Well, first off, I actually want to get some gold, hence why I'm posting on random threads. Sorry!
Anyway, I also want to get ALOT of gold, then make my avatar pretty much centered around a wolf character I'm making up (I'm seeing if there are any wolfy-accessories around, and I'm gonna get them all!! xD).

opalistic8: I'm not really sure we have many or any wolf like items but we do have a lot of fox items to collect :) You can put it up for suggestion though about how wolf items could be something people would want. Maybe we will see wolf themed items this Halloween as people have been hinting that they would like to see werewolf stuff ^^

I think a thesis on the economy of avatar sites (or any entertainment based website with a virtual economy) and how they are a little microcosm of real life would be interesting and well received :yes:

All sorts of avenues to persue there. Especially about things like market manipulation, as you've already mentioned.

Jelly: It really could be one interesting paper because you can use examples of a micro economy to apply it to real life. There will definitely be situations where things will not go smoothly here because of the single currency and all but its interesting. I am now thinking of the possibilities of maybe a Menewshan Bank acting as a central bank with loans and interest rates etc. That could be really cool to apply but a little tricky. I mean, it would be the first avatar website to have that right.

I think i may be side tracking from the topic now but this post is generally about economics and it is my goal ^^''

We've talked about loans, but the logistics of it would be a bit impossible.

Look at it this way...Some user is desperate for an item and doesn't have the gold so they take out a loan, that's the easy bit, but what if they're then not active enough to earn enough gold to meet the repayments/interest? Do we go around and repossess their items? Break their avatar's legs? What if people just become too demoralised at having a portion of the gold they're earning disappear in payments that they just give up and quit?

Too much temptation to get easy money, and too difficult to repay. Exactly the same as it is with loans/credit cards in the real world! :yes:

It would beneficial in a way when you think of maybe a mortgage? Where the bank would maybe take up the ownership of some of the person's assets before actually giving out the loan, and if the person does no repay the loan, that item could be auctioned off just like in real life as well :P

I know it sounds really good in theory like it would be a perfect market but yeah, things do not go as smoothly as they are here and in real life. Like how he banks are holding too many assets and may not be able to sell it when people are more keen on saving than spending leaving the banks unable to liquidize...

I really understand that with the manpower of the staff here, it is quite impossible to start a bank out but it might be a future plan? It would really be interesting to have something really simulate a real life economy here ^^''

Yeah, but people use these sites as an escape from the stresses of the real world. To have to do something like give over items as collatrel and so on, wouldn't be much escapism, it would be real life all over again xD

If we ever get a bank again it wouldn't be staff-run anyway, that just wouldn't be sensible, it would be entirely automated.

That's true in a way, I'm not really all for the idea, just sort of neutral looking at the pros and cons of it all but I don't understand why it would not be staff run though since if a person was behind it, it would be easier to control compared to it being automated as staff would know better on how 'loaners' would act and if they were trustworthy.

Because it's just not sensible for any site feature to need to be manually run by the staff. What if someone wants a loan and no staff are on? That would mean that the bank would need to actually close when there was no-one on to run it, which would frustrate the people who wanted to use it. Also, the staff just wouldn't have time to do it.

No permanently available feature should ever need a real person to run it, wherever possible everything should be done by code.
What your suggesting would be similar to the shops being run by staff, and only open when someone was available to serve. Do you see what I'm saying?

It really wouldn't be our problem is someone was trustworthy or not either, the coding would deal with that
Let me go off in a flight of fantasy here...
First off, this makes me realise that we'd need a marketplace before anything like this could happen...anyway, the system would scan a person's inventory and give them loan amount options based on the combined value of their inventory contents. You could borrow up to the complete value of your inventory, but not beyond.

So, say you have 175K in items and want to borrow 50K

So you tap in the amount, and then have to make up that amount in items. So you check off your items (same as in a trade) until you hit 50K worth, and those are your collateral. Once they've been chosen and the loan is secured, those items are then locked into your inventory and cannot be traded. As payments on the loan are made and the debt drops, items will be freed up again, until the loan is paid off.

