Tom Cantine

The pancake example works only so far as you really have fully compliant and loyal underlings. Otherwise there will always be black markets and emergent standards of exchange as part of the "real" economy. Our modern sensibilities include the notion that you can get better compliance through ergonomics. I am not advocating that traders should buy whatever you bring them, nor that they should take orders. Only that the amounts they buy should be adjusted to reflect the multiplayer environment. Moreover, much of my argument is not even really about the traders themselves, except as a means of expanding somewhat the ability of players to earn RG through something other than mob farms. In any event, there's a reason I said these things should be server-configurable. You want to run a server with zero property tax? Great, have at it. You want to configure a property tax that encourages centralized towns, or one that rewards self-sufficient homesteading? Emergent capitalism? Feudalism? Go for it. What I'm suggesting is that the code accommodate all these approaches, and I feel that the model I'm suggesting would be a relatively simple thing to implement, as most of the components (traders, /land claim, etc.) already exist.

In principle you could absolutely do the paper notes thing today. I once played on a Minecraft server where we did just that: a trusted player stored iron ingots in an enderchest, and issued signed books he promised to redeem for the specified number of iron ingots. So long as other players are willing to trust that promise, the books were usable as money. And VS allows us to sign/transcribe documents, so they're just as unforgeable. There's no reason you couldn't set up a town and have any kind of tax system for the residents you wanted. No reason, that is, except for the limits of the /land claim system. I mean, you could claim a large plot of land and build a whole town in it, assign permissions to a group and then charge taxes to remain a member of the group. But this isn't what I'm talking about, and those "taxes" would be no different in principle from, say, a feudal obligation to provide one fatted cow every year. What I'm proposing would be more integrally coded into the /land claim system itself. I should have included the word "fiat". Fiat currencies depend on taxation, but those backed by gold or some other commodity do not. Still, I am not sure I agree about states, but then I would recognize as a state-equivalent for these purposes any community with established norms for deciding when a debt exists and what constitutes payment. That does hint at an important point: since RG have intrinsic value (in that they can be "crafted" into valuable items at an NPC trader), why should they need a drain in the form of property tax? And strictly speaking, no they don't need a drain to support their value as currency. But that's not the only reason I'm suggesting this property tax model. First, although they have some intrinsic value, their value in trade (that is, with other players, not as an NPC-mediated crafting ingredient) fluctuates WILDLY. Those players who choose to focus on generating RG through mob farms can amass vast quantities of them, which isn't a huge problem if all they do is hoard them in their basements, but if they actually USE them their buying power advantage over players who do not concentrate on mobfarming is huge, and price inflation results. Again, this isn't necessarily a huge problem insofar as other players can just opt out of the RG-based economy and live off the land, so to speak. That should always be an option, of course, but so should meaningful participation in the RG economy; it shouldn't require mob farming. And that brings the second point (something else I should have mentioned in my original post): There DO need to be more worthwhile ways to earn RG besides mob farms. In particular, the NPC traders' inventories and limits are quite well balanced for single player, but they don't make a lot of sense in a bustling server context. They simply don't buy enough stuff. A player who devotes their time to farming should be able make a decent income selling turnips. Idea: what if a trader's supply/demand inventory scaled with the number of distinct player land claims within a certain distance? So, for example, if you go way out into the wilderness and set up your homestead near a lone trader, well, the basic single-player trader inventory balance would apply. ("Why would I buy all those turnips? I can't eat them before they rot!"). But if other players show up and build claims nearby, a town starts to develop and the lone trader's buying capacity increases accordingly; presumably they're buying to supply some virtual residents of the area.) Third point: The property tax proposal isn't just to drain RG. It's also to provide a mechanism to deal with abandoned claims, instead of requiring players to petition admins to release a claim. As I mentioned in a comment above, this should also come with some enhancements to the claim system itself, such as ways to transfer ownership (say, by designating an heir). I've long thought there needs to be some kind of succession system in place, ideal with some customizability and different levels of access/control. Maybe abandoned claims don't get totally freed all at once, and they go to /grant all use first. But that's a subject for a different thread.

