Inner village trade (coins)

[maze]

I updated the 1st post I made, to clear a few things up on stamp coins.

---------------


How do i stop 50 miners from making coins and buying out my town....you don't

-------------------

I've talked to my village mates over and over again.
The coins are to promote incentive to work, make some coins pay for the food and such.

--------------

What I'm trying to promote is coins used inside your own town, not outside, I have everything I need other then clay, what seems to be forever avoiding me.
-------------

then you go back and say just make the iron or steel with high Q be the real value of the coin........and it became a quick joke in T.U
since everyone has access to miners in T.U. tell me how am I to back a coins that I want to use inside my city to promote work and give people incentive to get better they need to do things for coins. and once they get coins they can do work.
if they can just make coins. and more and more and more. whats the point of coins.

------------------

World 3 Cavebulbs were the currency. no one cared for the Q other then it being Q10+. it was simple, 1 type of currency.

for the fact of making it simple make stamped coins out of wood~ that way farm villages who never use metal. can use coins.

if you want more then one type of coins make 2 types of coins

Metal coins bronze,tin, w/e junk you larpers want.
and stamped coins. for the people who know how this system works already from other games.

100% if you walked into T.U and ask us to trade cuz you got metal. you will be laughed at.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

Legacy hit a peak in this. There is only so much you can do with social mechanics before the unwieldy reality of this being a game vs real life causes it to collapse. Cost of information/goods exchange is relatively much larger in game than it is in real life. Hard coded mechanics targetted at easing things like collecting payments and automatically managing rights to plots or the like are critical if something like open cities are ever to exist on a wider scale. And I personally want to see that happen.

Without changing these mechanics, the game will socially stay as it is. Social management aids in haven has always been non-existent and the game could be so much more.

Methods of delivering/collecting coins are not an issue I was trying to address, my apologies for the confusion.

But the coins themselves were not the problem, their delivery and management was. That needs changing, not the coins themselves.

[Onep]

I definitely like the idea of cities being able to produce their own stamped currency. It could lead to a currency exchange between cities and aspiring merchants would be able to assess the value of other cities and determine its buying power.
A simple metal to coin system seems relatively useless in my opinion. I can go sit down and mine out an entire iron node in less than a day if I really wanted. It's too easy of a resource for everyone to gain access and the ease of forgery makes it impossible as a trade commodity.

[spectacle]

Legacy hit a peak in this. There is only so much you can do with social mechanics before the unwieldy reality of this being a game vs real life causes it to collapse. Cost of information/goods exchange is relatively much larger in game than it is in real life. Hard coded mechanics targetted at easing things like collecting payments and automatically managing rights to plots or the like are critical if something like open cities are ever to exist on a wider scale. And I personally want to see that happen.

Without changing these mechanics, the game will socially stay as it is. Social management aids in haven has always been non-existent and the game could be so much more.

Methods of delivering/collecting coins are not an issue I was trying to address, my apologies for the confusion.

But the coins themselves were not the problem, their delivery and management was. That needs changing, not the coins themselves.

The coins themselves were always the problem. Demand for metal in this game is extremely variable, so if you trade for coins you have no idea if you will be able to buy something with those coins next week. Pure metal coins are useless as a medium of exchange because they do not hold their value. The closest thing we have had to a stable currency is superior curiosities such as pearls, since every player always wants more of those.

There is hope for stamped coins though. You may have noticed that trade threads often use some abstract "points" as a measure of value. If villages could stamp unique coins to act as physical tokens representing such points, they could be useful as currency.

Suppose that WealthyTown is a big city trading all kinds of resources. I sell them some fated curios and get points in exchange, but instead of taking resources I ask for coins. I know that WealthyTown coins are valuable since nearly any player can find something they want in the list of products WealthyTown is selling. So I can use my WealthyTown coins to buy silk from a neighboring hermit, we both have faith that WealthyTown will honor the points the coins represent, so they are valuable to both of us, and that value is stable since WealthyTown sells a large variety of products so there is always a good deal to be found.

Will WealthyTown resist the temptation to mass produce coins and flood the market once their value is established? That's where the economy fun begins

[Phizuol]

I think we've gotten into a lot of pointless arguing. There's no reason we can't have metal coins of value AND village seal stamping other than the devs being willing to implement it that way. I can see maze's dilemma in needing some kind of abstract token for trading so why shouldn't he be allowed to have it? In such a case even wooden coins would be useful (which I hope we really can have wood coins that are cheap to produce.)

I also want to add my point of view on the "failure" of coins in legacy because I seem to have had a different experience than everyone else. My friends and I did tons of coin trading near the end of w3 at the central trade hub with all the vendor stands. Coins were pretty successful for us. We used the coins for currency and as a source of metal since we did not mine ourselves. This is where my career as a deer dong salesman started. Unfortunately the world was reset before I could implement plans to take it to the next level.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

The coins themselves were always the problem. Demand for metal in this game is extremely variable, so if you trade for coins you have no idea if you will be able to buy something with those coins next week. Pure metal coins are useless as a medium of exchange because they do not hold their value. The closest thing we have had to a stable currency is superior curiosities such as pearls, since every player always wants more of

The value of everything is valuable, that's the nature of supply and demand.

