Villager Economy System

[Mad Martian]

Preamble

The purpose of this ticket is to introduce an economy system or manager that alters supply and cost of goods offered by villagers given certain market drivers most typically being demand and sale frequency.

Please discuss this idea here using the comments on this ticket. Think about some of the issues raised by this idea and post your thoughts and ideas about how to handle these here using this ticket.

Supply and Demand Controls

It seems to be agreed that villager offers should be influenced / driven by the frequency an item is bought or sold:

1. If an item is bought from a villager the cost of that item increases
2. If an item is sold to a villager the offer amount should decrease

Issues to Consider

1. When the buy/sell price is altered due to these drivers, should that buy/sell price change for the...
   1. Villager?
   2. Region?
   3. Globally?
2. What happens when the price gets too high or too low?
3. What is the definition of too high or too low?

Currency Used

Presently the villagers accept items in exchange for other items, they have no concept of currency.

Issues to Consider

1. The concept of currency exchange to be abolished, and should villagers just accept whatever coins you have so long as they add-up to the amount desired / needed?
2. Currency be treated as an entity separate from trading items?

New Trader Entity

Rather than modify the villagers, introduce a new entity type exclusively designed for buying/selling goods using currency instead of in-game items.

Issues to Consider

1. What do we do with all the villagers then? are they to become technical debt?
2. What would the new entity look like? should it have any resemblance to villagers?
3. Isn't this still too redundant? wouldn't it be more sensible to modify the existing villagers?

Rarity

Not all items are created equal, dirt is literally dirt cheap and diamonds or rhenium ingots are extremely expensive. This implies two things for each item based on its rarity:

1. A starting / initial cost
2. The rate of increase / decrease for each item

Issues to Consider

1. Is the rate of increase / decrease related to the initial cost? or is there any reason they could be independent?
2. Does the rate of increase / decrease change? or is it fixed based upon rarity?
3. How are initial values for each item going to be calculated?

Price Point

How should the initial prices be calculated? it seems there are different categories of items and price pointing everything may be unnecessary:

1. Refuse - Dirt and netherrack probably fall into this category, generally things that have very little use and are abundant
2. Quest - Items that pertain to quests and should probably never be sold or even exchanged between players
3. Adventure - Blocks and items that are very focused and specific to mini-games and side-quests such as the construction materials used by towers in the Twilight Forest.
4. Ingredients - Anything that is an important ingredient for some recipe
5. Valuable - Anything that can be considered valuable such as gold bars or gem stones
6. Food - Edible items for sustenance
7. Tools - Tools for mining or digging etc.
8. Armaments - Weapons and armor

Issues to Consider

1. Should everything have a price point?
2. How is it possible to price point absolutely every item?
3. Is it possible to price point entire categories instead of price pointing a bazillion items individually?
4. Should only an initial and small subset of items be made available for sale?

[Tanya Shearon]

Does this mean that if you are the first person to buy everything, it will make everything more expensive for the next person? Say something that is technically really cheap like dirt, if I buy a ton of dirt, I feel like that price should not necessarily go up since its "dirt".

[Mad Martian]

Even the price of dirt can increase / decrease, but it can happen slowly. For example, if dirt costs one copper each, consider that it can double to two copper each after someone has bought 100 stacks of dirt or something.

So this implies that each item should increase / decrease by different rates depending on rarity. In fact, I forgot to introduce that concept.

[Tanya Shearon]

Just thinking now, so we would have to price point every single item?

[Mad Martian]

I don't think we should price point everything, some items don't even make sense for sale IMO. I'm going to update the description again. This will be a living document.