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Economics of Minecraft

alicemaz.com

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Re: Economics of Minecraft

#21

Post by adamcharnock »

nevir wrote: post #4
kiddico wrote: post #2

This was one of the most entertaining things I've read lately. I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me. But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...

If that scratches your itch, take a look at Boundless (playboundless.com). Though it's still pretty early, and the player base is tiny , the economy is pretty interesting

Thanks for the suggestion – I've just spent the last 2 hours looking into it and it looks good. Seems like development is still going strong too. I'll pick it up over the weekend if I'm not otherwise busy.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#22

Post by Karrot_Kream »

kiddico wrote: post #2

This was one of the most entertaining things I've read lately. I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me. But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...

Going to plug Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/) here. It's basically the Minecraft voxel engine with the ability for people to write hooks straight into it. Laying on an economy into this wouldn't be hard at all.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#23

Post by princeb »

interesting post. having never played minecraft before i don't know much about its multiplayer - i've always assumed it is a single player (or has a single player component) where resources are essentially infinite. this appears to me like the server admin incorporated scarcity in order to allow an economy to develop. or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

the other economy that appears to be fairly interesting to understand (but not necessarily to partake in) could be EVE Online. Because I only have a few unscheduled hours of free time a week to play video games, I haven't been able to get into it. Eve is one of the rare MMOs to allow two-way markets which presents plenty of opportunities for traditional market making. As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight the economy will get closer to how commerce works in the real world, but as of now these activities feel a little disjointed.

as for the other MMOs, i feel they are a little bit on rails. games like WoW and PoE allow all kinds of low-risk "arbitrage" because of the lack of a two-way market. i played wow for a while and i found it's not much of a rush to snipe ignorant listings as acquiring 1000s of g in raid materials to craft raid level gear that sell for multiples, just from the tremendous risk being undertaken. the best guild traders were not merely trading on the auction house, they had Top-of-Orderbook relationships with "Chinese farmers" and they'd craft discounted raid level materials into equipment and potions to sell to new guilds getting into the heavily-gated raid scene (this was back in 2004-2008 when i was active), so that these new guilds may one day have their best tanks poached by the very same guild that got them started in the first place.

i played wow just before my college days when i was all ready to make an education and career choice for the rest of my life. i was all set on EEE but at the last minute switched out (to math/econs) when i realized i hadn't been merely playing video games in the same way this person hadn't just been playing minecraft.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#24

Post by itronitron »

kuschku wrote: post #9
ReverseCold wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the server the author played on was in 2013ish (judging from the 1.5 version number given). I recently (2016) wanted to play on an economics server but I don't feel it works anymore. It feels like the whole game got more simplistic, no more metagame. Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted. If anyone knows of a good economy based server, I'd love to hear about it.

> Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted. The same happened everywhere in the Minecraft community. Be it in the english-speaking world, or Germany, everywhere the economy-based servers closed down over time, by now almost none of them are left anymore. Dominating now are the minigame hubs, dozens of servers full of minigames, raking in cash. And many of the players that used to play the econom…

Yeah, and with the current audience the currency has shifted to social capital wherein players work to increase their youtube subscribers and likes in order to get real dollars out of their time spent in game. There is a very wide range of approaches that players take in order to build up their channel.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#25

Post by pugio »

Can anyone recommend a good book about the Minecraft phenomenon? Something that covers its history, rise, proliferation; economics, education, global engagement, etc. It seems like a really great story...

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#26

Post by bpye »

ReverseCold wrote: post #8
kiddico wrote: post #2

This was one of the most entertaining things I've read lately. I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me. But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...

Note that the server the author played on was in 2013ish (judging from the 1.5 version number given). I recently (2016) wanted to play on an economics server but I don't feel it works anymore. It feels like the whole game got more simplistic, no more metagame. Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted. If anyone knows of a good economy based server, I'd love to hear about it.

I've just remembered that I used to play an economy based server, years and years ago. I think before the time the author is referring to because I think when I started mobs weren't synchronised in multiplayer. It would be great to find another server like that, it was fun.

Actually part of me thinks it may have been the same server, the sky mall sounds familiar.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#27

Post by jd3 »

extr wrote: post #16

i follow alice maz on twitter (@alicemazzy), was surprised to see her on the front page here. not sure I agree with about half of what she says but she's always insightful and interesting nonetheless. if you do twitter she's worth a follow.

I almost never find her bargain bin brand of post-libertarian NRx/UACC reactionary drivel insightful (who the hell unironically retweets kantbot and those #rhetttwitter teenagers), but to each their own I guess.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#28

Post by Cyph0n »

This reminds me of the good old days of trading in MapleStory. I recall spending many hours buying particular items from lower skill level areas and selling them at a profit in areas where they are in demand. It was such a fun game to play, but trading was the most interesting part of it for me.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#29

Post by extr »

jd3 wrote: post #27
extr wrote: post #16

i follow alice maz on twitter (@alicemazzy), was surprised to see her on the front page here. not sure I agree with about half of what she says but she's always insightful and interesting nonetheless. if you do twitter she's worth a follow.

I almost never find her bargain bin brand of post-libertarian NRx/UACC reactionary drivel insightful (who the hell unironically retweets kantbot and those #rhetttwitter teenagers), but to each their own I guess.

i don't really follow those circles well so maybe i'm giving her too much credit. what does UACC stand for?

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#30

Post by mos_basik »

princeb wrote: post #23

interesting post. having never played minecraft before i don't know much about its multiplayer - i've always assumed it is a single player (or has a single player component) where resources are essentially infinite. this appears to me like the server admin incorporated scarcity in order to allow an economy to develop. or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials. the other economy that ap…

As an (erstwhile) Eve player, most of your assessments ring true. I, too, was thinking "I'd love to see what this author would accomplish in Eve's sandbox!" :)

You sound like you've done quite a bit of reading, but in case you haven't seen it and for anyone else who is interested, this a great write-up of an economic scheme the Goons (players from the SomethingAwful forums) pulled off to the tune of ~4 trillion ISK (between $80k-$120k US at 2012 prices): https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/1512212/

A couple of thoughts I had on your comment:

>As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight...

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by pure arbitrage, but certainly it's impossible to buy something from a sell order and immediately turn around and sell it to a buy order in the same station for a profit (if someone tried to post a sell order with a price lower than the price of the highest buy order, the sale would immediately take place, filling the topmost buy order(s) automatically)

Transport risk wasn't very large for the regional trading I was doing. The player-run freighting groups have excellent coverage and reliability in high-sec, and because freight contracts use a collateral system, they were the ones shouldering the transport risk, not me. All I had to do was find goods selling in one trade hub for less than people were buying them for in another trade hub, buy up some, have them shipped, and put them up for sale. Of course, I was shouldering the inventory risk you mentioned, but my strategy was to invest as widely as I could and only keep a couple items of any given commodity in my hands at one time. This worked for the items I was selling (i.e. relatively small numbers of high-value and low-mass manufactured goods) but you'd definitely need a different approach for selling, say, minerals (huge amounts of low-value and high-mass raw materials).

Also, there are definitely ways to make transporting goods (even in dangerous space) nearly foolproof - if one is willing to put in the legwork. A lot of the loss of goods that occurs is due to player ignorance of game mechanics and/or laziness "well, I know I should [scout this gate|use an instadock bookmark|switch to my armor implants] but what are the odds of [bad thing] happening this one time and besides, it's almost downtime, I'll be fine." Of course I'm not complaining! This sort of thing keeps the prices high for the rest of us. :)

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