Auction House with Energy Trading - Asking for Feedback

  • (@Mods: I'm not completely sure if something like this is allowed here or if its the correct sub-forum. I'm sorry if not.)


    Hello Community!


    I will try to keep this short. I am a German master student for computer science. For a project I made a little mod, which allows you to trade items and EU, the IC2-Energy. It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/LJUsvBK.png An additional part of the project was a little experiment with my friends and a small analysis.


    Now for my master thesis I would like to make an auction house with more energy interfaces and a more detailed analysis in terms of balancing, behavior, motivation and economy in comparison to other auction houses and trade systems in other games.


    Now to my problem: I'm skeptical, probably because I mostly play on small private servers. I'm not sure if people actually would use something like that. In MMOs it's pretty much essential, because there are so many items and it's sometimes completely random what you will get. If you get something you don't need, you will trade it for something you can use. In Minecraft with Tech-Mods you pretty much have a goal which you can achieve completely alone. It's fun to work in a small group, but that has not really something to do with trading.


    So the purpose of this is to get some data and feedback to any of my ideas. So if you want to help, just post here, and maybe answer some of my questions:


    TL;DR: I'm a student who wants to make an auction house mod with the possibility to trade energy. And for that I'm doing a little research. I'm thankful for everyone who answers.


    If you want to try my first prototype of the trading mod (not an auction house, yet), tell me in question 8. It's for version 1.7.10 and Forge & IC2 is needed.


    Questions:


    1. With how many people are you playing Minecraft? How many people are active (on average) on the servers you play on? Is it a private or public server?


    2. Do you build your stuff alone or in a group? How big is that group?


    3. Is there more than one big factory (of different people) on each server you play on?


    4. How long are the servers online until they are shut down or restarted with a new world? Or how long do you play on one until you lose interest?


    5. Do you think your playstyle would benefit from an auction house? Can you point at any conditions under which it would be used more? Maybe bonus Energy when something is traded – keyword “industrial subsidies”.


    6. Did you ever play on a server with an auction house mod? Please tell me about this experience. What did you trade?


    7. Any other feedback?


    8. Do you want to try my first prototype of the trading mod?


    My answers:


    1. I mostly played on small private servers. Max. 10-20 people. Around 2-3 are active most of the time.


    2. Sometimes I build alone, other times in a group of 2-3 people. Not more.


    3. Yes, there is more than one, most of the time. Factories of other people that do mostly the same things.


    4. Our private servers keep being online until the lagg kills the gameplay after some months. Or if we just don't know what to do anymore.


    5. Maybe it would benefit from it sometimes. But most people I know want to create their own stuff without much help.


    6. Some of my friends did play with an auction house before, but I don't know exactly what their experience is with it. It definitely wasn't a server with tech mods.


    7. Just as an example: Ideas how to improve the GUI. Events that occurred, where you think that trading would have been a cool solution. Important aspects other auction house systems do wrong. Comparison to other games and their auction house or trade system.


    8. Yes./No./Maybe.


    Thank you and have a nice day everyone.

    • Official Post

    A fairly obvious problem with the idea is that energy is really quite ubiquitous, especially if you are looking outside IC2 or at long term players. Servers would have to actively restrict production to make it a valuable asset.


    For items it's not as bad, but still mods aren't nowhere near the large MMOs in terms of how many items can be acquired and the difficulty of doing so. Things like rare drops are scaling by building some automation to get them, e.g. mob farms, not by play time. Even if there were such drops, MC's progression is way to shallow, there's not nearly enough difficult scenarios that warrant much better equipment. Trading commodity type items will probably just shorten the game for players starting later.


    This being said, I don't think the idea has sufficient application potential without increasing the game's depth first. For the few things worth trading the basic Forestry post box system or Trade-O-Mats are IMO enough.

  • A fairly obvious problem with the idea is that energy is really quite ubiquitous, especially if you are looking outside IC2 or at long term players. Servers would have to actively restrict production to make it a valuable asset.


    For items it's not as bad, but still mods aren't nowhere near the large MMOs in terms of how many items can be acquired and the difficulty of doing so. Things like rare drops are scaling by building some automation to get them, e.g. mob farms, not by play time. Even if there were such drops, MC's progression is way to shallow, there's not nearly enough difficult scenarios that warrant much better equipment. Trading commodity type items will probably just shorten the game for players starting later.


    This being said, I don't think the idea has sufficient application potential without increasing the game's depth first. For the few things worth trading the basic Forestry post box system or Trade-O-Mats are IMO enough.

    Thank you for your input! What you are saying fits quite well to my scepticism and grasps some of the details better than how I thought about it before. So that can definitely help for my thesis, after I'm done with the practical part of my project.