These are excellent points. I did not go into detail about how to calculate the basic property tax, but this is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when I mentioned server-configurable variables for the formula. A player's first claim certainly could (and probably should) be free, if that's the kind of grace period you meant. The other grace period I'd recommend would be when introducing such a system onto an existing server, so as not to suddenly make a whole lot of claims disappear because their owners hadn't had reason to budget for this. I love the idea of a block to deposit RG into for this purpose, not only because it'd be way more convenient for claimholders but also because it would perform exactly the function this proposal is meant for: effectively removing RG from circulation. It occurs to me that it might be useful to also allow anyone to add RG to it, whether they own the claim or not, AND to allow the claimholder to withdraw RG from the block. It'd act like a hopper for players to pay each other when they're not both online at the same time. As for the period of 1 year, that was just a placeholder; I probably shouldn't have specified a time period. I'm aware that on TOPS a year is only 12 days, and also that six RL months is a reasonable time to declare a claim abandoned. I certainly wouldn't advocate that claims disappear after only 2 weeks of inactivity. Indeed, I had another suggestion on this forum about idle claims that I probably should have referenced here. It was about server-configurable triggers (e.g. the player hasn't logged in for some period of time, or the player hasn't set foot in the claim for some period, or X number of OTHER players have set foot in the claim, attempted to open a door, etc.) and included notice requirements in any event. So if one of your claims is getting near expiring, you'd get notice and a grace period within which to renew the claim. And after that grace period is up, the claim wouldn't necessarily disappear, but might go up for auction. The deposit block you suggested could administer the auction. Players deposit their bids, and when the auction closes the claim would be transferred to the winner, and the losing bids would be available to pick up free of charge from the block (or perhaps from a trader).

I have here a set of reforms aimed at making the in-game economy more playable, robust and realistic, as well as addressing certain problems that tend to emerge on any server that runs long enough. It’s assumed that Rusty Gears (RG) are the intended currency in the game, as they’re explicitly used as such by the NPC traders. And that’s fine; any arbitrary item can be used as a basis of trade/barter. But the problem with that is that there is in principle no limit to the number of RG that can exist. Precious metals like gold and silver have been used as currency for thousands of years because they are relatively rare, but a mob farm can generate about as easily as any other commodity can be farmed. So RG can accumulate at rates which have nothing to do with the amount of goods they can be spent on. (In fact, if anything, it’s an inverse relationship: the more time and resources players spend on farming RG, the less they are spending on farming those other commodities. More money chasing fewer goods is the very definition of inflation.) Now, it is also worth pointing out that you do not need RG to pursue your goals in game. Sure, there are a few things you might want that can only be bought from traders, but for the most part you can build a sprawling estate and farm all the crops and livestock you need, mine and process all the ores, craft all the gear and prosper just fine, and if you ever do need RG for that chandelier or elk, there are ways to obtain them. But note that in this sense, RG are really not so much a currency as essentially a crafting ingredient. A trader is just a kind of production station where the inputs are RG, and where you can convert certain select items into RG. And that’s why RG don’t really act like a currency: they’re not. They’re just a commodity that has its uses, and can be traded like anything else. Why do we accept them in trade? Well, we DON’T, unless we perceive we might have a use for them ourselves. That use might be simply trading them to other people for stuff we want, but again that brings us to why those other people might want them? This is a problem with money generally. Why would anyone accept it in trade? Once upon a time most currencies were backed by something of intrinsic value, precious metals usually (or bushels of grain, perhaps), but today we mostly use fiat currencies. At first glance we all accept these just because everyone else does so we know we can use them in trade, but there must be more to it than simply a collective agreement to recognize them as valuable? You’re not going to like the answer: taxes. Ultimately, the thing that makes money valuable is the knowledge that you’re going to need to pay some obligation to the sovereign government, and that sovereign government will ONLY accept its own sovereign currency in satisfaction of that debt. This is the insight behind Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). (I would add that there’s one additional related point: the courts recognize and enforce debts in the sovereign currency as well. If I sue you in tort or contract, the courts will recognize your debt as discharged if you pay in the sovereign currency, whether I want to accept them or not. But this is still a function of the sovereign state in declaring by fiat the money to be worth something). Another way to explain it is by analogy to an electrical current: you need to have a voltage, a cathode and an anode, somewhere the current flows FROM and somewhere it flows TO. Taxes are the anode, the drain that keeps dollars and euros and yen in demand. So sovereign governments, which can print all the money they need, raise taxes not to pay for stuff, but to ensure that the people need the money it prints. Of course, there is no obvious Sovereign in VS, no one who issues RG and collects anything like taxes and enforces judgments. Or is there? I would suggest that it’s the server itself, and it absolutely does perform at least a certain kind of enforcement function: land claims. If I claim a plot of land in the game, the server actually protects my exclusive right to use that land as I see fit. What I am suggesting, then, is a form of PROPERTY TAX. When you create a land claim, there should be a cost in RG. I haven’t worked out a formula for how this should be calculated, but this could all be system-configurable to allow different servers to experiment with the right balance. Factors to include in the formula could include size of the claim (volume), proximity to a trader, proximity to working translocators, proximity to other claims, and so on. Maybe there’d be a big discount for setting permissions for All to Use. I would also suggest that this property tax be periodic; you need to come up with enough RG to renew your claim every IG year or so. This would also provide an answer to the problem of abandoned claims. As we know, players drift away from the game from time to time, and just never log in again, leaving their claims idle but unusable by anyone else. Or some players may have several claims and simply lose interest in one of them. A modest property tax model would provide an organic way to retire old claims, and this could be structured to allow a variety of succession regimes. The point here is to implement a pull on RG, a reason why you need them, especially if you have a claim in a relatively populated area. Nothing would stop you from just homesteading way out in the wilderness without even bothering to establish a claim, other than the risk of being griefed way out there. You can be as self-sufficient as you want and never touch a rusty gear. But the system I’m proposing would help to transform RG from just another commodity with its random booms and busts, and a genuine CURRENCY that would provide a bit more stability in developed areas of the server.

