Commodity Exchange

These videos explain my commodity exchange on my previous server. It'd probably be something I'd try to reproduce if I get the chance.

This is an amazing idea. I really love this. Kind of wonder what happens if the shop runs completely out or is completely full, but I have yet to watch the second video (letting it load a bit).

I could never understand economics very well, but this looks like a very useful thing to learn from. It's also minecraft-centered! What more in a lesson could a student ask for.


Edit:
Letting players rent/buy out spaces in the corners was a nice idea as well.

Basically the chests at the high and low end are VERY HIGH to buy from or VERY LOW to sell to, so while you can try to fill up or completely empty the exchange, usually it doesn't make sense...plus its becomes a really good deal for people to do the opposite thing (sell if the price is high, buy if the price is low) so usually it self corrects to the middle.

The only exception to this is when the server owner started creating too much money for nothing (money printing) which made prices always go up. Sometimes we ran out of stuff and had to relabel the signs with higher prices after that.

I think I get that part now. Very nice. :]

Wondering how the server admins know how much money to create initially..
How does that even start off anyways? Your exchange on a new server?

On a new server, I'm not exactly sure how it would work.

At the begining, people could exchange 1 gold bar for 1 unit of currency, at a fixed rate. This was the only way to get money to begin with.

Later they started offering money daily for clicking their votes on server rating sites. This wasn't that bad, because the ammount was low to start with, but unfortunantly they kept making it higher and higher, until it got crazy. The daily offer was 25z when I started on my last server, it was upwards of 900z recently. It was just too much money.

This is seperate of the money created from people just donating to the server. When all the kids got money at christmas time this cause a big problem and was the last time I almost ran out of everything. THe prices never really went down to their old levels either. Everything basically doubled. It was almost like real life. That's why I ended up fighting with the server owner. We were going to strike and temporarily shut down the exchange. Then he called me a terrorist....after that I slowly just powered down and left. Hahaha...guy was too selfish for donations!

A terrorist? Lol. Okay guy.

This is really really interesting. I never thought to look at it from someone like yourself's point of view, any of those money-related promotions. Sort of makes me think of another server on a slightly different scale--they'd just go into creative mode and have drop parties to get people to come onto the server. But then people would just leave, because they had diamond everything and everything they could ask for. Sort of makes me think of that, though its different I know.

But yeah. That'd be really neat, getting something like that on the NT server. Trying to think of how to transport since I'm not sure how much we can do with this.. Maybe nether portals? lol. Then again I can't imagine people being too far out, since we'd just be starting and all..