Bukkit

Just an idea. What if you implement a way of handling "inflation". In the beginning of a server map, everything tends to be so expensive, but as the game goes by the same prices becomes so cheep. So a way of regulating the price could be cool, Im thinking mostly for rents and taxes, since its nice that the property that you have saved up for stays the same.

Im thinking that the base tax and rent would be multiplied with a number between a range that the player defines, for instance 1.0 to 1.3, this means that the tax/rent will never be more than 30% of the original price. So far its easy, but then one have to figure out what should influence this number. For example, one option could be to set it as a time in days (or times collected), where the maximum number will be reached at a predefined number of days (and stay that way), and that the number will increase a little bit every day that goes by.

Secondly one could do it more random, with more fluctuation, where the same max and min values stays, but that the increase would not be as linear, the curve would have some up and downs but the mean of all days will be that it always increase. In that sense one could add another value that would be the maximum amount of the decrease (lets say 0.9, which would be 10%). That means that for every day it would be picked a number that is between -10% to +30%, and since the plus side is bigger it will eventually reach the upper limit (1.30), but then it will also go slightly go down, however it should stay in the top. By making them equal the rate would be random and it would go on forever between 1.0 and 1.3, which could be nice, but it does not deal with the "inflation", but it could be a nice option for those who want some variation in their rates.

These two should be pretty easy to implement into your code, and I think it gives a good addition to your plugin, as well as making it feel more dynamic. It is possible to use the same system on the property prices, but its probably not a good idea to have big distance between the numbers if you use the second suggestion, since it could fluctuate allot in just a few days if you do. In terms of rent/tax it is not that big of a deal since it will even itself out in the end and most likely be small amount of money for each day.

Another option (more complex) would be to measure the market itself. This could be done, but it might be hard hard to implement this without hooking into other plugins.

I made a little test in excel. In this method it only uses the previous data as a starting point, so it would not need to store all these days, but it would be very nice if it could be optional (SQL) so that one can include this into webpages etc.

This is the excel sheet: http://www.filedropper.com/inflation

Since the data is mostly random, with just a few rules, it will be very different from time to time.

This is one example of 5 test trails of one whole year:

http://postimg.org/image/bepvnd2m5/

Hey, thanks for your suggestion.

Giving the taxes some more power sounds reasonable, but I question variable rent prices. If you sign a rent contract (-> rent a region) you would usually expect the price to stay the same I would say. Rent should be much higher than taxes anyway for logical reasons.
For the taxes: I think quite an easy possibility would be to add a percentage of the players money to the taxes. E.g. $15 + 0.1% of your holdings. What do you think about that?

But in general I am not sure if that is the right way to control your servers inflation. Maybe a separate tax plugin would be more appropriate?

@Phoenix_IV: Go

Yeah you are probably right about the rents.

I think your idea could work well, I think it could be combine that with what I suggested so that the taxes are determent by two variables. Maybe fluctuation is a better word for what I suggested than inflation, the holding variable would make it fair for the player, but the fluctuation would affect every player equally and its quite possible that you would get some interesting gameplay as well as a feeling of immersion. I also think this fluctuation is very resource friendly since it is only calculated once each day, and that its the same for every player.

So first the fluctuation would be calculated (globally) then the variable of holdings of the specific player would be added. Maybe it should be some limit of how high the holding variable could go as well.

If you make it optional that the plugin tracks the last 30 days of fluctuation (in sql), servers can make webpages that display a graph of fluctuation.