The Case for a Worse /Shop Next Season

[EnderEyeGames]

At this point, a server reset seems inevitable because the economy is completely obliterated. Anyone can just mine a few pieces of stone, sell them to get $5, and make their way to a public blaze farm+IGF where they can make $1M in a few minutes. Doing regular Minecraft survival activities is so pointless that even literal x-ray hacking doesn't even come close to the amount of money you can make legally through public farms. Every single item available in the shop is easier to get with money through a public farm than it is to get through the normal Minecraft way, meaning this is now a game that only loosely resembles Minecraft survival.

So what gives people something to do right now? Many player warps are just public blaze farms or IGFs, but the rest are what the player economy is really meant to be: trade between players. Because you can't just buy potions or enchanted books from the shop, they are manufactured in the normal Minecraft way (which gives people something to do) and sold in a fancy shop (which also gives people something to do) to another player.

I play on a very late-game vanilla SMP. If you want, for example, fireworks for elytra, someone has a massive gunpowder farm and they'll sell you 6 stacks of gunpowder for 1 diamond - incredibly cheap. Another player will have a massive sugarcane farm with a crafter and will sell you 6 stacks of paper for 1 diamond. But this economy isn't cooked the same way as the Invaded economy, because everything in these transactions is still produced, transported, and sold through a normal survival method.

How can we replicate this dynamic in the endgame of InvadedLands? I think the /shop should be significantly less powerful than it is - a smaller variety of items, with a larger difference between the buy and sell prices. Farmed goods, especially, should be extremely impractical to buy large quantities of in /shop - I think we'd see a resurgence of farms other than IGFs for personal use and for sale to other players. Having more inter-player trade will help curb inflation, as money-making methods that sell to the shop generate money and thus cause inflation. For some items, it should be made more practical for a rich player to pay a new player to gather them than for them to buy it from the shop. This is already the case for raw iron blocks used in mapart, but it could be extended to any number of mined goods by altering the shop.

It'd be interesting to hear what y'all have to say about these ideas. The goal is to try and make it so that (at least newer) players are playing something that resembles Minecraft survival for as long as the season lasts.

 

[0dds]

I generally agree with this. The server is basically a creative server with hunger and without fly (for half the players). And don't get me wrong - I love building just to build, but the community carries this server hard since the economy is cooked.

Greater margins on /shop items would definitely help. I was looking at slime earlier, which can literally be bought for about $600 dollars a stack. It's impossible to make a worthwhile farm and shop with items priced like that. I've made a music disc shop myself because it was one of the few exceptions I could think of. There are so few items worth doing this for, you see the same kind of shops over and over - armor trims, ebooks, discs, map art (my fav ), etc.

Since I bascially reiterated what you already said, I'll add one thing. The world border and /wild would definitely have to be changed if this was the case, since people would be encouraged to gather resources more. The end size (10k) is already insufficient imo. Elytras are long gone (and shulkers can't even be crafted anyways).

I've only been playing for about a month though, would love to hear what veterans, think about this.

 

[bluearchive]

This server isn’t just about the economy — it’s about having fun. You can build cool structures, create maparts, host events, PvP, open shops that sell items not available in /shop, or anything you can enjoy yourself. If they make /shop less powerful so that it’s harder to get certain items with money (even through public farms) than by playing the normal Minecraft way, it would seriously hurt the players who enjoy anything related to building. They’d have to manually smelt sand for glass, search deserts for cactus, find a cherry biome for cherry wood, go to the Nether to mine quartz, travel to the End for end rods — all of which brings significant inconvenience and limits creativity.


If mining ores becomes easier or close to as profitable as using public farms to make money, it would literally encourage people to use X-ray cheats and the server would be full of auto-mine bots.


If you want to trade resources like gunpowder for diamonds or hire new players to gather materials, and you make /shop offer fewer items to stop inflation, it’s just going to get really annoying. Imagine needing a block that's not in /shop or one that's too expensive — you'd have to spend a ton of time searching for it or hiring someone else.


And if you think “well, that’s the whole point of survival,” bro, we’re playing InvadedLands — not some boring ass vanilla SMP. This is a server with plugins, claims, ranks, money, and /shop. If they shrink /shop and widen the gap between buy and sell prices, gathering resources for building or gearing up is going to be a huge pain — and nobody likes things that are just annoying.

 

[afrqn]

At this point, a server reset seems inevitable because the economy is completely obliterated. Anyone can just mine a few pieces of stone, sell them to get $5, and make their way to a public blaze farm+IGF where they can make $1M in a few minutes. Doing regular Minecraft survival activities is so pointless that even literal x-ray hacking doesn't even come close to the amount of money you can make legally through public farms. Every single item available in the shop is easier to get with money through a public farm than it is to get through the normal Minecraft way, meaning this is now a game that only loosely resembles Minecraft survival.

So what gives people something to do right now? Many player warps are just public blaze farms or IGFs, but the rest are what the player economy is really meant to be: trade between players. Because you can't just buy potions or enchanted books from the shop, they are manufactured in the normal Minecraft way (which gives people something to do) and sold in a fancy shop (which also gives people something to do) to another player.

