Step by step

[Drumoldth 207]

  Greetings, people of lotc. As you all know soon we will be changing to the new map. A refreshing change indeed, but for me and many others, that is the least important thing. For two whole years we had no economy, thus the rp professions of a farmer, fisher, miner,  woodcutter, merchant, cook, breeder and many others disappeared or were meaningless. Anyone could mine some iron and forge a sword. Anyone could plow the fields and have food. Anyone could woodwork and make bows. For hundreds of years the races of lotc managed to be masterfull at everything individually. All nations became communist, having public fields. For hundreds of years gold coins (Minas) had no value at all. Many these new communist nations offered free housing too, with NO taxes. Why would they tax? No reason at all. For hundreds of years our economy was nowhere to be seen, yet in the voting sites we had the economy tag, HA! Only vip members had the luxury of selling items in these past maps, items with no value, items with no practical purpose... Nothing is wrong with rp items, nothing at all. As is nothing wrong with them (rp items) so is nothing wrong with practical ones. Alas, those in charge made their decission back then.

 

 

  Nexus was very grindy and unbalanced indeeed, so were the racial perks. Instead of reworking or balancing these features, they decided to press the delete button. A mistake, why? Because all of the sudden an olog was as weak as a hafling. Some will begin to say, but rp combat exists. Yes rp combat... but rp combat isnt the only option, as those who have the right to enjoy crp, there are those who must have the right to have a proper pvp experiance. So many times i run in to powergamers, ruining the crp. That problem doesnt exist with pvp. Im not saying that one is superior to the other, but both MUST exist. It should matter when in a warclaim a side brings some ologs... It should matter what gear or supplies(food, potions) a side brings. Not only the skill.

 

 

  Theres no need to convince anyone to bring back nexus and balance it, not any more... Vortex is here, a profession system, just like in the good old days. We shall soon see if its worth the wait. Though still, a positive step onwards. To those of the leadership i ask this, consider bringing back racial perks. You all saw and understand what the removal of nexus did to the economy for two whole years. Now i plant the seed for the return of the racial perks. Lets fix the damage that was done. Rework them, plan them better and bring them back. I thank all of those that dedicated their time reading my post. Make sure to post your thoughts! Good day to you all. 

[DISCOLIQUID 1963]

Minecraft is an easy game, and making it complex isn't necessarily good game design.

The economy arises as things get more difficult to acquire - ST items, edited goods, books & quills, leather. By adding artificial difficulty to the game, it becomes harder to gather items. This will cause less people to gather these items, as the game-world takes OOC time to navigate. In turn, these items become somewhat valuable. Valuable in minas, skins, other items, sure. But what you lose by adding a strict economy is freedom. You force a player to decide if wood-cutter or cook will be their profession class. This pushes players away from the 'use your brain to role-play' and more towards 'use our custom interfaces to role-play'.

 

People can only sell what they have extra time to gather, people can only buy when they have extra money to spend.

You say our farms are communist, and that there's no merchant RP on the server because you can just get what you want. Let me counter and say that if you can't get what you want to sell it, there will be even less merchant RP on the server. Most people who engage with professions plugins are just doing it to get the items they want personally, and then after that an even greater amount of time must be donated to the server in order to gather enough goods to then sell ''profitably''. 

 

You seem to have an issue with people being able to gather resources as they need them in-character, but I think you are forgetting something important. People use OOC time to get Minecraft items to facilitate their role-play. The plugins we're adding are going to add real life time-limits to the ability to roleplay as a merchant or woodcutter. Now, instead of just needing a skin and a small store (easily sustainable by voting), you need to upkeep your material gathering & profession skill in relation to others or be pushed to obscurity. 

 

And if voting to make money goes away too, we are forced to spend our time on this server doing professions in order to make minas, not role-playing. The plugin can facilitate some level of immersion, but those of us who have less time are not going to be able to afford these items or want to sell our items we gathered. Why will the items be so expensive? Because they will be inherently tied to their creator's own OOC time, and so they will  be valuable both in-game and in terms of out of game time.

 

So what will happen when items take more time to gather, cost more inherently, and are parted with at a lower rate? In addition, access to money drops at the same time? Hmmmmm.

 

The problem is the buyers. 

In truth, there is plenty of merchant RP on the server, what we lack is a playerbase with any level of cooperative imagination. There are stalls in every major city that don't have anyone roleplaying behind them. They have cheap goods, available in bulk. You might look at this and say the issue is the abundance of goods. It's not, the issue is that many players are unwilling to roleplay in order to buy something. The stalls will be filled with vanilla gear or Vortex gear either way. 

 

Sitting in a store and selling items doesn't go well. People will walk to the abandoned shop if they can buy something for a half a mina cheaper. If you still think that the problem of no merchant RP will be solved with Vortex, consider this. It's just not valuable enough to role-play in your store when you could be out gathering. Perhaps you need an item to continue gathering, though. Are you likely to stop your mechanical gathering, turn to role-play mode, and bash out an hour and a half of RP haggling? Absolutely not. I saw it during Nexus and during Aegis and during Asulon. You will continue on your path of engaging with the plugin, laser in on what you need mechanically, and buy it from an auto-store. 

 

But we all know that everyone has thousands of minas. So why are they acting like cheapos? Maybe people don't like to wait to get their items, and most of the time the buyers aren't interested in your little merchant thing. Despite having the resources to create economic roleplay by being active buyers of goods, most role-players don't bother typing it out. The issue is not a lack of people willing to play the merchant role, the issue is that buyers simply don't want to play the buyer role. They would rather get it themselves or pay minimally for it. 

 

So what will you have? Not more merchant RP, but a higher level of engagement with the plugin.

 

As aggregate item rarity goes up, doing shitty bandit RP becomes more valuable.

There's no point griefing someone whos bad items you could gather from the cloud temple resource pits in half an hour. Even a merchant going from city to city is unlikely to have to deal with the worst of the worst in terms of robbery RP right now because their items simply aren't worth that much OOC time. They may be worth a few thousand minas at most, chump change honestly. 

 

But ohoho, when you can take 128 hours of OOC plugin-work out of someone's inventory by stealing it through terrible gameplay? Then it's incredibly valuable. All of a sudden, you can OOC'ly circumvent having to pay or play in order to gather items. You avoid the hassle of needing to slog through persona cooldowns.

 

This pushes people who are merchants to have to spend even more time gathering PvP items, places the highest burden of loss on them, and drives up the amount of miserably bad bandit RP (read, 95% of bandits). Also, powergaming does exist in PvP. A person who is in high school and can spend however much time they want gathering better gear and practicing minecraft PvP is a powergaming PvP'er, and it's just as unfair and boring to lose to them too.

 

Last Thoughts

Now, Vortex is coming out and there's nothing that can be done about it. I'm fine with that, as the tech team has said they won't be changing too much of vanilla minecraft gathering, and that only special goods will be locked behind persona-cooldowns. Hopefully this will still encourage people to go out and chop wood to sell it, because a world where no one has time to gather and sell goods on this server is going to be bad. Nexus was miserable because it restricted access at the vanilla minecraft level.

 

I am confident that Vortex will be much better though, and likely will avoid some of these negative issues I have laid out. That said, I just want to warn that putting your faith in a plugin to restore a semblance of working economy just might not pan out. I think it may bring some value to committing to OOC'ly clicking at blocks and calling it lumberjacking, but actually encouraging economic role-play? Call me a cynic. 

[Vangroth 39]

#BringBackNexus