Economics of Minecraft
alicemaz.com
alicemaz.com
I run a small browser-based MMORPG and I've seen a lot of interesting metagames play out in the game economy.
One thing I thought of while reading this is the effect of scarcity. I specifically remember one time when a stupid bug made the world a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
My game has a political aspect where one player is the ruling king, giving them a few unique abilities such as setting taxes. It’s a powerful position and players are constantly fighting for the throne. The way this works is that the king hires NPC guards to defend and protect the throne. The more guards, the more expensive and time-consuming it is to dethrone the king. The downside is that the upkeep to staff a full kingsguard is equally expensive. This has naturally made it so that only the wealthiest players can actually afford to sit on the throne and the easiest way to accumulate wealth is to run a shop.
The economy is centered around resources and mining. Normally the mines are replenished from time to time but the bug broke this mechanic. The first thing to deplete was the noble metals such as gold and silver, the same metals that the wealthiest merchants made their fortune from. With prices going through the roof a class division was created between players who had accumulated metals before the bug and players who hadn’t.
The problem is that without good gear you have no chance of coup d'etat. Even if you had a gold armor and sword you need a constant influx of new gold in order to repair them when fighting the guards. Even bronze became a rare commodity.
In effect, what happened is that the kingdom became a dictatorship. The king could set maximum taxes without any consequences. Normally such action would start a riot, have all players get their pitchforks and create a rebellion but without good weapons this was impossible.
I finally got around to fix the bug once normal iron started to run out as well and new players were restricted to useless wood gear, barely enough to kill rodents. I lost a lot of players but it was a really interesting social and economic experiment.
(The coin mining doesn't work for me though - looks like my ISP (Virgin Media) is blocking the coin-hive.com domain.)
EDIT: Oops, didn't fully read OPs comment. More stalking... Probably this one: http://canvaslegacy.com/, but it's down.
The screenshots on the website are from the new dungeon patch I'm working on. If you want to get a better feeling of what the game is like I recommend checking out the photo gallery on the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pg/canvaslegacy/photos/
tombs.io is another multiplayer game of mine, or rather an experiment where I explored the concept of using in-browser XMR mining as a monetization and bot fighting method.
It won't mine anything without the player explicitly pressing the "Start mining" button, in case anyone wants to check it out. It's totally unrelated to my comment though.
(Fun fact since we're on HN: the backend for tombs.io is built with Firebase and Google Cloud Functions. I haven't really seen anyone make a realtime game with server-side authority using that stack before. Wrote a bit about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15977261)
“A near-infinite, persistent online world full of untouched wilderness. Build a new civilization from scratch, starting from rocks and sticks. When you join the game, you're born as a helpless baby, with another player as your mother. Each minute marks a passing year, and over the course of an hour, you will live a full life, having children of your own along the way in the form of other players, then growing old yourself, and eventually dying. Hopefully, in your brief lifetime, you can make your own small contribution to this growing world, passing something useful down to your children and grandchildren.”
I have no affiliation with the developer, other than enjoying his previous games.
git clone https://github.com/jasonrohrer/MinorGems.git minorGems
cd OneLife/
./configure # answer the question
cd gameSource/
make -j 4
./OneLife
mkdir ground; cp graphics/ground_t* ground/; mkdir objects; mkdir transitions;
A perfect opportunity to make storks bring new babies, since you already have to wait for some player on the other end of the world to decide to start playing. :)
I tried playing on minecraft servers with economy plugins, but never really saw the point. I just liked mining for the sake of mining so an economy didn't do much for me.
But this... it's like a gigantic meta-game on top of the game you're already enjoying. Something tells me I'll be playing some minecraft tonight...
Not sure if it's just me or if the game's audience has shifted.
If anyone knows of a good economy based server, I'd love to hear about it.
Given this...
I think you're right, the playerbase shifted. No one does it because the vast majority of the playerbase is in 3 camps:
1. Heavily modded servers. Lots of these servers revolve around gimmicks that ultimately produce a lot of materials, be they Botania and Mekanism or some kind of explicitly something-from-air premise like Sky Factory 3. The audience here is all 20+
2. Specialist modded servers that accept vanila clients. These are very showy and vary in complexity from modest story driven affairs (see Lyinginbedmon on youtube for good examples) up to the absurdly complex game-driven Hypixel world. Lots of kids play here, and to them this IS minecraft. Survival-style play in vanilla is no longer the norm.
