How to establish a thriving diamond-based economy?
this is not a question about:
- how or what economy plugin to use (we are not using any, we are whitelisted)
- should i use an economy plugin (we use diamonds as currency)
rather, my question is this:
- suppose you start a new server with a new diamond economy. how do you make it last? what sort of issues are there, maybe 15-18 months (or even longer!) after the world starts (this is my concern, many many months later when issues that you never saw coming start materializing and do irreversible damage to the server's economy)? e.g. inflation of goods, and the deflation of diamonds
- how much control or moderation do you need to establish in the market? e.g. use a permit system, use a fixed pricing system, or let it all go and make a free market?
- would the addition of a "resource world", reset every 3-4 months, have a significant impact on the inflation?
- the purpose of the economy, in my view, is less for the COMPETITION, and more so to function as a system where people can obtain diamonds for goods, obtain goods for diamonds, in a stable, functioning diamond economy where they know what to expect.
16 Replies
First rule of a Minecraft economy : never make a item-based economy.
It's asking for crazy omega inflation.
Why ? Because items are super easy to find in the grand scheme of things.
And that's not even talkin about players duping items.
If you do an item based economy, it will inflate in the first few weeks, if not less.
it will be inflated in a few weeks (maybe a month or two) yes, but that's where the economy is established no? you wouldn't gauge the value of the diamond based on day 1 value surely
it will never "establish" since you will never be able to control the inflation. Players will just stop using your economy and just trade items instead.
will just stop using your economy and just trade items insteadplease elaborate? if there's a common item that a player knows is used by everyone else for every other transaction, why wouldn't they use it?
From playing on servers using Diamonds as economy it is personally way better. Having virtual economies I find always end up being people having billions because you dont have to put in the same amount of work to make money. People usually end up setting up farms and generating easy cash. This will never be an issue with diamonds because people have to spend time gathering them. I dont really see how its easier to get than a virtual economy.
Benefit of doing diamonds I have found is that you dont really have to worry about managing an economy in the same way or fixing loop holes in said economy. Diamonds will always have the same amount of difficulty and isn’t gonna be farmed without actually putting in the time.
From the servers I have played the inflation isn’t crazy and has felt very fair even to newer players. I find the opposite in servers with a virtual economy.
that's exactly how I feel about this. @Naeso 's point about the duped items is true, the risk is there. but I'm personally against using an economy plugin, that was never even an option in the first place (still isn't).
my only worry about the diamond economy is... hypothetically, if I do a "resource world", people will get diamonds very quickly its value will deflate as more and more resource worlds get reset after many months
the resource world would serve to reduce the friction for new players who join 1 year after world start, so they dont have to walk 4k blocks just to go mining. that same "reduce the friction" however, also has the risk of inflating the economy
so i'm really confused as to how I can balance things out from the start.
Resource world will definitely make it tougher depending on how often they reset, not sure if you have RTP but adjusting it as time goes on would be a solution. Some servers also have designated areas that gets regenerated on new updates or after set amount of time (months). But honestly depending on how your resource worlds are I wouldn’t be too worried honestly. But it all depends on player base and type of server.
Also the duping argument is a joke, IMO. Duping is a thing even with a virtual economy, not really sure how having a virtual economy escapes the effect of duping. I am genuinely interested in how people can think a virtual economy doesn’t suffer from duping or inflates even quicker because virtual economies will always suffer from the fact that you can make money passively, you cannot do that with diamonds. Sure you can have a farm that gets an item people want, but a diamond will always have a time investment in the chain. Virtual economies wont.
What style server is it? And what size of world do you have? I honestly dont think it will be a big issue, from personal experience.
I am genuinely interested in how people can think a virtual economy doesn’t suffer from duping or inflates even quicker because virtual economies will always suffer from the fact that you can make money passively, you cannot do that with diamondsone argument could be made that if you tie the value of the currency to something that is not dupable (or tie it to nothing at all, but i fail to see how that would function as a currency) then your virtual currency would... work better? i've no clue, i have never worked with virtual currencies to be frank.
Resource world will definitely make it tougher depending on how often they reset, not sure if you have RTP but adjusting it as time goes on would be a solution. Some servers also have designated areas that gets regenerated on new updates or after set amount of time (months). But honestly depending on how your resource worlds are I wouldn’t be too worried honestly. But it all depends on player base and type of server.
What style server is it? And what size of world do you have? I honestly dont think it will be a big issue, from personal experience.yep, that makes sense... we don't have RTP btw, and the plan for the resource world is to have a portal at spawn that people can walk through. the server is a "no teleports, no landclaims" server with a trust-based (whitelisted, apply to join) environment. we've been up for 10 months, but for many reasons we decided to reset. we want to make this new world last as long as we can, hopefully go for many years to come. one of the many issues we encountered was with the economy / shopping district, which is why i want to set it right from the start. world size will be 40k x 40k (same size as the old world) and im thinking the resource world could be 3k in each direction (6k x 6k)
Right, the no teleport changes things for sure. I guess one of the things that helps manage the economy is having custom items/event items and such the become big collectables. Makes people want to spend a vast amount of diamonds to get them and even helps keep the long time players on their toes. Some stuff that will require either big time investment to get or is very limited through lets say event winners or something like that. And depending on how you guys deal with game updates the new stuff from updates usually become very popular.
I guess I cant really offer many solutions since all the diamond economies I have been a part of have all gone without intervention and haven’t felt like it progressed worse than virtual economies. Let me know what you figure out though. Will be launching a similar thing as you soon so would be interested.
Our approach is letting the diamond do it’s thing. Does the diamond become worth less over time? Sure, but that is the nature of a Minecraft server spanning years.
I believe it's fine to work with an item based economy as long as you have enough sinks for your faucets in game design
If you don't have a good enough sink for diamonds (Vanilla minecraft is bad with that considering after diamond and netherite you don't have much need for it), then people are just gonna keep collecting them as the crazy miners just keep digging infinitely
tbh its better to have your item based economy to not use nornal minecraft items
since most can be easily farmed
if you pregen the world and have a worldborder set, then you can do //count to find how many diamond ores are in the world via worldedit
then you’ll know the market cap if all diamonds were mined
tbh when you use an item thats apart of progression its just shitty
especially now that you need 7 diamonds to dupe the netherite templates
this is a good point. but how do servers with economy plugins manage that, in contrast? theoretically it should be similar no? people continue racking up more and more balance over time
The main benefit of an economy plugin over an item based one is you avoid or reduce any dupe glitches impact on your server economy, nothing to do with item sinks or faucets
Even with a money based economy you need enough reasons to spend the money you earn
If say you can sell anything you want but only buy golden apples, money and golden apples will become useless pretty fast
i see
that is something I'll have to consider
good insight thank you