Shops Discussion

[DeeKay]

So I've noticed at times there can be some tension towards the prices and items at the shops. This thread is to share your questions, concerns, opinions, and ideas on the shops, and get a general two cents from you all.

[JoshieAteMyBaby]

Me, Lissy, and Echo_Matty were discussing it yesterday, and we all have slightly different opinions on it. Personally, I agree that the sell prices of some items could use some tweeking. Right now, in terms of making profit by selling materials, mining is by far the most effective way to do this, because for the amount of work you put in to find Iron and Gold ore, you get the most money out of it. But I think other ways of making profit should be viable for people who dont really enjoying mining as much. I would propose keeping the sell price of Iron and Ore the same, but increasing the sell prices of things like wood, quartz, etc. I also would increase the sell prices of basic materials like dirt and stone - not enough to make a big profit off of, but as it stands its not even worth the effort selling those things because of how little they sell. Iron is by far the most profitable item, and Im okay with that. If we could increase the sell price of many of the other items, however, it wouldnt be quite as stacked.
All that being said, a lot of people dont really like using the shop, and I think it stands okay were it is. I would probably rather encourage player trading and interaction rather than forcing player reliance on the shop, but if you want to build something that requires material you couldn't get otherwise, thats when the shop serves its purpose. If the shop stays the same, Im perfectly fine with it.

[Echo_Matty]

I agree completely with Joshie, The sell prices of some items need buffing. Iron being the super over powered way of making crazy money should be re-balanced. Either by A, Lowering The value of gold and iron or B, Buffing the sell values of other items. There's a lot more to do in this game than Just mine, It shouldn't be the only way of making making realistic or substantial money,Fishing could be introduced as a way of making a little money (the rare fish, Salmon,puffer ect.),Woodcutting should make more money, Animal breeding and Adventuring should all have a decent income. Rare items like saddles and horse armor should be valuable to sell,seeing as they are so rare. At the moment it takes 8 stacks of carrots,wheat,potatoes any of the crops to make 100$. The same as One Iron ore. Nobody is going to farm that much for such a little income.

I hope the shop gets a nice overhaul for the better and iron doesn't rule the world.

[swimmergirll]

I also agree with Matty and Joshie, however i liked it when we did not have shops... people relied less on getting money, and instead traded with other players to get the resources they need. Plus, they spent more time going out and getting what they needed while going on fun adventures through the map. But, the shops are a nice addition as a whole and need to be tweaked a little with the prices.

[Adstrum_]

I also have had an idea to buff the sell prices to slightly below (or the same as) the normal buy price of an item...
This is only because I feel that if you buy something expensive, you shouldn't have to live with it until you make up the money... In my opinion anyway.
Side note: This might tie in to what everyone else is talking about with profits...

[Blood]

I agree with Matty about the prices of crops. Some of us have large farms that harvest many stacks of crops but are unable to make a profit from them. $4 a stack just doesn't seem right

[Tobieias]

I think that the prices at the shops are fine as they are, the only prices I would buff slightly would be the agricultural items that are for sale (not largely). And Mattys suggestion on adding rare fish for a decent sum (which in turn would encourage fishing) is a brilliant idea, I'll back this.

What rockraider said though; the prices for selling items is lower and/or much lower than the buy prices because items can be crafted in some ways to actually make profit from just buying said item and figuring out ways to create profit. Another reason why some items are drastically low is (I think) to discourage the use of large farms which can result in server wide lag. (All of what I have said has actually happened/been doable
In the past.)

As I initially said - I'm quite alright how the shops are at the moment, but a change in anything wouldn't bother me. There are always going to be ways to make a profit larger than other ways in the shops.

[Noisy Boy]

How I see the shop is for lazy players who don't want to go get the materials themselves and that is the price they have to pay for and by no means is there anything wrong with that. On a side note, just because a shop is established does not mean that you can no longer trade with other players and the shop is not there to force you to buy stuff. For me the best use of the shop would be when you are doing a major project and it's too much of a drag to go get your own junk for it; only then does the shop serve its true purpose. The only downfall I see to it is when players want to sell material. By tweaking the prices a bit could definitely help the players gain more profit for what they sell.

[ShadedDusk]

Noisy, I'd have to disagree with you on the fact that the shop is for 'lazy' players. Some things, like prismarine blocks, are quite hard to come by. I believe Mike is the only one to even have a farm for it. It is next to impossible to get even a small amount of prismarine blocks/sea lanterns/dark prismarine without the use of shops. Quartz also takes a lot of time to mine. It took me close to 35 minutes to find enough nether quartz to construct a single stack of quartz, and it wasn't nearly enough for what I needed it for.

Selling prices definitely need to be raised. Iron, like stated before, is the most profitable thing. But I haven't gone mining in a long time, as I've been clearing away land to do some builds. I've spent about 2 days clearing dirt, and based on what I've found, I would make less off of the 2 days of dirt-clearing than perhaps 30 minutes of mining.

[Echo_Matty]

Everybody either doesn't care(swim,tobie) or feels change is needed in some way.

[Lissy421]

I've explained before on another recent post about how I made the prices and things i took into consideration(http://dkcraft.net/index.php?topic=1558.msg10896#msg10896). I shall explain in as much detail as possible right now. So bare with this long post:

If you are lazy to click that link I will repost what I said in that topic:

"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."

I will even further go into this topic though. On top of this, I also took almost every price from the old shops on the old map, and applied them here. I tweaked a handful, but not by enough to be a major change. Many of the items we currently have in this shop that I added, were not on the old map. For those I did as I said in the quoted response above.

