[Robo]

Originally Posted by Kraetos Okay, I think there's an important part of this which I haven't made clear. (And for the record, I'm not arguing for a "closed" economy.) An important part of this economy is a centralized store where you buy goods. When you get a slimeball grant from Brad, you don't go back to Brad for whatever you need, you go to the store.

But I'm not convinced that other players will be selling the rarest materials back to the store. What could a player like bobsky possibly want with slimeballs? He doesn't need to buy anything.

I think a store would mainly just be people pawning nearly worthless stuff back to the store. I might trade stacks of wheat for lapis, but I don't think anyone would do the opposite. Nobody's going to go to the store and be all take my diamonds, seeds please. This means the valuable stuff will still essentially have to come from Brad (or turtle).

Originally Posted by Kraetos If your grant is big enough then yes, take it directly. But what if it's "I'm going to need some colored dyes and I don't yet know how much or what colors?" Then the slimeball store comes in handy since you can go pick up a small amount of dye without hassling Brad/turtle.

You just really want that red and black wool, don't you.

I don't care about simulating an economy. I don't care if some players decide to make a living off selling goods instead of mining themselves. I just think there should be a dye/rare ore/nether material shop in the center of town, and I also want individual players to have stores to efficiently deal with our surpluses. Example: through this thread I've learned that robo has lots of wool. I have lots of lapis. He needed lapis for his project but he got it from Brad. He could have "bought" it from me and in turn I would have been able to "buy" wool from his store. This is an improvement for 2 reasons: 1) If everyone has a store, everyone else can check other player's stores for stuff they need. 2) If everyone has a store, and we use slimeball currencies, transactions can occur between players even if one of the players is logged off. This is all heavily reliant on the honor system, but except for the Great Sword Heist, we haven't had any problems, and even that might have been a bug.

Well, when I needed the lapis, I didn't have lots of wool.

It sounds like what we maybe could use is a message board in town, or some sort of electronic message board, where people could post things like "Will trade for lapis. -werejack" and then people with lapis who needed other things could check the werecave and see if I had what they needed. I think the main problem is just knowing who is looking for what, not the fact that it's too hard to both be online at the same time. (And a trading thread here wouldn't even require that. I wouldn't have to be online for you to put blue dye in my dyes box and take out the red dye, or whatever.)