I won't say too much on Tax as that has been widely discussed, various options put forward and even Dex seemed on board with some sort of change at one point in time. I would like to suggest a change to, or removal of the dynamic pricing. I assume the intent was to promote farming and selling of various goods but I really don't believe it has any effect on that. It certainly has no effect on cropper farms which are most affected by dynamic pricing as no one is going to pull up all their crops and replant based on what dynamic pricing is doing. I feel that players would prefer predictability, perhaps with some fluctuation but not at the current levels. Especially given the effort and cost to set up a farm. When dynamic pricing was first implemented, Dex stated the following. "This is of course a really big and experimental change so we'll see how it goes and if it'll stay in its current form." So I welcome all to discuss how it is going. The reason I mention Tax in the suggestion is because it makes sense to consider all factors that affect income at the same time. If we consider all the losses that cropper farms take, it really is quite massive. Firstly, there is the average TPS of 14 (I think it's actually less than that) that results in a 30% reduction in production. Then there is up to 20% reduction in sale price due to dynamic pricing. I've not seen that yet but wheat is down nearly 17 % currently and with more people upgrading to wheat (despite dynamic pricing) I can see it getting to 20% at some stage. And finally the 32% tax. Using the 17% for dynamic pricing, not the 20% it will likely get to at some stage, all of that combined, results in a loss of more than 60% !!
Dynamic pricing, tax, TPS, lag are all things affecting our income, by up to 60%? Unacceptable. Dynamic pricing should have a max and min for each specific farm type. But if the more people make of one type of farm, the less and less money that farm type makes overall, we should do away with dynamic pricing completely. I want the server to grow and we not make less money because of it. Perhaps we could try personalized pricing for a while and see what happens. That rewards more farms being made, period, so the more sugarcane farms that are made, the closer to the max range people with those farms can make. Fewer loaded farms of the same type could cause them to be closer to the min. That ideally would make us all want to make more farms of different types. I just think it would be interesting to see how personalized pricing would play out overall and think it would have such a positive effect on the server. 32% tax is way too much if you consider all the other factors affecting our farms. I wish tax was dynamic based on production, so the less we are producing, the less the percentage we are being taxed! But I also have seen people saying when tax is calculated, it causes lag/a tps drop? Is this true? TPS is all over the place. Restart doesnt fix it. An eco server needs to keep up with its growth. I know the developers are working hard on fixing this. I read all stages of growing crops create lag. Here is my thought: you know how sugarcane doesnt visually grow on moss but a crophopper can still collect from it? Those 7x7 30-layer farms are completely lag free. I suggest that once a crophopper is placed in a farm chunk, the crops be visually stopped from growing up to the 2nd to last phase. Idk if there is a way for this to be done but if it works for sugarcane I'm hoping it can be done for other farms as well.
The only change that would bring about would be to take more from players with small farms who pay less than 32% tax currently.
Maybe something could be done about the tax depending on how bad TPS is, like 1% lower crop hopper tax for every tick below 20?
I just deleted the third portion since it was irrelevant to this topic, but the first two are relevant. I would like to discuss potential implementation changes instead of just saying get rid of it or figure it out. Staff don't seem to play enough economy to know how economies work, so I think its up to us to give them advice and input instead of expecting things to get better without solid plans. To tell you the truth, I don't think dynamic pricing really makes any sense. We don't have an active economy right now, and if it involved selling to /shop could easily become exploitable and laggy. For example, if suddenly wheat seeds become valuable, now everyone makes a flower farm using pistons and scales them up. Now we have 100 pistons constantly running per player 24/7. Many of the renewable items in eco require the use of pistons or water to collect at scale, so we easily run into lag problems with large playercounts. I think it makes more sense for the entire shop to get a boost in sell values since players hardly feel inclined to sell anything with the prices being so low as they are, but impose sell caps to prevent accidentally encouraging exploitation. Make sell values increase as payout levels increase. This way older players who have more invested are still encouraged to make their farms better, but theres a lid on things to prevent lagging the server. Dynamic economy is a fun idea, but in execution I think it's an unfun feature because you can put in all of the work to make a good farm only to have it lose value as more people try to get on the bandwagon. Also how long would it take for prices to return to normal? How much would you need to sell for it to be worth it to both old and new players? What if you make a mistake and it gets exploited? What if you don't know that something is actually super easy to collect and you accidentally devalue the dollar. What if you accidentally encourage building farms that use pistons and lag the server because the meta means having 100 pistons per player triggering frequently? Just some things to think about.