I think snakes get a bad rap as it is. Most snakes aren't dangerous to humans at all. If snakes are added, I would like it to be more representative of actual snake diversity. We have many species of goats and deer and butterflies and mushrooms, after all. So I think it'd be nice to have quite a few different kinds of snakes, only some of which are dangerous. And having one near your crops could even be beneficial, as it keeps the rabbits away.

I would love to have a telescope. Even more so when they update the sky to be more astronomically consistent.

I do not see farming drifters for loot as an "intended gameplay loop". I have always seen the Rust world nasties as intentionally a Bad Thing, something to be avoided or mitigated, and if you CAN get something useful out of it, great, but most of the time they're a net negative. It is, of course, possible to farm them, but it's possible to come up with all sorts of ways to capitalize on hidden opportunities. There are dedicated mob farms that produce quite respectable quantities of loot, but like anything else it takes a fair bit of planning, resources and risk to construct an effective one where the more lucrative mobs spawn. And I think that's entirely appropriate.

Yes, this is certainly a problem, and it was definitely a problem on the MUD I played on (and was a builder there for a while). But it was exacerbated by the fact that the server ran 24 hours a day, and many players lived in different time zones and had different schedules. The Auction House ameliorates that a bit, but its distributed nature doesn't encourage running a SHOP where people can come to buy YOUR goods in particular when you're not logged in. I do like, however, that it includes transport costs and delays, which provides a modest advantage to centralized towns, but again, only when all the parties to the transaction or work are online together.

I have not, but I was in a MUD for quite some time. Entirely text-based, but surprisingly immersive. I'd love to play a role like, say, the village blacksmith, or a potter, or farmer. One of the nice things about VS is that it does, to some extent, reward specializing and the classes enhance that a bit. And that's something I'd like to see in an RP server, further reinforcement for the division of labour and cooperative play. I like TOPS, but still SO many people have their own windmills and smelters and all that. (And of course TOPS is 100% conscious of this being a server and not some strange world we've awakened in as seraphs with no memory of whatever personal history we may have had before...)

I have been into RPGs since the early 1980s, starting with Traveller. I very much enjoy playing a character in a fictional reality, and I've LONG wanted to have a good RP experience in MC, and VS seems to have a great deal more potential for that to be meaningful. That said, I've never been quite so enthusiastic about the RPG trope of the Quest or the Dungeon. Some of the most rewarding RP experiences I've had have been really quite mundane but powerfully immersive and real, like compelling personal dialogue against a backdrop of bringing in the harvest or cutting up vegetables with my in-game spouse. So the kind of RP I'd want in a VS server would emphasize the sorts of ongoing challenges humans have in growing and maintaining their communities. Raiding dungeons can be a part of that, but contrived quests don't really do much for me. I would also very much like there to be somewhat realistic communication constraints. Proximity chat, for example, rather than built-in shortwave radios in everyone's head. Something to make it more immersive.

That is just because the developer isn't on Apple's list of verified, trusted developers. I've ALWAYS had to go in and manually tell the security settings to allow VS to run anyway. Edit: Whitelist. Yeah. That's the word I was trying to remember before my morning coffee.

Oh, you did that on purpose, didn't you?

