enormeous

Hey, I'm new to this server and have been looking at issues having to do with it's economy. I believe that I have thought of a viable solution to it's problems, it's called an Independently Functioning Economy, and could be a very revolutionary thing if implemented by the server staff. However, if it never gains ground, then it won't matter how good of an idea it is. So, go to the Mina and You Forum post, and read the 97th post. If you agree with me, then tell others about it, upvote the post, and try and get the staff's attention.

Ok so now that I've given my input on how to solve this issue with minas, I'd like to address some of the concerns of other respondees to this post. 

On 11/26/2020 at 4:49 PM, Flayns said:

Okay, so my piece on this new economy system will comprise of numerous different points, that likely have already been brought up but this is literally 5 pages long and I don't want to lose my train of thought, so bear with me here. Color ranged from highest priority concerns, to mid priority concerns, to lowest priority concerns.

 

• The whole issue with banks being nation-locked is truly unfair to settlements that do not wish to reside under nations. It takes away their ability to be able to hold roleplay with purchasing items, selling items, etc, and would make that kind of RP die out. Many people don't wish to keep an excess of mina on them in the event of pugsies or being bandited. Not to mention my next point:
• A ******* FIVE HUNDRED MINA CAP on what you can keep in your bank, without paying a fee? This is going to make people NOT want to pay their nation/settlement taxes even more than they already complain about doing. It's harmful to nations and settlements, especially settlements that are still attempting to grow, as these areas require more mina to continue growing and allowing for more housing, better tile developments, etc. Not to mention, SETTLEMENT TREASURIES were not included on the exemption list- only nation treasuries. It feels as if the world team is PURPOSELY trying to make anyone who plays in a settlement want to either quit or be forced to move to a nation so that they actually feel lumped into something. Settlement treasuries are just as necessary as nation treasuries, you cannot change my mind on this.
• The new system with mina is going to **** over everyone and anyone who makes skins. Are you going to make people resort to RMT? Or are you going to make them lower the prices of several hours worth of work? And what about those who donate skins to the server in order to gain mina? Is that system going away as well? The cap will ruin the idea of making skins for people unless for RMT, which inevitably brings losses to the server revenue, as less players will want to join unless they have a premade or donated skin, less players will want to spend their money on server ranks, and more artists will inevitably be scammed.
• Another issue regarding the nation exemption from taxes, but how are you supposed to know that users who are nation treasurers won't abuse the treasury exemption? Put their own funds into the treasury to avoid the taxation and keep track of what money they put into it compared to what money the rest of the nation civilians are paying so that they can continue to hoard their loads of money while the economy gets even more fucked than what you're hoping to keep it at.
• And where is the tax going, anyway? CT? Why does the Cloud Temple require mina? Shouldn't it be running on magick to keep it up and keep it safe? It's not going to help the mina just go back into circulation, because people are going to ask the same thing I am- Why is CT getting the mina if it's a literal godsent safehaven without any damage or government? The mina would be better going to working on making sure settlements, lairs, nations, and others aren't going to be landscars, allowing the users to clean things up easily and fix things around them.
• With the new economy ideals, what would happen if five players with five hundred mina each all up and left the server permanently? What would be done in that case, regarding the 2500 mina loss?
• And from the perspective of a friend, who plays amongst the Orcs race: 

  They make a very, VERY valid point when you bring in the fact that the LOTC player base already has a low chance of wanting to interact with the Orc tribes due to the banditing that had occurred numerous times, or because they hear negative things about them-- not to mention, very few people already want to play orcs. This would cause a very lore-rich race die out.

My response:

Ok, so you seem to have put some abstract thought into this situation as well and also have experience in the game and know what the economic issues with the server are through experiencing them on a first hand basis. You're free to respond to what I'm saying here and I in fact encourage that you do! Mainly, i'm going to try and take what you're saying here and tie it into my argument for an independently functioning economy. Take into account the fact that I'm a new player here, and am making observations about this server based what I have read on the wiki, from other sources, economic philosophy, and what I'm still learning about how everything here really works. 

Your first issue is that Banks are only available to nations and that this takes away the ability for small scale settlements to function independent of a major state. Well, I completely agree with this complaint, and this is a direct result of having a single inflexible currency as the only medium of exchange. There is less money to go around, so only major states will be able to make any real transactions because they are the only ones who are able to muster up an iota of economic power. This consolidates the money of the server in the hands of a select few who are running large states. This issue is then compounded by the fact that not only is it more difficult for the normal player to gather up any large sum of minas, but players are less likely to even be able to keep any large quantity of minas. This is either because they can only carry 500 minas at once, because it is all taxed away for redistribution by the server's central bank for later redistribution if it's in their bank account, (I'll get into this redistribution thing later in my response to you, but if you want to know how it ties into everything you should read my earlier post) or they are afraid of being in the midst of a Pugsies* event or being bandited.

*What's a Pugsies?

