How Things Could Be Priced Better By Looking Into Multiple Pricing Methods

Introduction:
Server item pricing are often unbalanced, sometimes prone to human errors,
and occasionally even leading to exploits that costed server a fortune and lost of revenue,
also creating a unbalanced economy for other players.

Problems:
Problem are normally human made and possibly lies in:
- Admin lack ability in properly calculating proper maths
- Admin negligences or human error creating unintended pricing
- The vast amount of items that depend on each other admin needs to correctly price, example:
wood log > wood plank > stick,
shall one of them priced incorrectly, it create an incentive buy log, craft it down, and sell it back.
The more obvious one is block items like diamond and diamond blocks, diamond block MUST be price of diamond * 9 or > else the same thing happens.

Possible Solutions:
Bellow we will discuss on a few possible approaches to solve this issue.

Dynamically priced market items:

This approach will try to calculate item price with:

Demand - How fast one item is begin sold/begin bought,
if an item is begin sold in bulk, you can try to spike up the price, same for vice versa,
with trail and error to find the sweet spot of keeping demand while still keeping profits.

Stock - Stock simply signals as how much of X item the store "owns",
remember in this model the store cant generate item out of thin air,
so it something is running low, the price can drastically spike up, to prevent running out of X item.

Funds - Optionally, admin can make it so the store actually dont just create money out of thin air,
this will make the store want to maximise the profits,
and will try to adjust prices if the funds is low comparing to the item buy price to allow it to keep buying items,
essentially acting as an 3rd party entity that's incapable of spawning money out of thin air.

When starting it will be willing to buy any item to stock up with extreme prices say 500(predefined/random) for each items.
If an item, say dirt is getting filled fast, the store will dynamically price it down,
until to the point when people stop selling and start buying,
which that will be what the system remember it as the item's market value.

On the other hand, say bedrock at 500 but no one is filling the order, thus the store will dynamically price it up.
Knowing it worth more then that, eventually it will price it up enough that people start filling it,
it can start to price it down to an acceptable price that people will be happy to buy and sell at,
thus successfully finding the market price.

There's also multiple possible starting modifiers:

Empty stock modifier, this will start all items with 0 stock and base buy price of (predefine/randomly) chosen and huge funds.
This will lead system to experiment prices slowly by turning up/down from the predefined price.

Filled stocks modifier, this modifier will start all items with (predefined) stock and base price of (predefine/random) and some funds.
This will allow the store to buy while selling to judge the market price of items maybe faster.

Pre-determine price modifier, admins can set predefined value for each item and stock of it.
Giving some control of it, but eventually it will deviate from the price.

Over time the store can automatically try to price it in a way that it "gains some profit", by deviating the selling and buying price.
Say a wood block sells for 50$ but shop only buys it from players for 40$,
in theory the shop can try to increase buy and decrease sell prices until to a point where people stop buying/selling,
which then it has successfully determine the market sell and buy price of the item.

The system also should have some memories of past base prices, sell buy price modifiers.
This will allow it to cushion a spike say that farmer just harvested a ton of wheat again and try to stabilize the price,
Say last time it try to lower the price to accommodate but that just send in flocks of player to bought it back,
the next time it will keep that in mind and dont go that low(to not loose money).

Optionally it can also understand a item links like in "Pricing via raw resource item price",
instead of selling wood and sticks at separate price.
You can assume that once you know the price of wood, price of sticks and planks should follow.

Item order book:

In this approach price is solely determine by players, there's no "systems" in this approach

To illustrate this example,
There will be Bob who's a miner and Alice who's going to buy some diamond,
Bob can add in the order book he's selling 20 diamonds each @ 1.5K with minimum amount of 2 diamond.
If Alice is happy with the price, Alice can "Fill" that order by buying 20 diamonds from him,
But if Alice isnt happy with that pricing she can add in the order book she is buying 40 diamond @ 1.3k with minimum of 20 diamond,
if anyone deem that order appropriate they can fill that order or ignore it.

Basically, all items have an "order book" which player can accept or propose,
Accepting means taking one of the market offers,
Proposing is submitting a new market order.
Anyone can propose/accept orders of any item if they want and have sufficient funds.
Optionally instant sell/buy can occur using mean market price+some tax.

This system is less abstract and more player based, so there's some downfall of it:
This assume all items have high liquidity that players will trade all day long, and this assume your player base is active.
The orders also will take time to fill, and wont be instant so it can be an minor annoyance,
maybe worth consider adding a sell/buy via market rate+tax to system.

