Shop Prices

The price of obsidian is high for a reason; let me explain why:

In many servers the price of obsidian is absurdly low. As a result, pretty much all bases are made out of obsidian and are underground and protected by water. This makes it virtually impossible to raid without teleporting in somehow, hacking or betraying the faction. There are certain TNT cannons that can bypass this, and there's also ObsidianDestroyer, unfortunately the TNT cannons sort of depend on ObsidianDestroyer, and ObsidianDestroyer is now a paid plugin and as such is no longer available.

Obsidian box raiding, as I agreed with fj as we created CC in 2012, was really boring and we were fed up with it. We were very disappointed that one of the best servers we'd ever seen, Rokitcraft had shut down (GolddDigga may remember this). I've never actually seen another server with the same "feel" as Rokitcraft apart from Craftology Reborn which also shut down, but that's a different story.

Back on topic, in Rokitcraft we had a faction called "Assault". At its peak it had around 10-30 people I believe, and to be honest, we were managing it fairly well until some guy called Crush_Power came along and blew everything up. The resulting war was devastating for our faction and many defected to Crush. In the end our huge city was blown up, every single base after that was blown up; everything was blown up. Now, you are probably expecting some great victory against Crush_Power now, right? Expect that didn't happen. Perhaps GolddDigga, 13thRanger and their crew did something, but I never heard of anything, because the server shut down shortly after. Then the ANR craft era began, which didn't really last long.

But you're probably asking me now:
a) What the hell has this got to do with the topic???!!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
b) Why didn't you win against Crush_Power you noob!!!!!!!

There were many factors to why we lost, mostly my fault, but the fact that during our height we built a great city was a factor. Why should people who build cities be punished? We couldn't fight back since they lived in obsidian boxes; the same happened to a lot of great builders on the server and as a result they quit.

In Cometcraft though we don't want to punish people who want to live in a secure obsidian box. We simply want the price to reflect the actual rarity in the game. Getting obsidian is time consuming and pretty dangerous without the right precautions. Everything in the shop is set against the price of one diamond, which is $3000. In real Minecraft, building a giant obsidian box to house a whole faction would take weeks to actually gather all the obsidian. In servers, it can take a matter of minutes. As a result the map is cluttered with worthless obsidian boxes, and people who put time into their bases gathering the resources by hand are screwed, and so are people who wish to build castles and cities.

The solution to this whole dilemma will come when the economy update comes - unfortunately however it seems as if the plugin keeps on resetting its config to some 18B file (HyperConomy), so if you can fix that Gold somehow it would be greatly appreciated. I've tried but to no avail.

Basically, in the economy update, we will have a system of supply and demand. Prices will change depending on how much is being sold and bought. For example, if I go and sell a couple of stacks of obsidian, the stock will increase and thus the price will lower drastically. Conversely, if I buy a couple of stacks of obsidian, I'll probably buy most of the stock and as a result the price will be drastically higher. Over time, the price will adjust to what it should be according to how much obsidian is used and how much is sold to reflect a real world economy.

This also leads to some interesting mechanics, such as the Minecraft equivalent of stock trading - buy when the price is low, sell it when it's high. That way you get a profit. If it doesn't go well, you'll get a loss. It's very risky.

I might even allow players to make their own shops to compete with the server shop and other player shops. You can compete with factions to attract the most people to your shop and get more money.

In fact, here's a guide to it here:

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/hyperconomy/pages/shops/