I’m sure everyone’s at least thought of this before, but I’ve never successfully conceptualized it without there being some possible issues. The easy thing with a local server economy is that you assure everyone that has the power to make a unit of currency isn’t illegitimately being generated. The hard part is remote, global economy. Staff could easily abuse their position on a server to generate tons of currency, which is a bad idea.
Here’s some of the bad ideas…
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Servers download the plugin and the currency plugin acts as a “buy back” system
- Servers could just spawn tons of ore for players, rendering the currency useless
- Users wouldn’t even have to try to get amounts of currency.
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- This basically explains how tough this system could be if done this way. Plus, if someone kept spawning dragon eggs or they had a ton because of a dupe glitch, the economy could tank.
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Play time based currency
- No direct way to accumulate currency
- Servers with the plugin installed could just endlessly say that someone was just on the server.
Now there are a few better ways, or really just bandages to the main fundamental issue.
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Include a global currency regulation team
- Regulators could possibly abuse their position, generating money for themselves or claiming prizes for free
- Requires giving Regulators basically super admin level privileges on every server
- Possibility of easy abuse if regulators are not vetted well
- Regulating people is a pain
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Users create and manage their own independent economies that people can be invited to join or request to join
- Economies would regulate themselves, the management of the individual economies making sure that each of the servers isn’t abusing their position in the economy
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Create limiters for servers
- Only allow servers to give users certain amounts of currency per day, depending on average playerbase size during active hours (whenever the average time with the most players is)
- Can cause issues with prize delivery if the threshold is too small
- easy to fix with per-server modifications
Servers would probably have their own individual API keys, associated with all the IPs that ever used that key. This would allow people abusing the system to be effectively cut off and even banned if so fit.
I don’t really know how I would personally accomplish this, but here’s just a list of my thoughts. The pros and cons could go on forever, so there’s always more to be said. If you have any thoughts, make sure to reply!