Cantr II Economics:

[mojomuppet]

6) Lack of programmed tools to help players manage an economy.

If we expect players to control a complex commodities market using their own free-time and a spreadsheet, it's doomed from the beginning. Economies thrive on standardization. I know we hate automation, but it would be nice if I could come into a town, make a trade for a set price, without having the other character necessarily awake. Waiting for others to wake up is probably the #1 killer of trade in the game - why wait for you when I can dig it up myself? This concept was put forth and debated to death several years ago. Who knows, I might have even been against it then, but it's clear it's needed now. We also need programmed mechanisms of land control and ownership.

I would love to see a vending machine/market stall in the game that could be stocked with a few goods and set to have a variety of prices based on resources and/or coins. Put a lock on it so there's a risk to not having it guarded at least. Something like that. The hardest thing about it would be that you'd have to set the different costs individually based on the type of coin and/or resource type used to pay for the sale item. Also, it would be best if the containers/vending machines could hold tools/weapons as well as resources. Bartering would live on, as there'd still be nothing prohibiting you from trying to haggle people down. It just wouldn't be as instant.

I have chars that will squeeze you to the dime, and others that will round you to the hundred dollar. Bottom line dont start a trade if you dont have the time to finish it. Or just wait it out. The traveling trader should not expect a town to run on it's time frame. It's up to you the player to be able to wait it out and not expect you trader to jump every town and get right away results. Seko has the perfect trader. She doesnt (I assume) think that is her main char, reacts when others react to it, and it is a Cantr responsible char. Well done you know who I mean.

[SekoETC]

Sorry, a long post ahead.

If a location has taxes, most players know OOC that there are other locations in the game that do not have taxes and are ready to cuss out the leaders who set the taxes for putting the common man down.

It would be cool if the taxes were progressive, so that some newspawn gathering for a couple of days wouldn't have to give their few meaningless grams to the town, but somebody gathering enough to build a ship or a cottage would have to pay their share.

The meaning of gathering taxes should be to encourage trade, but if the location cannot trade in said resource due to them not having enough stock (even if the taxes were paid in said resource) or the leaders being too sleepy or even worse, the town claiming it doesn't need any resources from other towns, or needing only specific resources so that instead of bringing what ever your own town produces, one would have to travel to another location and waste fuel and days in traveling before they can get something worth buying... it makes people think "screw this, all I really need is food and a shield, beyond that everything else is extra, so if that town is giving me such a hard time, either I'll find another one that's easier or give up my dreams and become a savage". Nobody ever compensates for travel time (one person once offered to compensate for my character, but ended up betraying him and paying nothing) so the only way someone can make a profit (or actually even break even, since you're spending that time on the road instead of gathering resources, unless you can come up with projects you can work on while traveling) is by getting something faster than what you tell the customer it takes to gather. Yet if everybody uses tooled rates, that's the same as everybody using manual rates, save for things like cotton and mushrooms being relatively more expensive. The location that sells resources locally most likely has the equipment to gather it efficiently, but if they sell at tooled rates, they also expect you to use tooled rates. The only way you can win is by using a harvester or a drill with petrol, and even that depends on how easily you can get the petrol. People are always overpricing it because the demand is higher than the supply, so the efficient way is to make it oneself, even though it requires a high initial investment.

I think it's dicky that people tell you "we don't really need anything, but instead of helping you get ahead with your dream, we're not going to trade what we have, or we're not going to even gather our local resources in the first place and we'll make sure that no one else will either". So should I blame the system for not creating more needs to fill? Cantrians are very primitive. In real life usually even the poorest people own lots of stuff but in Cantr it's just the bare necessities.

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Edit: but the talk about stalls and stuff like that makes me think of Puzzle Pirates. People can buy a stall and there are places where a customer can pick which object they want made, see a list of how much different stalls/shops are charging for that item and how long it would take to finish by estimate, and if they don't want to wait so long and have money to spare, they might pick a stall that does it a bit faster even if it cost a bit more. The stalls can also set how much they pay workers, and the game shows the ones that pay the most, although they usually get so much reserve labor that they can't use the work anymore, and there's also an option that takes the character to a random stall that needs that sort of labor. The problem is there are loads of stalls so there's lots of competition. Resources are captured from NPC ships in fights, or some are gained from foraging. Ship owners sell the goods at markets and stall owners buy them from there. There's lots of automatic calculation so that everybody can get the cheapest price without searching.

