Building in the wild; good or bad?

Hey everyone!

As many of you may already know, we have had a few different users come on and offer themselves up as beta testers. As great as this had been, none of them have joined a town or participated in the economy. Instead go out into the wild and start building which doesn't help us get any closer to release. 

I've already set up a test town, Aquatopia, designed to allow beta testers to test current settings as well as other plugins we need tested like Iconomy. We also have a few working shops but despite our current capabilities, none of the beta testers are interested in participating. 

I view this as a major issue.

Seeing as the crux of Econicraft is our economy and the ability to participate in trade/building towns, just building in the wild defeats the entire mission of the server. 

I would love to hear your guys' thoughts on possibly disabling the ability to build in the wild. Feel free to let me know if this seems too totalitarian...

Ender

I think the major issue is that creating a town costs quite a bit of money, and there is no clear way to earn money at this time. If we are going to have an economy based on player to player interaction then we need to lower towny prices significantly and give some sort of temporary stimulus of sorts to get people to settle towns and make a competitive environment to try to get new people into towns. Right now nobody is on top of the game when it comes to money or towns because there is no real way to get there.

Good point. The servershop is minimally operational for the time being so I think getting that up and running along with optimizing Towny prices (in addition to item prices) to get things going.

Maybe with the server shop we should have one item that is a real money maker, preferably one that does not have much use but is rare and nonrenewable like gold or lapis. That way people have something to shoot for to make money, we can develop something of an alternate currency, and not have something valuable within the game that people won't want to give up readily like diamond.

I really like that idea! I think something like lapis would be a cool thing to set up as the "main item".

Thanks to jake, now players can use shops....we just need to create them

Honestly, I dont think town prices are too high, I think they are Far too low. It only takes me an hour or so on survival to get enough money to make a town at its current price.

I agree with jake, now that we have finished pricing the base items, I think we need to raise the town price a hell of a lot. It should be a massive achievement to purchase and run your own town.

At the same time, it is important to have a town running.  I think it would be interesting if someone set up a town without claiming it and then a bunch of people built there and elected a mayor who would get all of the money and then could actually claim the town.  Right now that is the only feasible way.

That happened a couple of times in Econicraft 1.0.

If I recall correctly that was how Novac Started.