3. The very youngest end of the audience has almost no exposure to the game as it was originally played, instead playing the subtly different mobile & iPad editions. These folks may have multiplayer, but it's their parents paying for a realms server.
I'm sure economy servers exist, but they're quite hard to find and they are nowhere near they were back in the older 2013 (and earlier) days when that sort of modest bukkit mods were THE way folks engaged the scene.
That there even is something like a possible, viable economy in that game is a news I haven't even considered realizable. And now you come and tell me that is old news from 4 years ago. Jesus.
But try something like All the Mods 3 or Sky Factory. Here's a quick video where I describe my mid-to-lategame custom power system to get a feel for what kind of tasks we do in modded: https://youtu.be/5ztDvQan99Q
Not that I play very much. Learning Idris scratches the same itch as working through the combinations of mods, so...
The same happened everywhere in the Minecraft community. Be it in the english-speaking world, or Germany, everywhere the economy-based servers closed down over time, by now almost none of them are left anymore. Dominating now are the minigame hubs, dozens of servers full of minigames, raking in cash.
And many of the players that used to play the economy bad in the day, are now playing modded servers.
Actually part of me thinks it may have been the same server, the sky mall sounds familiar.
Really neat game that I wouldn’t have considered because of its weak original branding (Oort Online ring a bell?)...
Just beware everything gets wiped on the 1.0 release.
Also, it will not be wiped as in deleted forever, devs are pondering ideas about making those [archived] planets public or including builds in some way into new planets.
If anyone is interested in Boundless economy, it's a budding one. For serious traders this should be a prime time to start.
There's also a reference implementation, which you can download and play without getting into programming. It doesn't have all too much content by itself, but you can extend it with mods or use it to connect to multiplayer servers which can have their own collection of mods (sort of Modpack-as-a-Service).
So, you should also quite easily find a multiplayer server which has some form of currency and economy.
Sure, it's "just" a game but she was clearly playing a very different game from the one the majority of players were playing and it sounds like she was adversely affecting their experience.
The account sounds more like a cautionary tale than something worthy of praise.
The consequences don't impact real life, you can leave at any time, and in most cases it is very simple to recover, even if not fully.
I think the real interesting morality starts happening when it does impact real life. For example, someone in a poor country farming items to sell on the black market as a way to make real life currency they need to live. I've read about (though am not really sure about the authenticity) of gold farmers in places like Venezuela doing this to survive.
What happens when killing and looting someone in a game actually costs them a meal in real life (even if the real money trading is banned, a rule is only as good as it is enforced)?
I'm not sure it's an apple's to apple's comparison. Multiplayer first person shooting games are designed for mass killing. Minecraft players are playing a game to gather resources to build things. Alice is playing a economic simulation. Obviously she is going to win.
The equivalent analogy would be that Alice gets on to a Counter Strike server, and somehow manipulates the economy where she gets the best guns and all the other players get a knife. IMO, the game will not be fun for the vast majority of the players.
Obviously, the consequence is minimal compared to losing a meal. The only real consequence is that the perpetrator is a big bully and an ass. In real life, we (as a society) would look down on an adult who went to the playground and kicked out all the kids. There are no real consequences for kids to not play in one particular playground, but that's not the society we want.
What is missing is that people were still able to play minecraft without the market, even on the given server. Did like the price? Then go mine your own, with the same chance of getting it as you would in the vanilla version.
The only person who did anything bad (which I think may still be arguable, but lets just say the only one who did anything bannable) was the one duping the items.
If anything, the tax they implemented in the 1.7 server was worse than the market takeover of the 1.6 server because it wasn't something a person could opt out of and forced an effective black market.
Also, most people on the server where playing Minecraft with some buy and sell mods, not the sociopatic trading simulator the author describes.
Either way your moralizing is ironic.
One server you might be interested in looking at is 2b2t[1], which is a vanilla server which had the same map since 2010 and has no rules -- Hacked clients are "allowed" since nobody gets banned for anything! Me and a large group of people from another forum tried creating a republic there and I learned a lot about how to organize large groups that would split off into peripheral bases in a very hostile environment. Reading stories like this really makes me nostalgic for those days!
If anyone knows any servers that have trading communities and mechanics like the OP, please let me know!
