Currency or economy of some form. Why doesnt it happen?

[Idriveayugo]

I get the feeling you have no idea how difficult it is to develop and keep a stable economy - virtually or otherwise. I mean come on, even the US can't..

The US can keep a stable currency, it just chose not to in the name of cheep chinese goods, bloated budgets, record corporate profits during the Bush years, and record debt.


Anyways, going back on subject, I think a big reason currency doesn't happen is because counterfeiting is so easy. If people really relied heavily on a monetary system, someone would build a machine to produce coins which look exactly the same.

[SekoETC]

The coins in Cantr are clumsy, they don't stack so you have to hand them over one at a time.

The person or people holding a bank might fall asleep or die, and even if there was some stuff in the vault that previously could be exchanged for coins, the person/people inheriting the keys might not be willing to give resources to customers in exchange for coins.

If there is a bank, people tend to deposit things they don't need and which are easy to gather. If the town doesn't have enough contacts with neighboring towns to trade with them regularly, the bank will get burnened with resources nobody wants to buy. Unless the place is well advertized or located by the sea with lots of traffic, no one is going to come buy large enough quantities for it to count. Trades will be random. It would be necessary to employ traveling traders who chart the haves and needs of nearby towns and transport resources back and forth.

Consumption is limited since things don't get worn out. Once you make a tool, you can keep repairing it indefinitely and it will never break. There's no need to patch clothing, or wash them, people won't get dirty so there's no need for soap. People don't need balanced nutrition, eating raw potatoes is just as good as eating five different types a day. People won't get any happier from eating ice cream or pie and they won't get any more miserable from eating the same food years in a row. Flowers never wither. Food never gets spoiled (unless it's left on the ground, then some of it will vanish). Houses don't need to be painted or fixed, and even if house deterioration and repair was later implemented, it wouldn't require resources. Fuel hasn't been implemented because "people need time to adjust". Cantr is a babysitting society that assumes that characters are too helpless to maintain an economy that manages to replace things as they crumble, and thus everything that deteriorates can also be repaired, even bone knives and needles since who knows, there might be some poor creature on an island/boat with no animals and treasures a bone knife that was made by foreigners. The constant deaths ensure that items per person ratio will continue to rise and hogging and greed is the only thing that prevents everyone from having what they need and like.

People can't trade in steel if they don't have an excess of it. People with steel only buy things they need or which they can trade in another town for things they need. They generally pay in some other resource because steel is generally accepted by anyone. The price of steel and iron has gone down during the time I've been playing but they are still pretty much on the top of the chain. If something is used as a currency, there needs to be enough of it to ensure that people will put it into circulation instead of hoarding it (in real life they made dollar coins and it didn't work out because all the collectors hoarded them instead of using them) but production needs to be difficult enough so that not everybody could produce it and reduce the value.

If a person is given steel as a payment, they won't use it to buy food or wood when they can gather those rather quickly without any equipment, while they know they can't produce steel without a workshop. Instead they use the steel to make a file or a crowbar or what ever they're missing. People won't make a steel knife or an iron needle first off since bone equivalents work just as well and they need the steel for other things. Only when the person has an iron shield (or a kite shield), a sword, battle axe or crossbow, a crowbar and a lockable house or a ship or a car, then they can consider making a steel knife.

And for some reason the person generally can't go to a smithy and buy a sword and a crowbar, no, the person has to travel to get stone, hematite, limestone, coal, build a primitive smelting furnace, a stone table, make some iron, build a better smelting furnace and an anvil, curing tub, bellows, make some steel, make five tools to finally craft his sword. Because the people with a smelting furnace are most likely sleeping or can't trust the person enough because he looks like a poor newspawn, or the person doesn't have anything the smithy owner would need because he's already got it all. The best way to get a sword is to join town guard somewhere, but they might request to have it back when you resign.

A lot of people don't have incentive to make/buy things that don't have a direct influence on other characters. They won't make furniture unless they need it for resting after attacking someone, they won't make clothes because there is no weather. Impressing your neighbours is nothing. Maybe the neighbour isn't impressed because all he sees is text, not an object, and knows as a player that it does nothing. Also you can't go visit someone's house without having to fear getting dragged into a back room and raped.

[Drael]

*sighs* I give up, you just don't get it.

Try playing cantr a little longer, maybe you'll start to understand what's being said to you, instead of insisting steel takes queen, no matter the hassle it takes to generate, and implement, not to mention when there are far more efficient systems in play.

