Legalize Dirt Trade I promise it'll be okay Preface Go ahead and read the server rules. (Be honest, you've never clicked that link before in your life) You'll notice that nearly every rule follows the same logic: [Griefing, scamming, looting, harassment] is bad. [Griefing, scamming, looting, harassment] is illegal. With one glaring exception: dirt trade is illegal...to prevent island farming? Arguments Against And why they're all wrong "Dirt Trade restrictions has been a great deterrent for island farming" While true - and yes, dirt trade is probably the number one goal of island farming - I'd argue dirt trade is a bad indicator of island farming. There's plenty of good and normal reasons for one to be involved in a transaction involving dirt. Are any of the below reasons inherently bad? In my eyes they're all normal (or what should be normal) interactions between players on an economy server. But all are illegal Experienced players helping out new players by gifting them dirt Giving gifts between players Paying someone else to build a farm for you Downsizing your own farm and selling the materials Building a farm for someone else Buying an island from another player "Dirt trade itself is bad / unfair or could lead to unfair advantages for wealthy players" Functionally, what is the difference between a wealthy person buying a farm / island that someone else built (which is apparently illegal) and a wealthy person striking a deal with an island owner to get ownership of the crophoppers on their island? In both examples, the wealthy person is getting all of the revenue of the farm, but one of them is arbitrarily illegal and the other one is fine. I actually think there would be more dirt availability in the economy - which helps everyone, including newer players. "Dirt should stay rare" Scroll back up. The prefix says "Economy", not "Global". I know you're just curious and clicked here because of the semi-controversial idea and thread title, but since you're clearly unfamiliar with the economy server, dirt is available infinitely through the /shop mechanic. Okay...but what about Island Farming? This is admittedly the hardest sell of all of this - because I do agree that island farming should still be illegal, but past suggestions on alternate methods of preventing it have been met with mixed reactions. I wish I could just say "these ideas don't fall under the scope of this suggestion", but admittedly, I find it unlikely this suggestion will be implemented without a semi-unanimously agreed upon "good" replacement for determining and catching island farmers. I'll list some of the ideas I have, and if anyone has any other good ideas, please comment them and I'll add them to this list. Rely on player reports Players aren't dumb and anyone with a suspiciously infinite and easy supply of low cost dirt will likely draw suspicion. Implement some form of /newisland replace cooldown In regards to map arts As Drogo has mentioned multiple times, the island generation pattern is known. Continuously creating new islands and "hoping" for a map art island is inefficient compared to just...timing it correctly. If I understand correctly, /newisland replace regenerates the island in the same spot. In order to properly get a totally fresh island, you'd need to leave a coop, leaving you with no island, so the command you'd do is /newisland - which shouldn't have a cooldown. While this technically could still allow island farming, they'd now need two accounts to keep cooping and leaving, which I'd hope is something mods could track and look into and verify if it's island farming or map arting In Conclusion It's lame that we have access to infinite dirt, but something as simple as paying BossOfAll98 to build a farm for you is illegal, if that farm uses dirt. There's gotta be a better way.
support, even if dirt is still going to be illegal to trade, at least make it cheaper. mods also have logs so
I do agree with some parts of this suggestion however i feel like a different approach would be more effective such as modifying some of the rules to allow exceptions such as the farm build example you gave i'm unsure if total removal of the no dirt trade rule should take place as it would give the staff team too much to deal with incase of an island farming happening and could effect the economy of it greatly before any action could be taken to prevent it so for these reasons ill give my support on taking a new look over the dirt rules but not for overall removal
I do appreciate this feedback. With how large farms are on /economy, I think the scale you'd need for island farming to truly negatively impact the economy is extremely far beyond that threshold I mentioned where players would notice something is suspicious and create reports themselves. As an example, over the last week I accumulated 6 DCs of dirt for one of my farms. The default island has 80 dirt / grass blocks. Generating the same amount of dirt would require creating and dismantling 260 islands - something I don't think would go unnoticed, especially if some sort of newisland replace cooldown was also implemented.
Do you think silking grass should be enabled, given the (only?) reason it's disabled is to stop you from selling the dirt as grass?
Mmmm I could see arguments either way. I guess allowing that would kinda open up some interesting ways of making money (dirt to grass farms?). But that's definitely one thing I think falls outside the scope of this specific suggestion.