[1]http://www.jamesrustles.com/2016/12/2b2t-history-2010-2016.h...
The best multiplayer experience I've had in Minefraft is the notorious 2b2t server. With vanilla Minecraft, no plugins, no rules. Did I say the pvp experience in Minecraft was bad ? Cheaters insta-mine all blocks surrounding them, turn on x-ray vision to see diamonds and chests, etc, fly, speed run, etc. There's literally no restrictions or checks on the server side, while at the same time the server is a huge resource hog ... Because of cheaters the spawn point on the 2b2t server is a complete wasteland, with experienced players fully geared killing all fresh spawns. If you manage to avoid the spawn-killers, you'll probably die from hunger. You have to run for several minutes just to find a tree so you can craft yourself a pick-axe. And if you manage to find food and survive you have to walk for hours until you find unsettled land. But you'll have an incredible journey. You will pass ruins of great castles, and monuments. Some of them still having farms with crops in them, that will help you on your journey. And once you find unsettled land you can build your own castle, or underground city.
the other economy that appears to be fairly interesting to understand (but not necessarily to partake in) could be EVE Online. Because I only have a few unscheduled hours of free time a week to play video games, I haven't been able to get into it. Eve is one of the rare MMOs to allow two-way markets which presents plenty of opportunities for traditional market making. As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight the economy will get closer to how commerce works in the real world, but as of now these activities feel a little disjointed.
as for the other MMOs, i feel they are a little bit on rails. games like WoW and PoE allow all kinds of low-risk "arbitrage" because of the lack of a two-way market. i played wow for a while and i found it's not much of a rush to snipe ignorant listings as acquiring 1000s of g in raid materials to craft raid level gear that sell for multiples, just from the tremendous risk being undertaken. the best guild traders were not merely trading on the auction house, they had Top-of-Orderbook relationships with "Chinese farmers" and they'd craft discounted raid level materials into equipment and potions to sell to new guilds getting into the heavily-gated raid scene (this was back in 2004-2008 when i was active), so that these new guilds may one day have their best tanks poached by the very same guild that got them started in the first place.
i played wow just before my college days when i was all ready to make an education and career choice for the rest of my life. i was all set on EEE but at the last minute switched out (to math/econs) when i realized i hadn't been merely playing video games in the same way this person hadn't just been playing minecraft.
I would say this is pretty much the case.
Even the simplest most abundant resources takes time to harvest. And that rare resources take much longer to fine, and can be much more dangerous to gather (requiring people to suit up with a set of expensive gear that they could lose in the process).
What makes different servers so diverse is that mods can drastically change the underlying cost and risks of gathering material. There is a turtle mod that allows you to program a turtle to mine resources for you. While it is kinda slow, it runs steadily without intervention and can quickly strip mine an area to provide you with plenty of resources. But it can't farm animal items like wool, so it significantly lowers the time investment of ores while not at all impacting animal product costs.
You sound like you've done quite a bit of reading, but in case you haven't seen it and for anyone else who is interested, this a great write-up of an economic scheme the Goons (players from the SomethingAwful forums) pulled off to the tune of ~4 trillion ISK (between $80k-$120k US at 2012 prices): https://forums-archive.eveonline.com/message/1512212/
A couple of thoughts I had on your comment:
>As far as I can tell, pure arb is hard to come by given all the fees and most mkt mkrs make money taking a combination of inventory, production and transport risk. now if Eve standardizes chartering freight...
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by pure arbitrage, but certainly it's impossible to buy something from a sell order and immediately turn around and sell it to a buy order in the same station for a profit (if someone tried to post a sell order with a price lower than the price of the highest buy order, the sale would immediately take place, filling the topmost buy order(s) automatically)
Transport risk wasn't very large for the regional trading I was doing. The player-run freighting groups have excellent coverage and reliability in high-sec, and because freight contracts use a collateral system, they were the ones shouldering the transport risk, not me. All I had to do was find goods selling in one trade hub for less than people were buying them for in another trade hub, buy up some, have them shipped, and put them up for sale. Of course, I was shouldering the inventory risk you mentioned, but my strategy was to invest as widely as I could and only keep a couple items of any given commodity in my hands at one time. This worked for the items I was selling (i.e. relatively small numbers of high-value and low-mass manufactured goods) but you'd definitely need a different approach for selling, say, minerals (huge amounts of low-value and high-mass raw materials).
