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Economics of Minecraft

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Re: Economics of Minecraft

#81

Post by BearGoesChirp »

pluma wrote: post #75

Surprised to see so many positive comments considering her behaviour in the game seems eerily similar to that of the kind of startups HN likes to hate on. Her success was mostly based on exploiting the naïvity of other players, draining their money by selling excessive amounts of overpriced goods. She even brags that "scrubs" complained about her behaviour. The traders she bankrupted are the "moms and pops", the hand…

Why? To me this is no different than a person who is against mass murder being okay with multiplayer first person shooters.

The consequences don't impact real life, you can leave at any time, and in most cases it is very simple to recover, even if not fully.

I think the real interesting morality starts happening when it does impact real life. For example, someone in a poor country farming items to sell on the black market as a way to make real life currency they need to live. I've read about (though am not really sure about the authenticity) of gold farmers in places like Venezuela doing this to survive.

What happens when killing and looting someone in a game actually costs them a meal in real life (even if the real money trading is banned, a rule is only as good as it is enforced)?

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#82

Post by ansible »

andybak wrote: post #72
bufferoverflow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what happens when someone wants to look/sound smart, but actually isn't - lots of jargon, piled like spaghetti, impossible to follow. Actual smart people are generally effective at explaining complex things succinctly and in simple terms.

A bit harsh. He might be busy rather than a charlatan. I often err on the hand-wavey side when I don't have time to do the topic any justice. It was just a HN comment after all.

Yes. Though effective communication involves knowing who you are speaking too.

I have a mental model about the typical HN reader. So, for example, I would not bother explaining the term 'container' in the context of application deployment. Even for devops who don't use containers, just hanging around here providers plenty of exposure to that concept.

But in this case...

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#83

Post by SiempreViernes »

bgun wrote: post #78
pluma wrote: post #75

Surprised to see so many positive comments considering her behaviour in the game seems eerily similar to that of the kind of startups HN likes to hate on. Her success was mostly based on exploiting the naïvity of other players, draining their money by selling excessive amounts of overpriced goods. She even brags that "scrubs" complained about her behaviour. The traders she bankrupted are the "moms and pops", the hand…

You seem to be moralizing about how an economic game was played to maximize pretend profits. Do you have the same complaints about how winning at Monopoly "adversely affects" the losing players' experience?

Monopoly is a very bad game, and you are a bad person for forcing it upon people.

Also, most people on the server where playing Minecraft with some buy and sell mods, not the sociopatic trading simulator the author describes.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#84

Post by BearGoesChirp »

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…

>or perhaps scarcity existed in terms of time it took to procure materials.

I would say this is pretty much the case.

Even the simplest most abundant resources takes time to harvest. And that rare resources take much longer to fine, and can be much more dangerous to gather (requiring people to suit up with a set of expensive gear that they could lose in the process).

What makes different servers so diverse is that mods can drastically change the underlying cost and risks of gathering material. There is a turtle mod that allows you to program a turtle to mine resources for you. While it is kinda slow, it runs steadily without intervention and can quickly strip mine an area to provide you with plenty of resources. But it can't farm animal items like wool, so it significantly lowers the time investment of ores while not at all impacting animal product costs.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#85

Post by hopfog »

joefreeman wrote: post #60
cejast wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting, where can we play?

I guess here: https://tombs.io/ (The coin mining doesn't work for me though - looks like my ISP (Virgin Media) is blocking the coin-hive.com domain.) EDIT: Oops, didn't fully read OPs comment. More stalking... Probably this one: http://canvaslegacy.com/ , but it's down.

You're right that it's canvaslegacy.com and yes, the server is down at the moment.

The screenshots on the website are from the new dungeon patch I'm working on. If you want to get a better feeling of what the game is like I recommend checking out the photo gallery on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/

tombs.io is another multiplayer game of mine, or rather an experiment where I explored the concept of using in-browser XMR mining as a monetization and bot fighting method.