Im not saying steel should be universal, its just that all my characters are in regions with no indirect trading. Its so unlike natural societies is all. Im trying to grasp this all with real life thinking, so there are prolly things i dont get....in fact i figured one out...

Most of the communities ive spawned in so far are much smaller than real life communities. As such, theres less CALL for trading locally. (Why trade indirectly when theres only ten people).


But then if that were RL, thered either be a trade system, or no advanced tech.

Still kinda weird.

Maybe you'll get a charri on K-isle one day, and stumble upon something us folks call currency.

Cant wait. All this manufacturing is sooo distracting from RPing.

Or up near the Dourdens (sp?). Seriously, play a little more, hopefully you'll see these things.

Actually do have a character up round there, theyve been charitable, but not seen any currency yet. Interesting, but guess i cant act on it.

Quote:
Yes coins, but then someone has to make them, and then its more artificial than say just using a commodity

By the way, thats the same as what trying to get the steel thing going would do.

Doesnt have to be steel, can be locally figured out. As i said, in RL, indirect trading occurs naturally. But thats cos in RL a village is a couple hundred people.

Very weird though, dont you think, that a village with ten people in it, no centralised currency or manufacturing can have a bunch of cars? Its not just strange, it makes no sense actually.

EDIT: Labour standard for the already implemented win.

Yeah, which is player oriented (time spent playing), not character oriented (value to the charrie). Shame, but i think this TBH OOC standard is pretty much it. That is prolly another reason why currencies havent formed as often as RL, because people dont value gold, they value their RL players time on the computer

Good night, and yes, i do hope i end up with a character somewhere that i can actually focus on RPing, instead of constant manufacture. Somewhere with a natural life like economy. I dont mind the techno weirdness, i just want my characters to not all be craft oriented survivalists. I guess i need some bigger towns. Would help if some of this made sense too.

But dont get me wrong, im still addicted, still like it, its a good game, just wish i could RP alot more, or get into the characters. Hope im not manufacturing for ever, lol!

[Doug R.]

The question is, whats missing, that proper economies dont develop?

Trust.

[Drael]

SekoETC, thats a very in depth answer, and exactly the sort of thing i was enquiring about.

Weather would be cool, to make clothes nessasary. Things breaking would help...alot, to make metals more valuable to everyone. At the moment i suppose there only useful for high level items, which are still handy, but not the advantage that say, a steel sword had over a bronze sword in RL.

Perhaps people would care more about what people looked like, wore etc, if you actually saw it without clicking on them!

Good answers...

[SekoETC]

Yeah, I was working on graphics for the clothing. I should get back to that... The problem that made me stop working was that fur leg warmers go under pants and shoes since the stacking order is assumed to be based on categories, and if someone wears tight pants and boots with legwarmers then the legwarmers will spill through the seams, making it look unnatural. But it's pretty ridiculous to cling to such details.

It would be useful if people could make copper and brass tools and weapons, but they would have a chance of shattering when you hit something with them, and blades would go dull faster and you'd need to sharpen them with a whetstone. Dullness would make them less effective. With weapons people tend to make the best they can afford because those deal the most damage, so if project advancing speed was also affected by the quality of the tools, maybe people would try to get the best tools they can instead of the cheapest ones.

[Tiamo]

Drael,

Seko pretty well sums it all up.

In short there is hardly any trade, and no effective currency in Cantr because:
1) it usually is easier to get-it-yourself or build-it-yourself than to produce something else and trade it for the things you do need. Trade is never a necessity, only convenient at times.
2) there are hardly any lasting societies in Cantr. Most communities depend on one or two characters who hold all the power (the keys). Those will crumble when the leader(s) die.
Trade and currency depend on trust. This trust cannot be built if characters know any social organisation will invariably cease to exist at some moment, probably during their own lifetime.
3) there is no useful material that can be used as a currency in Cantr. The material should be available in large enough quantities, but should not be simple to produce. And it should be easy to handle.
Coins are too high-tech. By the time you can introduce them there is nothing left to trade: you will probably have it all. And coins are not stackable, so not very handy in larger amounts.
Steel is too useful, thus not available in large enough amounts to be used as a currency. And it can be made too easy once the machines are in place, so its value can't be depended on.
Labor, the most dependable commodity, cannot be traded.