In Cantr it would make more sense if shops had to advertize via a bulletin board and make themselves stand out, rather than an automated feature telling the player where to find the cheapest price. But it would be useful if there was automation to barter things and to pay workers. It would make things faster. But it would be useful if it also allowed haggling, and a shop might be ready to pay more if they're in dire need to get an order filled fast than if they were only making items in stock. It would be an interesting thing to program but sounds complicated.

[mojomuppet]

Your char would be dead if mine knew what you sell petrol for...enough said.

[muidoido]

...
It would be cool if the taxes were progressive, so that some newspawn gathering for a couple of days wouldn't have to give their few meaningless grams to the town, but somebody gathering enough to build a ship or a cottage would have to pay their share.
...

It's a working man's dream! Unfortunately RL is a bitch sometimes! And it's harder to kill bad leaders...

[Cwalen]

Do we have enough common consensus that stalls could be a good feature to pop a new thread on them, and follow it?

[IvanicDiazinum]

Do we have enough common consensus that stalls could be a good feature to pop a new thread on them, and follow it?

I would be one to disagree, if a poll is put up for it. Personally, it just doesn't seem to fit in with the general style of Cantr.

[Piscator]

I think it would depend on how it's done. If a market stall would require the constant attention of its owner to operate, I could probably live with it. There's not that much difference between a project for gathering potatoes and one for selling wares. The latter one admittedly involves human interaction, but both are quite complicated actions our characters do without our attention.

There's a market stall thread in the suggestions forum already, by the way:
http://forum.cantr.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17838

[SekoETC]

Your char would be dead if mine knew what you sell petrol for...enough said.

I don't like reading comments like that. If you need to kill my characters, do it without a warning or let them find out ingame but I don't want to hear about it OOC and get disturbed over it when it's actually unlikely to happen.

[Dudel]

No player value to items = No player greed = No character greed.

Most greed is forced RP based on an arbitrary choice made by the player to have a character like that. Not to mention such behavior is usually frowned upon very heavily. Last I played people always complained about "bad RPers who horde" or "being killed for their stuff."

Cake and eat it too, you can no haz.

It has nothing to do with altruism or whatever-else-Doug-was-on-about. Stuff in Cantr just isn't worth being greedy over OR everyone shits a brick when someone DOES get greedy. (Unless things have changed since I last looked around.)

[nitefyre]

Coasean bargaining solutions!

[SekoETC]

In most games being online more allows you to do more and thus it's possible to have obscenely expensive items that people spend a long time to earn (unless they use autoclickers/scripts/bots etc) but in Cantr everything happens in three hour ticks, so the most you could hope for was being busy for each tick and starting some automated projects on the side.

It would be cool if it was possible to make items with descriptions so there could be lots of variation.

[formerly known as hf]

It's not a lack of greed in Cantr that dooms it to barter.

Greed, as it was used in the OP, is a certain form of power-lust, as exhibited in advanced capitalist societies.

A lack of a capitalist economy is a lack of a certain form of power ordering. It's the same as Cantr lacking all manner of possible government formations.

The Cantr world is not necessarily capitalist. Power hierarchies and structures take on all manner of interesting formations. (One of the things I loved about playing it and watching it). It's infinitely more experimental in these formations than anything in the really-existing capitalist hegemony.

As such, power get wielded, fought for, fought against, placed in the hands of the few or spread among the many as times / locations work this through.

So: The reason Cantr has never developed really complex forms of economy, goverment or other types of power strcutures?

Power is most easily wielded and gained by -appealing- to people, by helping them help you, and by building lovey-bloody-dovey communities.

Coercion is basically impossible in Cantr. There's no mechanic for it, and many players will simply let a character starve rather than RP captivity or any other forced activity.

Apart from a few very notable exceptions, which have tended to build their power on fear and might, simply acquiring the wealth of others by kiiling them, not coercing them, players in Cantr have prefered harnessing power and organising societies based upon mutuality and communality.

Because, in Cantr, unlike many of the societies we live in, it is easier to encourage someone to help you gain power, than to coerce them.



What Cantr lacks to make it into capitalist or other forms of complex power structures is a means for those with power to wield it in more coercive, terrifying, forceful ways.