I play on a very late-game vanilla SMP. If you want, for example, fireworks for elytra, someone has a massive gunpowder farm and they'll sell you 6 stacks of gunpowder for 1 diamond - incredibly cheap. Another player will have a massive sugarcane farm with a crafter and will sell you 6 stacks of paper for 1 diamond. But this economy isn't cooked the same way as the Invaded economy, because everything in these transactions is still produced, transported, and sold through a normal survival method.

How can we replicate this dynamic in the endgame of InvadedLands? I think the /shop should be significantly less powerful than it is - a smaller variety of items, with a larger difference between the buy and sell prices. Farmed goods, especially, should be extremely impractical to buy large quantities of in /shop - I think we'd see a resurgence of farms other than IGFs for personal use and for sale to other players. Having more inter-player trade will help curb inflation, as money-making methods that sell to the shop generate money and thus cause inflation. For some items, it should be made more practical for a rich player to pay a new player to gather them than for them to buy it from the shop. This is already the case for raw iron blocks used in mapart, but it could be extended to any number of mined goods by altering the shop.

It'd be interesting to hear what y'all have to say about these ideas. The goal is to try and make it so that (at least newer) players are playing something that resembles Minecraft survival for as long as the season lasts.

Stfu

 

[Hail]

I agree that the economy is already cooked and it's time for a survival reset, but a reset wouldn't change anything. I vividly remember vroom having 80 billion dollars in the first two months of this season, and people can just re-build massive iron golem farms at the beginning of the new season. The only thing server staff could nerf is the price of iron golem spawners (maybe make them from 2,000,000$ -> 3,000,000$). I don't think it's a good idea to get rid of igs entirely as that would make a large part of the playerbase quit.

Also, what ILoveBlueArchive said was 100% true. /shop should stay the same. There is no reason to nerf shop or change it at all in any way (although I would love for shop to have an enchanted books section to make life 10x easier).

 

[ExtremeTryhard]

Yeah, I agree, a server reset should be happening soon

 

[EnderEyeGames]

I agree that the economy is already cooked and it's time for a survival reset, but a reset wouldn't change anything. I vividly remember vroom having 80 billion dollars in the first two months of this season, and people can just re-build massive iron golem farms at the beginning of the new season. The only thing server staff could nerf is the price of iron golem spawners (maybe make them from 2,000,000$ -> 3,000,000$). I don't think it's a good idea to get rid of igs entirely as that would make a large part of the playerbase quit.

Also, what ILoveBlueArchive said was 100% true. /shop should stay the same. There is no reason to nerf shop or change it at all in any way (although I would love for shop to have an enchanted books section to make life 10x easier).

I never said anything about getting rid of IG farms. I said that the shop prices should be rebalanced so that IG farms are no longer the only real way to make money. Also, an enchanted book shop or anything else to "make life easier" would destroy dozens of player warps and force those people to find something else to sell - which, if you insist on "making life easier" in all aspects (turning the server into creative mode with hunger), won't even exist!

 

[EnderEyeGames]

This server isn’t just about the economy — it’s about having fun. You can build cool structures, create maparts, host events, PvP, open shops that sell items not available in /shop, or anything you can enjoy yourself. If they make /shop less powerful so that it’s harder to get certain items with money (even through public farms) than by playing the normal Minecraft way, it would seriously hurt the players who enjoy anything related to building. They’d have to manually smelt sand for glass, search deserts for cactus, find a cherry biome for cherry wood, go to the Nether to mine quartz, travel to the End for end rods — all of which brings significant inconvenience and limits creativity.


If mining ores becomes easier or close to as profitable as using public farms to make money, it would literally encourage people to use X-ray cheats and the server would be full of auto-mine bots.


If you want to trade resources like gunpowder for diamonds or hire new players to gather materials, and you make /shop offer fewer items to stop inflation, it’s just going to get really annoying. Imagine needing a block that's not in /shop or one that's too expensive — you'd have to spend a ton of time searching for it or hiring someone else.


And if you think “well, that’s the whole point of survival,” bro, we’re playing InvadedLands — not some boring ass vanilla SMP. This is a server with plugins, claims, ranks, money, and /shop. If they shrink /shop and widen the gap between buy and sell prices, gathering resources for building or gearing up is going to be a huge pain — and nobody likes things that are just annoying.

Some raw materials like quartz and sand just don't exist in large enough quantities to support a large player base - that's the biggest reason the shop has for existing. Netherite is the same way, but instead of putting it in the shop for an extremely high price, the devs chose to make it a P2W item that mostly comes from crates, which is not necessarily something I agree with. As for processing that sand? My suggestion is that glass, especially stained, should be quite a bit more expensive than sand to incentivize people who aren't rich to do it legit.

For farmable stuff like the cactus and chorus plants (end rods) you mentioned, it should simply be very, very expensive to buy, such that you only buy one to start the farm. The buy price of farmable stuff should reflect how hard it is to search for it the first time - the sell price should reflect how much you can farm with it. As another example, it's absolutely ridiculous that despite creeper spawners and sugarcane farms being perfectly accessible, it makes sense for anyone - even a new player - to simply buy that stuff from the shop using a public farm to make elytra fireworks.

Of course, it would still be practical for the richest players on the server to just buy almost everything in the shop and act like it's creative mode. However, at the moment, public farms are so powerful relative to the shop that that's not even something you have to earn - it's just the default state of Invaded. How can you stop that from ever becoming the case next season? It might take more than just a shop rebalance.