I'm moving it over to a different post, it'll be gone in a few minutes. I misunderstood the point of the discussion. My bad!
i like the idea of dynamic pricing. to be able to work on and see a wide variety of farms instead of just.. melon/pumpkin would be nice. but even with the current dynamic pricing, that's still pretty much the case. i say make it matter more so that we can see more diverse farms on islands. and yeah, please lower the tax. we're getting screwed over on tps already.
I like the idea of farming a variety of things but that can be done regardless of how dynamic pricing functions or if it exists at all. For players who like to maximise income, those players will ultimately progress to the crops that make the most money. Dynamic pricing doesn't differ a crops value enough to change the fact that wheat is the most profitable so we will likely all end up farming that. It used to be that melkin crops were regularly the most dynamically reduced crop. This morning, wheat had the greatest mark down so it seems were getting closer to that point. Interestingly though, melkin is now reduced more than wheat. If prices fluctuate so dramatically over such a short period of time, no one is going to pay any attention to those fluctuations when deciding which crop to farm. I imagine that the base price of crops, took into consideration the cost farming that crop and the time it would take to recoup that investment. That makes complete sense, but dynamic pricing undoes that good logic. Due to the logical base prices and cost to build farms, I believe that most players are going to follow a progression from sugar cane, to melkin, to wheat with some players skipping one of those farms. Dynamic pricing won't change that. I would not be surprised if we see the return of piston run melkin farms. They are not taxed, they are not limited by cropper collection rates. They can deal with low TPS by being made larger. Yes they are restricted by the cooldown on /sell all but if fed into profit shops, this restriction is removed and so too is the effect of dynamic pricing as it can be sold at /warp shop. Currently, melkins from cropper farms are making $0.12 each after all these losses. If you sell them at /warp shop, you are getting $0.89 each. That's 7.4 times as much!! Dexuby. Regarding croppers, can you tell me if they collect 3 per seconds or 3 per 20 ticks.
Yeah this is a big issue with the current system. There is no reason to be creative and design new farms because you'd be better off investing in the safe croppers even if they make less money. This isn't much fun for new or old players. Whats worse is that difficult items to farm have low sell prices so even if there was a reason to try to break out of the meta you wouldn't be able to make more money doing much else. Plus, whatever you can do is likely going to cause lag when expanded to be competitive with the profits of a large cropper farm. If anything, the shop seems like its designed for early game only. Leaving croppers as the only late game income source with mining being also somewhat profitable. This is the crux of my argument against infinitely scalable farms. The shop has no sell caps meaning people are encouraged to do janky things that lag the server. The only reason this isn't a bigger problem is because not a lot of people have the technical knowledge or the funds to make farms like these. Instead of a dynamic eco we should try to incorporate sell caps on items and increase the sell values of items to allow people to make good money for a limited time before being forced to transition to a different source of money. The more farms you can make to meet your sell caps the more money you make without being encouraged to scale up to the point of lagging the server. In this system the number of farms would be what determines your $ not the size of the farm. The hardest part is balancing the shop to make it all fit together properly. Some items can be farmed insanely quickly, some take a while. How do you account for that in the value of the item and the sell cap? How do you account for difficulty of building the farm when setting prices? How do you account for potential lag issues? It would bring a tear to my eye to see a world where people are encouraged to design more farms, sell their farm designs, and sell the items to each other after their sell cap is reached. So long as it is balanced logically of course. But that takes work.
Self quote moment but this is also way better for new players because the current system doesn't reward them much for the hard work of farming early on. It should be fun to go to the nether to harvest materials to sell to the shop for good profit early on, and then use that money to invest in other things. It should be fun to scan shop to see what farm you want to design. Right now it's not really possible because sell values are so low that its far easier to just make a scane farm.
The whole idea behind croppers was to prevent large piston run melkin farms I believe. But with all the losses that they are hit with, players might move back to the old ways. And to be honest. It would be good to see profit shops back. zestym3m3s , Watch those double posts. I really don't care, but technically, it's against forum rules.