[IvanicDiazinum]

It's not a lack of greed in Cantr that dooms it to barter.
What Cantr lacks to make it into capitalist or other forms of complex power structures is a means for those with power to wield it in more coercive, terrifying, forceful ways.

Then again, we do have steady wages and stable prices in certain regions. I would argue you're wrong... some places in Cantr do have capitalism, if only very limited. I would say it has nothing to do with the lack of violence, but rather, other limitations of the game mechanics. For example, security. One can only have so much security. You can lock up your stuff at home, maybe even build a storage three rooms deep, that is, hidden behind three locks, but in the end it's only a matter of destroying each lock. So traveling far away and having any real expectation that not much has changed is limited by time of travel and security.

As has been discussed in many threads before, one serious issue is the noise level. Simply put, cities are too noisy and many get overwhelmed because there is no way to filter through the noise. It's not just a matter of actual overpopulation, because the resources can support an unlimited number of people in any given city. It's the game mechanics, because we can all understand that a better events page would solve the problem and make cities with large populations more attractive. Certainly, it's no coincidence that busy cities tend to support stable wages and prices; capitalism throughout history is tied to these environments, so we should expect it to be the same in Cantr and in my experience, it is.

I would agree, however, that we do not see government, not true government as we know it in the real world, in Cantr because of the reasons you have stated. We see no strong slavery (temporary prison labor is hardly the same thing but it can come close). Why? Well, there's no mechanics to support it. Anyone outside can simply leave; no fences or methods of bondage. Not that I would support any of these changes, it's just an observation. I would imagine that with some very minor tweaks, the in-game world could change dramatically... just the smallest changes to make slavery possible and it would probably spread like wildfire.
These changes wouldn't have to be directly tied to slavery, it could be just correlational. For example, advanced economies. With the current mechanics, the only way to enslave people is indoors. So, if we had more work that could be done indoors (more machines, more complex non-raw resources to be fabricated, etc.), it would make slavery more attractive even in the current mechanics.

Then again, the most obvious reason that we're forgetting... we don't have currency in Cantr. Why? Everyone seems to be skipping over the obvious in every mention of the issue. Well, this is just my perspective, so call me out if I'm totally wrong here... but isn't it because of counterfeiting? The actual coins are worthless because they can be fabricated anywhere and are identical. Put simply, no items are 'unique'; you can't tell one sword from another, and this extends to coins. What if to some extent they could be made like keys? Unique in a simple way so that they could not be counterfeited and thus no one could cheat the system. It's not the weight, as some have suggested. Real world money has weight, has all the limitations we accuse steel and other useful barter items of having. No, these are not the problems. Advanced money doesn't come about because there's thus far no defense against counterfeiting.

[SekoETC]

If someone tries to enslave another, it's up to the player of the victim to decide whether they play along or simply stop playing, or run down a road to get themselves killed or to start hitting themselves, in which case no one could force them to heal. No one has a way of forcing characters into doing things they don't want to do, maybe short of threatening to harm their loved ones, and many characters care only for themselves. I think the only solution would be to turn abandoned characters into NPCs. That way if someone wanted to avoid having their character turn into a mindless drone, they would have to put some effort into keeping them alive. There are 4821 characters and even though over a half of them (2735) have been checked today, 350 haven't been checked in over 20 days and 669 in over ten days. Okay, 7% is quite small for a number of sleepers but they could be turned into something useful if they could be mobilized as NPCs.

[IvanicDiazinum]

If someone tries to enslave another, it's up to the player of the victim to decide whether they play along or simply stop playing, or run down a road to get themselves killed or to start hitting themselves, in which case no one could force them to heal. No one has a way of forcing characters into doing things they don't want to do, maybe short of threatening to harm their loved ones, and many characters care only for themselves. I think the only solution would be to turn abandoned characters into NPCs. That way if someone wanted to avoid having their character turn into a mindless drone, they would have to put some effort into keeping them alive. There are 4821 characters and even though over a half of them (2735) have been checked today, 350 haven't been checked in over 20 days and 669 in over ten days. Okay, 7% is quite small for a number of sleepers but they could be turned into something useful if they could be mobilized as NPCs.

Strongly disagree.

NPCs would fundamentally change Cantr into something it just is not and probably shouldn't be. The whole point of the game is that it is a simulation with some level of realism of society. Society does not have actual mindless drones, no matter how much we will all argue occasionally that some people act as such.