I sort of jumped ahead to your second complaint while responding to your first complaint when I mentioned that players having only 500 minas at once compounds the issue of wealth inequality and the inability for people to actually participate in the economy. You then go on to make a complaint about a conclusion I literally came up with myself before reading this, which is that power is consolidated within the major states. You then go on to make the conjuncture that the staff is purposely trying to consolidate power in the hands of these few state leaders in order to achieve a better roleplaying experience. To be honest, this was actually a good move on their part in a way, even if they didn't go about it that well. Think about it, if you want to get more complex story lines out of RP's, you want to have larger groups of people so you can get more interactions out of said people. However, when you have the economic restrictions of a singular inflexible currency, this consolidation of power with the nation leaders leads to the mini story lines and other things about a RP universe that make up the pillars of the temple rotting away because they are forced to fall in line with the big nation states. My system solves this through setting up economies that are independently run by these different nations and compete with each other. Then, smaller peoples and settlements won't be economically forced into joining a nation, as they can simply function as a part of the larger world economy of competing states and economic coalitions, and etc... This is not only because as nations print out their own money (lol they won't print it this is a computer game) there will be more money to go around and make use of, but also because players will now have the option to choose between one state's economy vs the other. This will lead to a normal player no longer wanting to join a state so much as a state wanting a player to join them. (although it's still going to be a transaction between the state and the player, as it is now, but it's just that the player now has the freedom to tell a state "bug off, I'm joining a different nation" or they don't have to join a large nation at all.).

Skins. Let me reference once again my being new to this server, so when I wrote my first post on this forum, I didn't know that people traded skins for minas and looking into it also at times trade skins for IRL currency. Well, based on what you said this could turn out to be a huge issue for the server and if skin trading is a big part of the entire server's economy, then it's being messed with could mess with player base retention like you stated. This would be a big catastrophe, and ought be dealt with. As for how an Independently Functioning Economy could come to fix this, (I will refer to it from now on as an IFE) well first off having more money units in circulation would allow for larger payments to an artist, and also if I were to change the basic economy of the server, I may want to make skin transactions something actually separate from the server economy if I wanted to incur greater IRL profits for the server. But yes, based on what you have said in this post and what I now know abt skin trading, it'll probably fall apart if something is not done soon to protect it.

Well, this is getting to be a pretty long response, so I'll try and keep my answers shorter for the rest of your complaints.

You mention that people who run a nation's treasury have nothing stopping them from hoarding money for their own purposes simply to avoid the server tax. Exactly. To be honest, why wouldn't they? They are in a bit of an unsolvable situation where if they don't do everything they can to gather up wealth, then they will be rolled over by people who do. They are like England and France and Spain (Spain can relate to this lol) trying to gather up as much gold as possible from everywhere so that they can be the dominant world economy. And yeah, if this trend continues (which it will) it'll just result in the money gatherers gathering up minas indefinitley until there are no minas left, minas are injected into the economy, staff force them to spend the minas by breaking rules that they have already established, or minas just becoming worthless. 

You mention that it makes no sense that the Minas are going to the cloud temple as it is inconsistent with the RPing as the cloud temple is a definable entity in this world, and that with the minas in the cloud temple, they are not going to any real use. Well, actually there is a reason that the minas are going back into the CT, it's because they only have a finite amount of Minas circulating in the first place, and want to use their taxation system to keep minas being redistributed. To put this in context, when you get minas from killing mobs or other things, it's being with drawed from the central bank of the Cloud Temple, which keeps it's store of minas high through taxation and possibly through staff injecting Minas into the economy. Think of the CT as a way of artificially keeping the economy running. My IFE system would solve this by putting transactions of currency in the hands of the people, thus transactions would be made out of necessity, not artificial creation. 

Well shi- um, that's a good point I guess that a bunch of people taking mina out of circulation like that would literally throw a monkey wrench on the head of a drunk monkey, or in other words make it even harder to make economic transactions than it already is. As for how my IFE would solve this, well great questions deserve great answers! But I'm torn between two answers: it would either be changed so that the minas that they logged off with was put in the central bank or something else was done with it, or a better idea would be to change the ownership of the minas to the nation, and not a person, therefore, a nation does not give someone access to the minas directly from their treasury, but allows them to make transactions from the treasury to another entity. This is in essence adding another step to the approval process, and could be an optional but recommended thing for nations to do. Also, you could just allow for people to file complaints to staff about improper minas use, and it could be sorted from there by directly taking the minas from the account as the staff see fit. 

Lastly, you reiterate the complaint about how minor storylines and races cannot compete in the economy and are dying out, like how your friend who plays an orc states: The orcs are being forced to the backburner, ... and are dwindling even further as a result. Again I agree, but my system could solve this. 

Wrapping up everything I've written, I hope this properly responds to your complaints about the current economy, and also convinces you that they can be addressed, and things on this server can be fixed. So, if you want this to get better, then I encourage you to upvote this post, read my previous post, share them, and get the people's and staff's attention. The same goes for anyone reading this.

If you want things to change, support a solution!

