The point I'm trying to make is that you don't "need" it. You pointed out that you don't need MultiHome for mining which I disagree. I define "need" as something that actually helps make you money. I don't see how going to your house after farming could help you make money.
Wouldn't that mean you "need" to have certain ones to make more money? Obviously you invest in it at first but you get your money back (if you're buying features from people with ECD)? If I'm not mistaken, the argument here is how much money you can make with msword versus eff7. If donations affect the overall profit, shouldn't it be taken into account how it affects it? I don't think you can get 20k/hour with an eff7 without donations is what I'm ultimately saying. That's been probably the biggest problem about this debate so far, comparing the differences unfairly. If donations like MultiHome, etc. were taken out of the equation, eff7 and msword would show more similar profit.
I'm fairly certain that only two people were talking about Max Fortune pickaxes were you and @block_crusher who agreed with your initial statement. I think most people are in consensus that in no way, shape, or form, can a Max Fortune pickaxe produce any number close to what a msword can produce in an hour. If an msword can make 15k/hour, most people claim to make a maximum around 10k/hour at most. After you both said it very plainly, you never backed up the claim or disputed when other players said it was wrong but I would be happy to see you provide some evidence that what your said was true initially. Through open discussion the conversation shifted towards discrepancies between profits from an eff7 versus the msword. Though I don't believe that the melon prices will be raised because of this reasoning, we should still discuss either: Why it won't change. What can we do to make it change. There's a lot of people who ask for changes to farming/mining and there isn't really a good argument so far. There also have been changes affecting experience and how much ores drop (without influence of fortune enchantment) about two weeks ago, which has drastically affected mining as a whole. I'm a little confused about why we should further nerf mining again in just a short 2 weeks since the most recent one. But the change for melons could be positive in a way, to try and even it out even more so. However saying that the msword doesn't provide enough earnings in comparison to a $20,000 (at most) pickaxe is not convincing at all. Farming was nerfed heavily in the past and now is obviously not the same but it does not mean that farming is currently bad. It just means that in the past, it used to be extremely unbalanced, requiring these changes.
Based on how I mine, and how others tell me they mine... Redstone, Lapis, Coal, and Iron are sold to the server. The only real price that depends on players is for diamonds, emeralds, and gold. I have some books that contain prices from Summer 2013, here's 1: (Server Prices, except for emeralds.)
@Dccciz I think you can actually make small profits off of lapis lazuli at some player shops and iron blocks in bulk. Users always seem to want iron blocks even though the demand is lowered. If you don't need to sell right away I advise you don't do so. I think having bulks of any material could be profitable in the long run, only selling what you need to buy things and sell when there's a demand for it. Having large stockpiles could also allow you to create supply agreements with shop owners who will buy your stock to fill up their shops. Basically, it really depends.
Just a note, people who are comparing mining and farming. Most people aren't completely correct when they say they can make a lot of money with mining. You don't need many donation features either, mining without fly/fly+ is easy peasy as long as you don't dig straight down. The thing that makes mining more profitable is the fact that you also gain things you can sell to other users. EXP mainly. Also when people mine with an eff7 they should also count the time it takes for them to place and break the ores with fortune to get exp and to sell the ores. Surprisingly, not many people actually do this. When you mine for an hour, you also break ores for another 10 minutes. Let's say you get ~20k worth of ores in 1 hour and you then spend another 10 minutes breaking the blocks then you make only ~17k an hour. Also mining is irregular, you don't have a constant stream of 20k an hour, no, you have 20k one time, and ~11k the other time. It's never the same, you have to be extremely lucky if you get a really steady stream of income of mining. The best way to calculate mining gain is to mine for 1 hour, break the ores, write down the profit and time it took to mine/break the ores, and then go for another round of another hour. Keep doing that and then divide the total profit by the total amount of time it took. You will notice that the average isn't as high as people think it is. Farming is also one of the easier ways of making money, it's a low-risk and stable way of making money and it should not ever be better than mining, which is a moderately risky without donation features and low-risk with the necesary features but also unstable, you don't have a steady income, while you do with farming. And that's why farming is fine the way it is. Don't like it? Go mine.