There will always be an item that is the most profitable in this shop, or any shop for that matter. In terms of our shop here, Gold and Iron ore are the most profitable. Dirt, however, is the most common item in the game, as it is almost endless. For that reason, dirt is literally dirt cheap. Yes dirt will take you 2 days vs mining for 30 minutes, because mining gives more of a profit then digging dirt. That is just basic common sense.

Now onto the topic of changing and adding things. I went ahead and added Fish to the sell shops, as well as coco beans and sugar cane. I also went ahead and raised the price of crops (wheat, potato, carrot) by 3 times the amount it was before in the sell shop. I have no plans on making it any higher. All it takes is one carrot to make stacks and stacks in the near future. Doesn't seem right to make something to basic and easy to obtain any higher then what it is now. Wood is another item that is extremely common, 10 minutes could get you a FEW stacks of logs. 1$ per log sounds extremely fair (the acacia and dark oak are a bit more). I went ahead and made 64 quartz for $200 instead of what it was previously at ($120), I also changed selling brick from $100 per stack to $300 since someone mentioned how much effort it takes to craft. The buy price for Quartz blocks have also been changed to $440 per stack (previously $800). Oh and I have no plans nor or anytime in the future to change the price of Iron and Gold ore in the shop.

Please continue to respond I do like hearing what people have to say involving things like this. And within good reason; I will change things and tweak things. It is clear that everyone has different opinions, so don't feel afraid to add your opinion. I hope this clears up a lot of things.

[Wooper]

Overall, I think the shops are very good addition to the server. It gives more reason to play because players aspire to get more money to buy useful things like protection stones and beacons. But, there are some changes that COULD be made. First, like Matty pointed out one iron ore equals stacks on stacks of crops. It takes WAY more effort to collect stacks of crops than to just go down into your local strip mine and mine one iron ore. Why would I even bother to farm anymore if a I have a double chest full of potatoes and its still not worth it to sell it all? Just to put it in perspective a double chest full of potatoes equals about 7 iron ore. But, like Tobie said, buffing the prices too much could encourage use of massive farms that would lag the server. So overall on the crops, its good that you tripled the prices Lissy, but I still don't have a motive to sell my crops. Second, I also saw Lissy mention that she is not going to raise the prices on iron and gold, which is fine. But, I would just like reiterate what people said before. It just seems like since iron and gold ore are so profitable why even bother do anything else in the shop at all? So I had a stash of iron ore, and I finally decided to sell it, I made ONE HUNDRED AND FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS, in one transaction, I mean I'm not going to complain that I made that money, I'm just saying it makes me not want to sell any other things. Last, (kind of speaking for Matty on this one) I believe that the prices of things that are obtained from complex automatic farms should be buffed a LITTLE bit, and here's why. The player be rewarded for making these auto farms, yes I get that it doesn't take effort to harvest it, but it can take a lot of effort to set up the farm in the first place. But then again, not enough to where people have a motive to build huge farms that could lag the server.  If these materials such as prismarine were to be buffed it would encourage people to get out of their strip mines and make something automatic/cool/different. Those are my thoughts.

[mike]

The way I see it;  "Economy" means I can sell for example, wool, to other players cheaper than the Shop price.  And the dividend is Win/Win for seller and
buyer.  Thus incentive for the farmers, miners, and woodsmen to provide product for profit using shop prices as a baseline.  So interaction among players
brings us to a closer friendlier society on dkcraft-world.

[AnnaRooks]

i really think that we should mostly disband the shop, leave only the stuff thats impossible to get, and rely more on barter and trade with other players instead of grinding in shops, to promote interaction. like you cant get protection stones in vanilla, so those would be all thats left. if someone can get an item, let them sell it to other players who need it

(if you dont like my opinion atm just ask again in a week, itll probably change by then)

[DeeKay]

First of all, thanks to everyone who has submitted their input thus far - we really do appreciate the responses.
Just putting my own input here on top Lissy's.

From the responses in this thread, I can get a general idea of some of the main concerns and ideas:

• Mining for iron/gold is the most profitable thing, but there should be other methods for doing so.
• Increasing the sell prices for several items.
• Decreasing the sell prices for several items.
• Player-to-player trading and interaction over using the shops.
• Prefer not having shops all together.

This is a pretty diverse list if you think about it, and while it's hard to please everyone, we will do the best we can to accommodate a few of these things, as Lissy has already made a start on.

As for my opinion, kinda in a response to the first point in the list, which seems to be the most mentioned.
When I first released the shops, my intention was to give players an alternative method to obtaining resources as a last resort. If you had a large project or you simply didn't want to go mining for something, you could invest some money through several ways (voting, donating, etc) and buy the things you needed from the shops. This was back in 2012 if I recall correctly.

I admit this could have gone better on my end. I don't think I ever really enforced the idea that the shops should be used so sparingly, and the prices of the items probably told players otherwise. If I were to go back, I would probably have a lot less items for sale (which I did bring down a lot from version 1 of the shops to version 2 in our first world), and I would have the prices a lot higher. I think this would encourage player trading and interaction, which I value a whole lot more than the shops.

However, I realise I don't play on the server, and the people who do actively play will create their own lore in a sense, and create their own definition of the server and what it's all about. This is a good thing, I encourage things like this. However, when it comes to my intention for the shops, there's some aspects of it I would like to keep from my original intention. That is that I don't want it, along with the economy, to define our server. I want things like trading/bartering to be looked at more than how much money you have in your account, or where you sit on /baltop.

Like I said though, we will try to accommodate some of your guys ideas, because it is you all who play on the server, not me.

I hope this at least helped broaden your thoughts a little, and please do keep up the replies.