It won't mine anything without the player explicitly pressing the "Start mining" button, in case anyone wants to check it out. It's totally unrelated to my comment though.

(Fun fact since we're on HN: the backend for tombs.io is built with Firebase and Google Cloud Functions. I haven't really seen anyone make a realtime game with server-side authority using that stack before. Wrote a bit about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977261)

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#86

Post by kuschku »

Kiro wrote: post #67
narag wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I've read is possible without "cheating"... not sure what you meant with that, do you mean server plugins? You could still make the exchanges interacting with other players, the shops that use special chests (that's a server plugin) are a convenient shortcut. The economy becomes complex because you can build automatic farms for many valuable items: experience points, food... that would beat manual producti…

What I mean is that if this complex logic lived on the client then everyone would cheat. Therefore the logic must live on server, contrary to what I believed. In other words: I thought Minecraft multiplayer was something you did with friends where the possibility to cheat doesn't matter, not like an MMO where cheating would destroy the game.

> In other words: I thought Minecraft multiplayer was something you did with friends where the possibility to cheat doesn't matter, not like an MMO where cheating would destroy the game.

Some Minecraft multiplayer servers run profits > 100k USD per month, with tenthousands of players. There has been a massive investment into building alternative server backends, sharding the world across multiple servers, implementing complex anti-cheat systems, and more.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#87

Post by rainbowmverse »

tialaramex wrote: post #55
Kiro wrote: post #42

I always presumed Minecraft had most of the logic in the client but this kind of complex economy obviously wouldn't be possible without someone cheating. How does it work?

The server is the source of truth. The client only duplicates logic that's present on the server in order to optimise for network delay. For example suppose I smash a block of iron ore with a pickaxe. The client tells the server that I used my pickaxe to smash the block of iron ore, the server checks that yes, that pickaxe can smash the iron ore, and adds one chunk of iron ore to my inventory. By duplicating this log…

This leads to fun things in high-load situations (like Extreme Hills biomes) even on a local single player game. You break a block...and it comes right back. Break again, comes back. The internal server is rejecting it all even though it's on the same system as the client.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#88

Post by narag »

Kiro wrote: post #67
narag wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything I've read is possible without "cheating"... not sure what you meant with that, do you mean server plugins? You could still make the exchanges interacting with other players, the shops that use special chests (that's a server plugin) are a convenient shortcut. The economy becomes complex because you can build automatic farms for many valuable items: experience points, food... that would beat manual producti…

What I mean is that if this complex logic lived on the client then everyone would cheat. Therefore the logic must live on server, contrary to what I believed. In other words: I thought Minecraft multiplayer was something you did with friends where the possibility to cheat doesn't matter, not like an MMO where cheating would destroy the game.

Cheating hasn't destroyed the game, it's just annoying. Servers (some of them very profitable) use anti-cheat server plugins (that are sometimes more problematic that cheaters) and shrug it off. Cheating is done using client-side plugins.

The problem is that Minecraft doesn't mistrust clients enough.

BTW "hacker" has become a dirty word for Minecraft multiplayer gamers :(

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#89

Post by pavel_lishin »

bufferoverflow wrote: post #56
IIAOPSW wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This raised more questions than answers for me. What are we even talking about here? Economic theory? Political ideology? Philosophy? What exactly is anti-Fordist, accelerationism, L/ACC, R/ACC and CCRU?

That's what happens when someone wants to look/sound smart, but actually isn't - lots of jargon, piled like spaghetti, impossible to follow. Actual smart people are generally effective at explaining complex things succinctly and in simple terms.

It sounds like a lot of it is social circles. It's hard to explain social circles without using internal shorthand.

Re: Economics of Minecraft

#90

Post by pavel_lishin »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #64

OK - really dumb questions - if your child (8years or so) loves minecraft but you think staying away from public servers is sensible, is there a good way to introduce them to these worlds or just wait for some years ? - what are the tools and scripts for looking at the real world like a MMOneconomy game?

You might get better answers at https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/
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