Or, even shorter: NO NEED, NO TRUST

[BlueNine]

Most places my charries have been accept Iron in trade for a lot of things...mostly because it's one of the most useful resources around, but also because the one resource that does deplete (charries) is always demanding it.

[Piscator]

I have to agree with Seko.

There is no common currency because there is no single resource that is valued by everyone. In RL, before symbolic money was introduced, "currencies" had a value for the owner, apart from enabling him to buy something. Livestock and bags of grain were used because everybody has to eat and it is never wrong to have a little bit more. And it basically the same for precious stones and metals. Although you can't eat them, you never have enough.

In Cantr things are different. Food is not hard to come by in most places, medicine is only needed in a few locations and resources are only then of value when you are planning to build a specific thing. Every Cantrian values different things. If there were to develop a common currency, it would have to skip the "real value" (livestock and gold coins) stage and go straight to the "symbolic value" (paper money) stage. And that's unlikely to happen while societies are so unstables as they are now.

[Dudel]

Real issue is dropping "RL" over and over again. Cantr ISN'T "RL" and NEVER WILL BE!

Other then that... I agree with Doug.

Those that can be 'trusted' can't be trusted long. Once a character has 'what they wanted', they usually just up and prick about. (They bail on whatever and do their own thing.)

Quick Edit:

Religion meet Economy

Economy, Religion

http://www.forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.ph ... 63&start=0

[DylPickle]

Lots of reasons:

1. Simply player inactivity (unequal input by individual players and low active-player numbers as a whole)

2.
a) Characters tend to only desire iron and steel because it's useful to build most practical things, like tools, vehicles, and weaponry. Steel is valued not because of scarcity, but because it's used to make most things that most video game players would want their characters to have.
b)This limits opportunities for trade, because, for example, blacksmith would have little use for anything but iron and steel, while the consumer might as well just build the tools/weapons himself since he'd have to pay in the iron and steel anyways.
c)Currency can't fix this, because that currency would have to be based around iron/steel, and therefore simply won't be used.


Ah, I want to write more but I've got better things to do.

Just start actively creating markets for a variety of things, like furniture, clothing, food variations, etc, and economics come on their own. For that, you're going to have to probably have to start enforcing social laws, be they written or unwritten. Takes a lot of player concentration and input, but it's the only way these things work.

[Marian]

Seems to me most places already have the same currency, it's called 'days of work'.

But Doug was pretty much spot on - anything else is pretty much doomed to failure because of lack of trust. In RL, the money in your wallet is useless paper without being able to trust that wherever you go the stores will accept it...also that the store will be open sometime in the next decade and have goods in stock and a shopkeeper awake enough to do business with you who won't drop dead of a heart attack in the middle of a transaction.

In Cantr maybe at best the leader could convince all the shops in their location to take a certain kind of currency in exchange for goods, but the town only has so many resources, and when they need to trade with another that understandably wants more than just what amounts to an I.O.U. note they're back to square one.

[DylPickle]

But for it to have any real point, you need to take it beyond just "the town". It has to be a general acceptance within a region with multiple towns, vast enough for resource variation.

[Arlequin]

The main Spanish island has had coinage for a long time.

The main problems my banker has found are: a) getting the coins on the hands of people, and b) people forgetting they own coins. The second being the most aggravating of both.

[ceselb]

There's a rather excellent discussion that touches on this, if you're feeling up to reading it (you should, it's very good): http://www.forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?t=9164

In short, we've abstracted out so much in this game that I'm not sure there can be anything else than a barter economy.
Historically you wanted something that kept value well, gold for example. In cantr nothing really rots away unless you leave it on the ground. If our world behaved the same way, we'd go around with slices of carrots and leaves of salad in our wallets and not bother with coins and bills.
Then there's an issue of trust. If human life was as fickle as a cantr one, there'd never be much progress. At anytime your trading partner, king or banker can drop dead in this game. Fiat currencies won't work without trust and permanence.

I have several traders in game and I can tell you what the cantr economy boils down to. Your own work is everything. This includes travel time. Either you do work inside, that some people deem "too boring", as they'd rather be outside roleplaying. So they pay you to work instead. Iron is used for many things that people want and 'stores' the travel time to get the constituents and make it. Obviously a well placed city that's had easy access to the ironmaking things and has stores of finished iron will be reluctant to trade for much more other than at rather sharp discounts. Conversely,a place that has nearly half a continent to one or more ingredients and have limited means to get any, will place a high value on iron.