Also, there are definitely ways to make transporting goods (even in dangerous space) nearly foolproof - if one is willing to put in the legwork. A lot of the loss of goods that occurs is due to player ignorance of game mechanics and/or laziness "well, I know I should [scout this gate|use an instadock bookmark|switch to my armor implants] but what are the odds of [bad thing] happening this one time and besides, it's almost downtime, I'll be fine." Of course I'm not complaining! This sort of thing keeps the prices high for the rest of us. :)
There was an attempt to institutionalize the movement (outside of the twitter-sphere) through the likes of LD50[0] and Vince Garton's Urbanomic piece[1], but since their whole ideology is based around the principles of "anti-praxis" the entire thing is kind of just a big self-own imo.
Anyway, I find people like Alice Maz (who suckle themselves onto these fashionable but theoretically barren movements that fetishize an aesthetic in order to aggrandize their own narcissistic image[2]) kind of annoying. I don't doubt that Maz may make interesting observations about tech and cs, but I can't stand the constant alt-right posturing on her tl.
[0]: although it is more of an outwardly alt-right thing, many of the U/ACC people seem to engage and condone what is happening there
[1]: https://www.urbanomic.com/document/leviathan-rots/
[2]: I find this behavior also expresses itself more generally in the tech world through the proliferation of ideological contempt culture and platform capitalism
What are we even talking about here? Economic theory? Political ideology? Philosophy?
What exactly is anti-Fordist, accelerationism, L/ACC, R/ACC and CCRU?
Actual smart people are generally effective at explaining complex things succinctly and in simple terms.
I often err on the hand-wavey side when I don't have time to do the topic any justice. It was just a HN comment after all.
I have a mental model about the typical HN reader. So, for example, I would not bother explaining the term 'container' in the context of application deployment. Even for devops who don't use containers, just hanging around here providers plenty of exposure to that concept.
But in this case...
I feel like this is the link someone above me should have shared:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism#Contemporary_a...
SEEMS LIKE philosophy-type sub-communities trying to figure out how to use all this new tech these past few decades to achieve 'post-capitalism'. Lots of room for different political tribes, in that direction.
Tempted to check out a book related to this stuff, but I haven't exactly had my philosophical world rocked yet by anything I've read about it yet.
Although I sincerely hope these people don't drive automobiles the way they advocate running society.
> unconditional acceleration — think <stuff I don't understand> à la alt-right.
Now I wonder if I've gotten the jist of it or not.
- if your child (8years or so) loves minecraft but you think staying away from public servers is sensible, is there a good way to introduce them to these worlds or just wait for some years ?
- what are the tools and scripts for looking at the real world like a MMOneconomy game?
Each version update breaks compatibility and your kids have a hard time understanding why they can’t use that cool mod their friend told them about at school where they portal to the moon!
Definitely makes me interested in trying something like this - does anyone know of any other games that have similar economy aspects?
Maybe the conditions for that kind of behavior are less common than we think.
Assuming that people actually bring their ideals to a game - which is by no means certain (my Civilization-style games tends to end with total war because it's fun when nobody gets hurt for real), the two (and numerous variations) would lead to very different results, and such results would also depend greatly on ability of in-game enforcement.
E.g. you can't have a revolution and change the mode of production if the mode of production is hardcoded into the server (property right enforcement; protecting capital; inability for the in-game community to set and enforce their own law rather than rely on the mods) - unless of course the mods are in on it.
The latter, I think highlight a lot of the difficulty in getting such societies to be good simulations rather than "good enough" simulations for specific types of games: they tend to take a lot of shortcuts in enforcing certain rules "out of game" because having malleable but reliable in-game government and law enforcement is really hard to do with NPC's and requires a fairly big and dedicated user base to make viable with human players, and a lot of the potential strife it would lead to may not fit most games.
When the worst case consequence of a failed attempt at in-game revolution, coups or large scale war is that you "burn" an account, and empathy can be expected to be stunted by lack of perceived real world consequences for your victims, it's much harder to expect people to behave.
Players have a mechanism to feed their desires into the actual game rules. They also had some sort of indirect democratic control which enabled them to give characters a death sentence, ceding all their property. I think they elect a "Demi-Pharaoh", and the DP gets to give out one death sentence during their "reign", something like that. So it was possible to _really_ screw somebody who caused trouble.