On The Official Public Server, someone created a separate chat channel specifically for the sorts of profound conversations that some folks don't like for whatever reason. It's an open group, so you don't need to be invited. Just type /group join PhiloCircle

Garlic is NOT obscure!

There are some issues I've seen come up in TOPS, and which I suspect are going to be pretty common any time you have a persistent server with many users. One such issue is abandonment. It's not uncommon for players to just drift away from a game or give up on it and never come back, leaving their claims unavailable for anyone still playing. Rather than having to pester the mods to intervene, it might be useful to build in a system that can be administered automatically or with player input, all configurable at the server level. Here are a couple of mechanisms I've been thinking about. First, each claim should have an "idle timer". This would keep track of how long it's been since it's been reset, and it'd be reset by one or more of the following server configured options: The owner of the claim logs into the game. The owner of the claim actually enters the claim. A player with permissions to the claim enters the claim. There should also be an "adverse possession" counter. This would increment each day someone who does NOT have permissions on the claim enters or attempts to enter an idle claim (such as by trying to break a block or open a door), and is reset to zero whenever the idle timer is reset. Finally there would be an "abandonment timer", which is triggered and starts counting down once the idle timer or the adverse possession counter reach a server configured threshold. (If this timer is configured to zero, then abandonment happens immediately.) When the abandonment timer is triggered, notices would be published to a configured audience, whether it be just the owner, everyone with permissions on the claim, or the entire server, that the claim is subject to abandonment in X days. (This should also be shown by /land info.) When the abandonment timer hits zero, the land is declared abandoned. Depending on server configuration, this could mean: The claim instantly expires. The land becomes "use" for all players, but the claim doesn't disappear entirely. A player entering* the claim is given the option to delete the claim A player entering* the claim is given the option to renew the claim on behalf of the original owner, thus reseting the idle timer. A player entering* the claim is given the option to take over the claim. *entering the claim would include attempting to open a door or break a block in the claim. It occurs to me that there should also be a way for the owner of a claim to just transfer ownership of a claim to another player, rather than having to release the claim and make the receiving player establish a new one, because that could be quite difficult in the case of claims made up of multiple cuboids weaving their way around other claims.

It should also be possible to paste them in from an external text editor. I do that with books I write, so I can make multiple copies rather than have to transcribe them all as scrolls.

Insects are pretty well represented in the game so far, though many of them are just ambience. Bees are economically important, and termite mounds exist (and can be a source of food). We see fireflies, grasshoppers and swarms of midges over ponds in summer. I'm told you can hear cicadas in trees in some biomes, though I've never encountered them myself. And with apologies to J.B.S. Haldane, "Tyron, if he exists, has an inordinate fondness for Lepidoptera." I have been disappointed that the only mollusks we find are the shells of dead ones. It'd be nice to be able to dig up clams or dive for oysters as a food source, and that goes for lobsters, crabs and crayfish as well. How do you think ants should be implemented, in game terms?

No no, it's The Original Battlestar Galactica. The one with Lorne Greene.d

May I suggest, instead of 4x4 grid, a 3x3x3 one? Assembling three dimensional components seems considerably more interesting than just bigger two dimensional ones.

I would think that if we wanted a potter class, a better way to do it would be to increase the number of voxels they get per unit clay when forming items.

It SORT of is, so long as you commit to knapping it into a particular form. Start knapping, and then just don't finish until you need it. But it takes up a whole tile.

I never leased it in the first place!

I appreciate how useful it is to be able to slaughter domesticated livestock so quickly, but isn't a cleaver mainly used in butchery? That is, carving up a carcass? So why do I need a separate knife for that task? I therefore suggest a slight tweak to the cleaver: make it usable for processing dead mobs. Maybe even allow for slightly better drops when using one, to make it worth having before you've bred gen 3 livestock.

It's not a step BACKWARDS. They haven't eliminated the existing salmon mobs. While I was (and am still) hoping for more catchable fish and various means to catch them (nets, lines, maybe weirs, lobster pots...), I'm very glad oceans will feel more alive. The grasshoppers and midge swarms add greatly to ambience, and it'll be great to have this in the seas as well. And eventually, I hope, bigger fish, and mollusks and crustaceans.

Except that spears are also used as missile weapons, and carrying several for that purpose is pretty common. The trade off is that (1) flint spears are fairly cheap but don't do huge damage, and (2) bronze spears which do more damage are constrained by the scarcity of the metals involved. Iron is so cheap (once you get to that level) that throwable iron spears would almost make people stop asking for guns to be implemented.