Balancing The Shop Prices

[AtomicSpaceMonky]

Recently, a friend and I have found that the shop, while balanced in certain aspects (courtesy of Lissy), can still be craftily used to earn more money than expected. Lissy's main focus was to prevent the exploitation of prices within the shop, thus making it impossible to mash two or more resources that can be bought at the shop and selling it for more. However, there are ways to gain more money by using some of your own resources. For example, instead of selling coal and cobblestone individually, by smelting cobblestone with coal to obtain stone, you can earn more. I suggest that further calculations be made to better balance the pricing. In fact, I believe that Echo_Matty has a few comments on this subject...

[Echo_Matty]

A few comments, Sure I could make a few comments but no matter what, The shop values need to stay balanced in order to prevent exploitation. It was smart to figure out that using coal and cobble was a more efficient way of selling your coal and cobble(props to that I didn't cop that one), but it will never make money in the shop alone. For example, for a short time on the old map you could buy sand and coal make glass and sell it for a profit. There is no way of profiting from the shop alone at the moment(and it should stay this way). But I 100% agree that the shop can and should be balanced further.

[AtomicSpaceMonky]

A few comments, Sure I could make a few comments but no matter what, The shop values need to stay balanced in order to prevent exploitation. It was smart to figure out that using coal and cobble was a more efficient way of selling your coal and cobble(props to that I didn't cop that one), but it will never make money in the shop alone. For example, for a short time on the old map you could buy sand and coal make glass and sell it for a profit. There is no way of profiting from the shop alone at the moment(and it should stay this way). But I 100% agree that the shop can and should be balanced further.

I did mention this in my post that it is not possible to exploit from within the shop alone, and I certainly agree that it should remain balanced. I'm just suggesting that we improve the balance of the shop so that exploitations can't be made outside of the shop as well.

[DeeKay]

I'm just suggesting that we improve the balance of the shop so that exploitations can't be made outside of the shop as well.

Pretty much what Matt and yourself pointed out, since there's no way to use the shops alone to make any profit, it's not a huge concern. Again, as Matt mentioned, there have always been ways to gain a tiny profit by selling things in different ways, and I've always seen it as a fair way to gain a little bit more for the extra work that goes into needing to smelt sand, or smelt the cobblestone.

If it does become a concern, or if any major exploits do arise, we will patch them right away.

[Lissy421]

I'm going to try to explain the process I took in making the shops, so that way you and anyone else can have a clear understanding of what I took into consideration while making the shops. The server itself was a survival server until the shops. The shops made it an economy and survival server. With that being said, I took into consideration both survival and economy. I did my best to balance the two which means it takes effort to make profit on many of the items depending on how common or rare and on how many steps/how hard the steps to make. The buy prices are a lot higher then the sell prices to 1. Prevent exploit and 2. Make it to where survival would cost resources & Buying would cost money. This is basically adding on to what Deekay said;  Smelting requires an extra step, thus making it more profitable to sell. However A simple Silk Touch Pick can remove the smelting entirely, making it more profitable regardless.

Idk if that cleared up a lot of things or not, if you have questions or suggestions on price changes let me know.

[AtomicSpaceMonky]

Yes, that clears up a lot. I never really looked at the shop from a survival viewpoint, always an economical one. Thanks for broadening my perspective.