If payments aren't made, then items that cover the value of the payment become the bank's property, and you can only get them back once payments are up-to-date. All done by code with no staff intervention needed :)

Ah, I just read your example. So the item becomes soul bound for that term until the loan has been paid off? I'm not really sure about coding and softwares in all these but I am sure it could be hard to implement and the site might go crazy like it sometimes does with the crashes and all :) But what you typed out seems like a really good idea. There will definitely be lots of fluctuations in the economy because of that but then it would be even better if there was interest charged on the loan so it makes people think twice about borrowing and the interest rates could go up and down depending on the economy. during quiet times, interest rates would be low to encourage spending and during event times, you could make it high! Oooh! This is really exciting O.O Its very interesting how it seems like you can have recession and economic boom even on an avatar website ^^''

Any coder will tell you that anything can be coded :yes: Think of how complicated some games are, every single bit of complicated computer functionality boils down to code in the end...

Site crashes shouldn't effect anything too much, as everything is backed up daily.

If a system like this was implimented, the interest charged would be higher, the greater the amount of the loan; the same as it is in a lot of real life cases, to offset the risk of non-repayment.

Also, the value of the items used as collateral would be fixed at the time the loan was taken out, they wouldn't fluctuate with current market value as that wouldn't be fair.

But this is all pure conjecture anyway as that was just an off the top of my head example of the way something like this could work.

Buy Some Clothes :]

Right now, my goal is to have 500 items by my first Meneversary. I'm about 30 items away. I have about a month and a half to go. Part of that time, I will be on vacation though, and I don't know how much I will be online then. So, I'm going to try to get all items before I go on vacation. I think it's possible, considering most of the items I want are in the 100s to 300s.

Have fun, get my dream avatar, meet cool people, get recognized on Menewsha, maybe someday a dream of mine is to be an Admin Pick...... dazzes off into an unknown world... :shock:

Well, my main goal is to get a presentable avatar that I like. =) I'm usually not good with keeping up with projects I start, so I'm trying to get something that I can stick to. A site like this is perfect.
I figure if I get on here everyday, it'll help my boredom during the summer and give me something to do. I like having goals and reaching them, so this site gets me excited and motivated.
I enjoy talking, so forums are great when I don't feel like calling a friend or something.
Once I get my dream avatar, I'll probably just keep trying to get different outfits for her to wear. =)

goall...o well, not really, just wanna have fun..

but maybe this can be considered..i'd like to get my hands on the Love Boa, though i think im incapable of doing so, looking at the limited amount of time i spend in here..

but yeah..XD

My goal on Mene, well I would have to say that I would deffinitely like to save up and purchase every store item I like, though that will all take time.

My goal on menewsha is to be one of the few to save one million gold. C: Then to be the first to have five million gold! C:

My goal is to not let on that I am actually a secret agent from Soila.

IM IN YUR MOD FORUMZ... STEALING YOUR SECRETS!!

Crap. Then I probably shouldn't have typed that all out. *swallows cyanide capsule*

My current goal is to not flake off and forget to log in for months at a time again. D= I really need to partake in things I enjoy more often.

Also, I need to de-lurk myself. Those two goals kind of go hand in hand, though.

Howdy xD :lol:

My goal is to find out secret info about Howdy! Oh, and to make lots of people hungry with my signature :angel:

why hellos ^^

i don't i have established my goal in menewsha yet,
but i'm starting to collect CIs and am thinking of buying each CIs every now and then.
And then save some gold for the CIs that i have missed

My goal is to finish making an outfit for my avatar. Then i'll be on to another outfit, basically I just want items since i'm fairly new and don't have much items to make my avatar look good, and I like my avatars to look good. :)

I don't have a specific goal, I just want to make tonnes of RP's, word games and all that stuff ^-^ I also wanna be rich~ >:]

At the moment, earn more than 40 gold on tetris in a single game. That's the highest I've gotten so far! Also, to finish the outfit I want for my avatar, and roleplay. Well, try and roleplay-- I haven't been able to write in about a year, so I'm hoping having others push me along will help :)