I'm just going to sit here and speak my mind out, Firstly, there are so many things wrong with the ownership and dealing of problems on the server, especially ones that I have noticed in the past few days. As an old player starting in the April range, the server was indeed, not for profit, and guess what? It was 20x more enjoyable than it is today. I remember michaelwm's words, "andrewkm does this for enjoyment, not for profit" Unfortunately, there have been 0 massive changes to the server, of course besides the massive amounts of price hikes for donation features. (Pyro,Water,LWC,Tombstone 10 => 15) Adding onto this, every exciting feature that WAS ADDED, has now been removed (mcmmo, tax free lotteries, I'll go into this part much more) I still remember the golden times of the server, money was hard to come by, the economy wasn't inflated, and creativity/ingenuity was rewarded. Now it seems like the server is almost robotic and routine. The economy: For the entire course of my entire time on the server, I have found the best way to make money, and this has always been my main incentive in the game. However, you have failed to notice the most crucial step in creating a balanced economy, there are 0 taxes at all on transactions, almost everything is terribly priced and primary industrial jobs are pretty much worthless. I'm going to start with the huge and massive problem with towns. Everyone, log on (of course if you're currently able to, haha) and type in /who. Look at the presidents, mayors and back to residents. How is that balanced? I'm assuming from the view of me sitting on my pluffy office chair, and this advertisement of this male godaddy model, that the numbers are somewhere around: Residents - 20 Mayors - 15 Presidents - 10 Now imagine yourself, you are creating a dream city, a city which you were the head of developing. Now look back at the city you currently own in-game, or are living in. Is it a barren wasteland, type in local. Is there anyone there? I'm assuming not. Towns should be an achievement on the server, we should have a ratio of at least 10 inhabitants to 1 land owner. This makes absolutely 0 sense. Unfortunately, there is currently no diversity of jobs on the server. All I can think off the top of my head currently are these jobs: Farmer Miner Merchant (although I think I was one of the few who actually did this successfully and in massive amounts) Random Builder Who Digs Dirt And Gets 5$/Hour Nowhere on that list, can someone make a decent amount of money selling plots. Want to know why? There is absolutely no market for selling plots or creating a town. Towns are way too cheap. $75,000 is way too low of a price. Better yet, anyone who wants to own more than one town, lets say to make a giant nation/community is slapped with the smallest fee possible of 30k more each time a town is created. Is this server a charity? Look at this picture: I remember, back in the day of the first birth of the server, there were only about 3 towns, there were no boundaries for them, which I thought was cool too. I remember how tight knit it was, I could walk around, say hi to Hdvortex (sitting in his beach home) and then presume to AFK sitting my cactus farm, making obscene amounts of money. (I swear there's 2-3 new town applications per day) Owning a town should be a giant achievement, and it should be your 'baby', meaning you should give it extra special attention, it should be what you breathe and think about. Unfortunately, I admit to completely neglecting my towns, as they to me, have 0 value at all. I have 3 towns, 1 is a giant farm, 1 is a failed farm attempt, I doubt I've edited a block there in about 2 weeks, and the last one is a residential town called Toronto. Funny thing is, I treated this as a giant project, tried extremely hard, but then I took a reality check arrow to the knee, soon to realize that there is about ZERO incentive to do this. It's hard enough to sell plots, there are so many towns already up and running (check my picture.) and most users already have a town to live in. Secondly, if you are a resident in the town, the amount of incentive you will have to stay in the town 90% of your time online the server is minimal. Your house will pretty much be a storage center. Land in towns needs to be of value, and the only way to do this is to bump up the mayor price... and I'm talking by about 20x. Now, I'm going to talk about how EASY it is to obtain money. For all this time, I've been talking about how hard it is to generate money (haha) but now, here I am speaking out. Of course, as ranks progress, foundation is built, donation features purchased, it gets easier and easier to earn money. But here, I'm going to actually support you andrewkm, and show how broken your $$ >> ecodollars is. Using the theory of time = money, the minimum wage in my city is $10.25. If we directly transfer that to ecodollar donations, that turns out to be, a whopping $10,250! Wait what? You're saying that I can only get 10k... for working 1 hard hour, in real life to directly transfer it to ecodollars? Yup. I recently did some experiments with pumpkin farming, after having to adapt to the ridiculous new chunk regeneration algorithm, I was able to make a whopping 20k+ an hour (With mcmmo). Wow, that means if I could somehow transfer my eco dollars into real money, I could have 20$! Haha, you're funny Rezon, this isn't real life! We have no taxes, except the lame 50$ on the lottery, which makes no sense. We have no taxes on selling to the server, versus selling to other players. The server store of glory is opened 24/7, resulting in killing half the jobs of collecting raw materials (Primary Industries). Shouldn't someone who works hard to sell their product, to another user, be rewarded more than the infinite server money? I'm going to go make an RTS/MOBA reference right here. True Damage, its OP. It burns through all resists and usually has a low base amount of damage to balance it out. Now, here it is where it fits into the current meta of the server. The amount of stuff we sell to the server is insane versus player to player transactions, yet the most common of things we do sell to the server have A RIDICULOUS BASE AMOUNT. If there is no tax on it, it should be affected by resists. It should be lower. kthxbai Oh yeah, it would be a really good idea just to hire some staff as "price negotiators/balancers" we really need some.
