite money) they are unlikely to say. Do quests need work? Yes. Is this a good argument for Admin Shops? No. We used to have cash4gold and we used to have 20+ players. Coincidence? I think not. For what must be the billionth time, the number one way to attract more players to your server is by having a bunch of active players on your server. We had more players back in the day because we had a large enough population that it was self-sustaining. As it currently stands, growth is a lot of work! This has nothing to do with the economy.
Well written and accurate! I miss the days when we had 20 plus players all the time.. and we had tons more on creative. But a few guys have to stick it out and play every day to build that player base. There's no other way--it takes a community.
I still think a better way to handle this would've been to reduce how much gold was worth. However the question I wanna pose why do you think a lot of the old people left? My thought immediately goes to the loss of everything they worked hard on and the feeling that it would be wiped away over and over again. ie; all the maps we have gone through, bad management of the economy(not on your erik that one is specifically on max way back when). Either just wanted to put my 2 sense in.
Before the 2015 hard reset, we had fewer active players than we have now (and I was better at bumping threads at the time). Players left because they felt they'd "completed" everything and were bored. The old vote plugin with insanely OP rewards, ShadeTokens and legendaries, and a (high) fixed value for diamonds that were easily achieved with fortune contributed to that feeling. I know of one player that quit because he lost his stuff in the reset, but the short term gain of old players returning for a new map made up for that numerically. Bit of a dick thing, just talking about people as numbers. Heh. If we had a bunch of active players and tried a hard reset, maybe there would have been more losses. Of course the other major reason people leave is a lack of players. If they wanted to play alone, singleplayer is a thing and it has no stupid rules to deal with. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone though, I've talked about it in at least a dozen threads now. "We need to get more players to get more players."