However, Vanilla Minecraft has some labour-saving devices, where you invent some resources to make more without proportional effort, e.g. using stone, and metal from a furnace you can hook up a simple machine that turns wood into charcoal and feeds the furnace, so compared to a beginner you are now using much less wood to make the same resources, and no extra effort. ATITD mostly avoids this, it has a strong click economy, a serious player must spend hours every day clicking on things, machines that reduce the amount of clicking are almost unheard of while of course clients that automate clicking _outside_ the game are common. This can't help but tilt the way the game is played.
ATITD when I played it (many years ago now) was already a very niche game, and I believe it now has even fewer players than it did then and is maintained entirely by fans rather than a third party developer, but the reddit still seems to exist, as does the game's web site.
Many things are totally renewable AND automatable even n vanilla, including all the metals ((A famous youtuber Tango Tek shows how to make infinite iron; it's involved but cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw), flowers, wood, dirt, and sand.
Economies form around packed ice and diamonds, but even these are eventually destroyed as fortune 3 picks become easy to manufacture.
It's all about timesavings.
It looks like there haven't been any updates in almost a year - does anyone know what Alice is up to now?
The server we were on was much smaller, and while there was an economy, it was never to the point that B would buy from A just to resell at a higher price than A was selling.
One game that fascinates me with its economy is Path of Exile. It tried to do away with gold, and in doing so gave evidence that there will always be some sort of currency. Granted, I think this was already shown in Diablo 2 when, because of the gold cap being far below the value of the best items, a second organic currency economy was born trading in runes (I think it was runes, its been a long time).
Kinda reminds me of Bitcoin. Or these free to play apps that force people to look at ads of other free to play apps (on an infinite time scale, only the bank^Wad platform will win that game)
For example suppose I smash a block of iron ore with a pickaxe. The client tells the server that I used my pickaxe to smash the block of iron ore, the server checks that yes, that pickaxe can smash the iron ore, and adds one chunk of iron ore to my inventory. By duplicating this logic the client can anticipate that I'll get a chunk of ore, but the fact it did that doesn't actually give me ore in the world, it just means my display updates even before the server replies saying "Also now you have ore". I actually think the ore example doens't happen in modern minecraft because a better pick might give more ore, or even auto-smelt it into iron ingots, and the server would decide some of that randomly in some cases - but you get the idea.
Network problems can cause this to de-synchronise. The symptom might be e.g. you dig a block of sand on a new server, your client shows you now have sand, but when you move to where the sand was, your client rubber-bands and the sand re-appears in front of you. But the server is the truth for everybody else, they'll see you lurching about trying to dig sand but failing, and when you fix the problem, you won't have any sand.
Modders are mostly working on the server, although since they add new graphics and other elements the same mods are usually also needed by the client (it just doesn't run the server elements).
Some logic does live purely on the client but it's mostly quality-of-life stuff, e.g. auto-mapping. All the visuals live on the client. So a client can make opaque blocks see-through for example, to some extent, which would be a problem for cheating in combat games, and hit-scanning would be easy to cheat in a client too.
The economy becomes complex because you can build automatic farms for many valuable items: experience points, food... that would beat manual production hands down.
The piece is a little old. You can now farm wool mostly unattended and food totally hands free. I can't see any mention to villagers trade, not sure if that's because some server rule or because it was impossible with that versions.
Villagers and wool are an infinite source of most valuable items including some diamond tools. Also you can farm gold and experience points with Snocrash's pigmen farm at an incredible pace.
In other words: I thought Minecraft multiplayer was something you did with friends where the possibility to cheat doesn't matter, not like an MMO where cheating would destroy the game.
Some Minecraft multiplayer servers run profits > 100k USD per month, with tenthousands of players. There has been a massive investment into building alternative server backends, sharding the world across multiple servers, implementing complex anti-cheat systems, and more.
The problem is that Minecraft doesn't mistrust clients enough.
BTW "hacker" has become a dirty word for Minecraft multiplayer gamers :(
Her name is literally Alice. Women can be sucessful in business, too, y'know?
That said, I suspect Microsoft views less as 'return on investment' and more as value of having Minecraft on Xbox / Windows Store as an immediately recognizable title, just like how they acquired Halo to do the same back in the day.