#revolution #solution #economy ##

I think that the entire issue with running an economy like this is that you don't have economic entities doling out money but instead have an all powerful entity doling out currency and keeping track of the economy, which is an issue because it means that the people participating in the economy will not be able to fulfill their wants and needs as they see fit. The major issue that is going to happen here is that there will be deflation of the minas if you don't inject minas eventually as the economy will inevitably need to have some sort of sustained growth and consistent influx of resources and if you do eventually have more minas being exchanged among the populace of the server rather than sitting in banks, then this means that as resources become more plentiful and becoming cheaper, there won't be currency changing according to the needs of the market. Sure you could solve this problem with your resort of injecting minas into the economy, but won't this just lead to the same problem of minas inflation that you were trying to avoid? I have a solution to this, don't use minas as direct currency! Make it so that nations are encouraged to create their own currency that is backed by minas that are present in their national treasuries. This way, actual economic entities are creating their currency according to their own needs, and resources and services are given proper values. You know what's even better about this? it's already been practiced in real life and you have the example of nations using gold as a backing of their currency to go off of. (although this is a bit different and maybe it is unapplicable to this scenario, if so then I haven't really thought this post though) All in all, if you want to create a somewhat realistic or at least independently functioning economy, then you need to switch the power from being in the hands of you administrators to people who are actually participating in the economy. There will be a few things you will have to work out to do this, but it will lead to a functioning economy, and thus a better role playing world.

Edit: Ok so I just realized that you have a 3% tax on minas which allows you to have consistent control of redistributing minas to the player base. But my argument about the major issue with minas still stands, which is that goods will face severe eventual deflation as the availability of resources increases unless you increase the ammount of minas in circulation. I should mention that the reason that deflation is bad for an inflexible currency is because it would make it more difficult for players to sell items at reasonable rates, which you may think that if resources are more plentiful and thus the price of some items cheaper, then that is the market adjusting itself problem solved, however with minas this is not possible as when the people with the minas to buy the resources would value the said resources at a lower value, but the people selling the resources would want have a higher value of their product. In a situation with a flexible currency, this would lead to competition between sellers for who can get the customer their resources at a lower value, but with minas competition is limited between the sellers. 

When nations stopped using gold as their main form of currency and started making coins with lesser metals and paper money, it was to solve this issue and allow for competition between buyers and sellers, which is why healthy economies typically see inflation and unhealthy economies see deflation - deflation means less competition.

So, how are you going to implement this is a big question. First, stop taxing minas. treat it more like gold in real life, make it what currencies are based off of, and transition the economy from being based on one inflexible currency to being based on multiple currencies of flexible evaluation that derive their values from being backed by minas. Currency is basically like a banknote, or an IOU, in this case it's an IOU minas, and minas are an IOU resources/services. People should be allowed to trade currency for minas and minas for currency, but overall most transactions should eventually be done with a nation's currency in their economy (oh I should mention the huge fact that nations having a currency will mean that they will have to manage an economy and have an economic zone/sphere of influence. This may seem scary, but if you think about it it is so badass) Alright, so let's pause here. What I'm saying is really cool and all yes, but if you're a person running this server, you're probs thinking "wont having minas not being the main currency jeprodize the income i get from selling things on this server for money IRL?" the answer to this, is you change the way you sell things for IRL money. I cannot think of ways to do this offhand, but with a more complicated economy there will be more incentive for players to want to buy stuff from your server in the first place, so I'm sure that different, even better money making machines could be put into place on this server. *having a better economic system will only lead to good things for you and the players don't fear what I'm saying*

Ok, so I realize that all of this is very revolutionary to say, as it would mean a systematic restructuring of the entire way that this server works, (maybe not that much but just the way the economy works which affects everything else) and you would be doing things that nobody has done on a MC server before (so far as I know) and I also acknowledge that there are probably flaws in what I am proposing here, but realize that this would be a ginormous leap forward in the imersiveness and functionality of your entire server, and would make it far superior to what it is right now. I would like to end all of what I am saying by asking that I be able to discuss and propose this idea to the economic team. 

Also, while I was editing this, I saw that NotEvilAtAll replied to my post, so i'd just like to thank them for doing so and providing feedback, and address what they said in their response. 

- I'm glad you agree with my thoughts on an independent economy for the playerbase and his acknowledging the need for inflation, glad I already have an ally here.

- As for voting being nerfed, well before reading your post I actually got rid of what I said against voting for money. My opinion on it is now that with my system not having minas as what people use as currency voting should either be for a basic income from the state you live in (which could be adjusted by said state) or should provide a small ammount of minas that you could use as a sort of way to build up your base wealth (like slowly piling up gold that you'd trade in with the French empire for some money)(although having minas accessable like this could be a good or bad idea I haven't decided yet)

-As for your observations of how there is not enough minas to flow around atm and there needs to be more for the economy to function, I literally had a mini heart attack when I read that (hyperbole) because it means that I literally predicted an issue to do with this economy without actually participating in it, so I feel pretty cool rn. 

Ok, so this is a long post but whoever is reading it, it is well worth thinking about, and would solve a lot of the problems in this server's economy. My final message to the economic team is- imma go alexander hammilton on y'all but with modern philosophy and knowledge.