Admins can set optional "order fees" where anyone who open an order cost say 50$ or 5% of price whichever highest,(fees are taken when user submits it to order book)
accepting an order will cost the user who accepts it extra 2%

Pricing via raw resource item price:

In this approach price is partly determine by admin and partly by system,
admins will set the prices for the raw resource items.

Example: if a wood log cost 50$ then a wood plank must be $12.5 and a bench will be 50$(cost of 4 planks)
and setting iron to cost 500$ will automatically scale with each armour pieces and tools

This system is less about free market but more about allow admins to set prices like before,
while preventing flaws in logic and still allow customizability

All items have "links" to other items, there's different types of links:
- Crafting Link: is the most simplest and common link, it just means A can be crafted into B, can also be recursive like C and be crafted into D and D can be crafted into C.
- Transform Link: is to denote something can be "transformed" into another item,
and have different sub types:
- "Broken type" are for anything that can be "broken down" in world to another item.
Example diamond ore can be broken into diamond.
- "Aged type" are for anything that needs to take time to transformed into another item.
Example seed can be aged into wheat+seed, saplings can be aged into wood+saplings.
- "Smelted type" are for anything that can be smelted into a another item.
Example raw fish can be smelted into fish, ores can be smelted into ingots.

Links allow admin to target price modifiers,
for example: all transformed(aged) links get x2 pricing, say a sapling cost 20$ wood log will cost 40,
if seed cost 30$ wheat will cost 60$
admin can also set modifier for each item, or sell/buy
example of x1.3 on buy will increase all buy prices without affecting sell prices

Summary:
In this post we discover the ways we can control the price via:
letting a semi autonomous system control the price, fully free market, let admin control everything with tools to prevent loopholes.
Overcomplicated code just to archive something seeming simple,
Anyone who control majority of the economy can shape it to their will,
A system where only admin get a say,
In the end everything will have it's flaw..

Money is only as valuable something they are guarantee to be able to bought using it,
Think of this, how much does 500,000$ in a minecraft server "worth"?
Now think again that a piece of diamond go for 50,000$.
Numbers are just numbers, big numbers looks good, feels important but meaningless without the context of something attached to it.

Now think of this, you have 10 of some currency.
Do they feel like they worth a lot?
Maybe not?
Think again, what if these are bitcoins, each goes for 6,300$USD(as in time of writing),
despite it's small number that 10 bitcoins worth total of 63,110$USD(as in time of writing) to be exact,
Again, numbers are only valuable because people accept them and attach values to them, not because it's "big".

An item can easily be pegged at something which will form the backbone of all prices,
if an admin state he will trade 1k for a diamond, anything that values less then a diamond will maturely fall lower, and vice versa

To which, there's no "universally accepted price list of items",
your server currency is as valuable as how much your player put their trust in it,
your item might cost fractions or thousands, there's no right or wrong in it,
but there's no real way to price something that isnt backed by anything.
(you could back them with money or features, but that's for another thread)

TLDR:(since some people dont like to read things, here's a more undescriptive request for you)
Someone pls give a shop plugin that can price items without price exploit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

actually not true, assume we used solution3(Pricing via raw resource item price)
log = X
plank = X/4
sticks = X/4/4
in this example, each item is sell for and bought for the same value
so each trade is 100% lossless
it might make no sense to buy the log and resell the planks

but it make perfect sense to sell leftovers,

or to farm it by buying saplings growing it, cutting it down
which still will be viable option

i am assuming you are targeting solution 3
yes a standardize ratio but also in theory how it logically should have worked
also it shouldnt be at creator's choice but at minecraft logic/crafting recipe flow
i personally doubt it will be "controversial", since that means owners now can let a tool calculate the price on behalf of them rather than using calculators and doing the annoying work
and if anything isnt what owner wanted he can simply price overwrite or add an modifier to the base price itself and alter it till he likes it

it make no sense that planks should be higher then the raw resource it came from
as crafting log into plank dosent even take work, opposed to farming corps, trees etc
so i dont think we need incentives for people to do that
sure if you really care you can just allot it to X/4+1 so people get 1$ for crafting log onto planks and sell it back
also rewarding players for finding an exploit is nice but if it could be negated why not?

why will this be more exploitable then setting each price one by one then?
mirroring other server prices make no sense in a context that every server have it's own economy and it's own perception of value and also the things backing their server's value

 

Pay attention to the changing demands of certain items. The balancer should be aware of changing trends instead of taking the whole history into account.

 

tendst?
you meant take into account trends and historical trends?

 

Yes, I meant trends