Even pearls became valueless and hard to trade in late game world 3.

Your system establishes a point of "no value". Abstract point systems have no economical basis. Metal has a base value in metal, and once established in what it can be traded for.

I simply fail to understand how a coin worth "nothing but abstract points" is worth more than a coin that has intrinsic value for what it's made from, no matter how little.

[Lunarius_Haberdash]

I also want to add my point of view on the "failure" of coins in legacy because I seem to have had a different experience than everyone else. My friends and I did tons of coin trading near the end of w3 at the central trade hub with all the vendor stands. Coins were pretty successful for us. We used the coins for currency and as a source of metal since we did not mine ourselves. This is where my career as a deer dong salesman started. Unfortunately the world was reset before I could implement plans to take it to the next level.

That was my experience, an entire conomy running on Q10 tin coins. We had 40-50 people regularly trading in them, and two more villages that were unrelated started buying and selling through them.

Hugely hugely successful, our tin based economy was why we could have nice things.

[_Gunnar]

I feel like everyone is talking at cross purposes...
Here's roughly what I think, explained I hope more succinctly compared to my previous posts.

A. The game should give us tools to simulate any kind of economy/society we wish, or as wide a range as possible.
B. The game should, however, not hard-wire in any particular form of economy/society. I agree with Lunarius on this point, and I've said this before in posts about Vassalage I think.

To this end;

1. We need to be able to put stamps on coins. This opens up the possibility of fiat currency as Maze suggests (i.e. NOT solely tied to the value of metal).
2. The stamp needs to have some genuine uniqueness to it. My "hidden function" idea would work for this, but so would Maze's "lawspeaker only" version. The reason I don't like his is because I dislike the hard-wired importance of the Lawspeaker . The only real requirement is that the State should have the monopoly on money creation (I think fractional reserve banking would probably be a freedom too far, and this normally doesn't result in physical money anyway).
3. We need good tools for transferring coins between players and objects (trading stands), as Sevenless pointed out.

4. I see no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to melt stamped coins back into bars. The "fiat" gives it value far exceeding 1/100 of a bar, anyway, so it would only be melted down if the economy collapsed.
5. I see no reason why we shouldn't have q on coins, it doesn't matter to the fiat currency anyway because the stamp is all that matters. But it also allows for ancient-type currency tied to the value of the actual metal, which is, again, more freedom for us.
6. Therefore, there doesn't need to be 2 types of coin at all, because q doesn't matter to the "stamped coins", while the stamp doesn't matter to the "intrinsic value coins", so you can have them be the same type and noone will care.

[Sevenless]

4. I see no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to melt stamped coins back into bars. The "fiat" gives it value far exceeding 1/100 of a bar, anyway, so it would only be melted down if the economy collapsed.
5. I see no reason why we shouldn't have q on coins, it doesn't matter to the fiat currency anyway because the stamp is all that matters. But it also allows for ancient-type currency tied to the value of the actual metal, which is, again, more freedom for us.
6. Therefore, there doesn't need to be 2 types of coin at all, because q doesn't matter to the "stamped coins", while the stamp doesn't matter to the "intrinsic value coins", so you can have them be the same type and noone will care.

My main concern with all this is that it interferes with storing coins as a "liquid". Keeping quality and metal type would require that the coins be tracked as individual items, and that would be a waste of server resources imo.

Fractional banking can't occur because there's no support in this for loans, and no centralized bank where people would be depositing coins. And as much as I'm supporting "tools for people to do stuff with other people", I think that's miles and leaps beyond what anyone would expect or want out of this game.

[_Gunnar]

4. I see no reason why we shouldn't be allowed to melt stamped coins back into bars. The "fiat" gives it value far exceeding 1/100 of a bar, anyway, so it would only be melted down if the economy collapsed.
5. I see no reason why we shouldn't have q on coins, it doesn't matter to the fiat currency anyway because the stamp is all that matters. But it also allows for ancient-type currency tied to the value of the actual metal, which is, again, more freedom for us.
6. Therefore, there doesn't need to be 2 types of coin at all, because q doesn't matter to the "stamped coins", while the stamp doesn't matter to the "intrinsic value coins", so you can have them be the same type and noone will care.

My main concern with all this is that it interferes with storing coins as a "liquid". Keeping quality and metal type would require that the coins be tracked as individual items, and that would be a waste of server resources imo.

How is this at all true? They made it so different q seeds didn't combine (I think?), so you can do the same, and there are plenty of recipes that convert fluids to solids (pies?)... I think there is nothing particularly intensive about adding a few different fluids, we already have a fluid for each seed type...

Fractional banking can't occur because there's no support in this for loans, and no centralized bank where people would be depositing coins. And as much as I'm supporting "tools for people to do stuff with other people", I think that's miles and leaps beyond what anyone would expect or want out of this game.

I agree, as I said, that fractional reserve banking is a freedom too far ^^ - as to whether there is "support" for it, there is already, because we can *technically* make any item into a currency and do bookkeeping offline, but it would be far too fiddly and not worth the time given the current society in game.