Yesterday my friend and I went mining (it's better with someone else) for a few hours. I (not both of us, just me) came home with half a stack of gold, a few diamonds, and four stacks of iron. I'm pretty sure iron sells for 200, so 64x4x200 is 51,200. See that? 51,200 in a few HOURS, not even counting the gold. I may be wrong, but I don't think most farms make that much.

If you sell iron to the market, you'll get $50 each after you smelt them. So that's $12,800 in a few hours (which is not hard to beat with an automated farm).

If you sell to players, they should pay between $50 and $100 (since the market sells iron blocks for $900), so up to $25,600 in a few hours. But trade between players isn't going to inject money into the player base, which is the real issue here.

Quote from: stewbasic on June 28, 2012, 12:01:37 am

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I NEED to buy things from the market.

> That is not intended. Money should not be a substitute for effort. Melon farms aren't enough effort to make considering their income. The market should only be a convenience. It seems this server has forgotten the meaning of survival.

But protection stones can only be bought from the market. As far as they are concerned, the market is a necessity, not a convenience.

He is obviously speaking in general, it's an obvious thing Protection Stones can only be acquired on the market. All the rest of the stuff in it can be found or crafted.

This is an example of my point about setting prices to encourage certain behaviours. If players are supposed to be buying protection stones from the market, but not buying materials that they can collect or craft, then the former should not be so expensive compared to the latter. By the time a player has raised $1500 to buy a tiny protection stone, spending an extra $500 on materials to fill it out doesn't seem like a big deal.

I haven't been on this server for long, and about half the time I've spent here has been spent building melon and pumpkin farms. So I hope you appreciate that this is intended to be a constructive post when I say: I think this is a sensible decision. I don't know much about hosting a minecraft server, but I have no trouble believing that large melon farms could result in a heavy strain.

However, I do hope optical et al think systematically about the rules of the server's economy, as this will determine how players are encouraged to play. It's pretty clear what resulted in all of these farms:
*Protection stones can only be bought with server $
*The only source of server $ is selling items to the market
*The only _renewable_ item that can be sold to the market at a price comparable to the price of protection stones is (was) melons and pumpkins

Selling non-renewable items to the market as a sustainable income requires constantly expanding and claiming more mining space, and it's often not far to the neighbouring player's home. And yes "you can sell nearly every block you end up breaking", but you'd have to sell 100 stacks of cobblestone for a single tiny protection stone.

I don't know exactly what is planned for this "player-based Auction House", but if it's another way for players to transfer goods and $ between themselves, that's not really a source of server $.

Also some of the market prices really need to be rethought:

1 iron ingot buys for $200, but 1 iron block = 9 iron ingots buys for $100. A %50 discount for bulk buying?
1 gold ingot buys for $350, but 1 gold block = 9 gold ingots buys for $3500. Now bulk buying is more expensive?
1.5 stacks of coal + 12 stacks of sand costs $1170, can be made into glass panes and sold to the market for $1280.

If you don't want players doing it, set the prices so it's not profitable. And vice-versa.

I'd like to sign up too. Would it be OK if my friend and I build something together, or would that be considered unfair? Also is the idea to use only the resources in the chest, or is it OK to use other blocks too?