My bad, still figuring out forum rules. Thank you for the warning. I think the idea of croppers is fine if they weren't so annoying to build and they didn't lag during taxes. At this point it feels like croppers are the whole point of economy which is sad since they're pretty boring. I think it might not be a good idea to tie passive income to in game mechanics like that. For example, server render distance is a major player in the size of the cropper farms. I'm sure it would be awesome to have the ability to reduce server render distance to accommodate more players or whatever, but because people have invested so much time and energy into 7x7 croppers it would be a nightmare to lower it to 5x5. As you mentioned TPS is a big player too. If server performance goes down, then profits go down, encouraging people to make bigger crazier other farms to go on top of their cropper farms. This makes TPS go down more. Croppers also take up a ton of space on islands. I think most people would prefer to use their islands just for island things, but because croppers exist you kind of need to plan where you put it otherwise you're stuck deconstructing a megastructure only to rebuild it again. Also as you mentioned people have other methods of getting melons/pumpkins without dealing with taxes so they might choose to do that instead which would add to the lag crisis and make more people want to try the same thing to recoup some profits. Most of these problems end in more lag for the server because people want to find ways to make up for lost profit or make more profit by pushing the /shop to its limits. I know that sky doesn't like the idea of sell caps because it feels anti-eco and I get that feeling too, but currently theres no way to make /shop sell values both appealing to new players and old players without increasing sell prices and decreasing the scale of farms. Old people play enough to collect more farms and stock up on items. New people can get a foot in the door by making a cool farm and wanting to make more to make more $. Also there isn't really much of a player-player eco other than trading rare items right now, so whats the harm in trying to revamp the economy by making it possible to expand your profits if you put in the time to design and sell farms, or set up profit shops to sell farmed goods to players once your cap is reached. That sounds great to me, even if it acts against traditional economy ideas. This way it would be more focused on players collaboration and creativity than afking.
Respectfully I disagree with the proposal to modify/remove dynamic pricing. I think it’s a great thing. It stops single crops from being over-harvested and encourages players to take explore a wider variety of farms and crops. If one crop (eg pumpkin) had a set value that never changed no matter how much was being /sell (sold) then farms would be very boring and unanimously pumpkins. It works like a real market, the higher the supply of a crop, the lower the demand and therefore the lower the buy price. You say it may disappoint players who spend so much just to find out their crops are 10% cheaper the next week, but, to me, that’s just how real markets work. Everybody can’t win 100% of the time. I support a tax cut. 32% cap is honestly way too much, I understand it has been proposed multiple times before and has yet to be worked on, but I don’t think it’s right to start asking for other things to be changed like dynamic pricing. I understand TPS is also a factor which reduces revenue but that can be addressed in different ways, not by abolishing dynamic pricing. Remember just a year or two ago, when everyone only farmed pumpkins and melons? Very basic, very boring and the server was really dead. Now players can try other crops and farming methods, since pumpkins tend to fluctuate. The market has been energised through dynamic pricing in my opinion. Personally I’m sticking to supporting lower tax rates, like 0.75% per cropper and a cap of 22.5% (30 croppers worth)
In it's current state it's not stopping anything. Fluctuating pricing isn't swaying players to make any decision different to when it was a fixed price. That is what people are complaining about. It's not working like a real market because the shop has infinite money and the base prices are chosen arbitrarily. It tries to simulate a real market and fails miserably. People aren't trying different methods because pumpkins are fluctuating, they're using farms like sugarcane because it has become much cheaper to build that type of farm on a massive scale due to the introduction of moss. People are switching to wheat too because, since the update, people have had the opportunity to use 49 (and even 81 for a few months) chunks for farms instead of 25 chunks to build up vast amounts of balance in a much shorter times than previously possible. Simplicity is key. If anything remotely similar to this would be implemented, then it should be kept at 1% per crophopper and capped at 20% or 25%.
It really doesn't at all. Players can explore all they like but the fact is that wheat is the crop that brings the greatest income and so it is what everyone will arrive at. If they don't play enough to recoup their investment then they might stick with melkin or sugar cane. Either way, their decision isn't influenced by dynamic pricing. For the players that don't care about money, they can farm as wide a variety as they like and what happens to dynamic pricing won't matter to them, because it's not about the money. It's really not like a real market, the Eco market, unlike any real market has infinite demand. And there are really only 4 crops that are farmed enough to influence dynamic pricing. There is sugar cane, cactus, melkin and wheat. The fluctuation isn't enough to reorder the profitability of those crops so it wont influence a players progression or choice of farm. And now that prices have been driven down by existing players, any new players trying to get established will have a tougher start than those before them. Dynamic pricing disadvantages new players, because the players that set up before them have driven the price down. Yes, there was a time when everyone farmed melons or pumpkins. Because they were the most profitable. Croppers didn't replant wheat back then and now that it does, wheat is the most profitable, despite requiring a larger initial investment. There are a few other players farming sugar cane because it's incredibly cheap to do that. and with profit shops gone, it's all they can do. They don't do it because they like the variety, they do it because its the cheapest starter crop. The only other crop that cropper collect is cactus and yes, some people are farming that but that's a large investment as sand is 1.5 times the cost of dirt. and even with dynamic pricing lifting the price of cactus and lowering the price of melkin, cactus still sells for less than melkin. Yes, we can abolish, cut or restructure taxes, and that would be good but dynamic pricing will continue to make it harder for new starters. EDIT: Seems Sky and I were simultaneously typing a very similar response.
