The Economist ~ Printing money, housing (part 2) and ice buckets

Day 2,481, 12:22 • Published in Poland United Kingdom • by Spite313



Dear friends,


This is an article of three (hopefully brief) parts. First of all, a little bit of talk about the price of gold and the money market in general. Secondly, an update on housing following on from my last article. Finally, randomly donating gold to three people to keep kitten from mauling me every time I join IRC.


So to begin, most of you can see by now that gold has been fluctuating between 150-180cc/gold for some time now. This is for a number of reasons- influx from the Give Gama Gold Competition, the admins ongoing attempts to charge cc for things and reduce currency supply, and so on. Ironically, lowering the price of gold (and raising the value of currency) has been something players have been asking for since it first began it’s freefall from “pegged” currency amounts in the six months running up to the launch of V2.


So what exactly is different between now and then? Does it really matter if currency goes all the way to say 50cc/gold? From a consumer perspective, not really. Firstly because you still need to buy things with currency and gold in the same way you always did, and prices of things will always reflect a mixture of production and startup costs. From a national perspective however, it can do.


In the ancient past, each country had it’s own currency. Companies got bonuses based on the region they were built in. So if for example if you built an iron mine in a region with no iron, you got screwed for productivity. So everyone built them in a few key locations. Two of them were in Russia. As a result people were always hiring Russian workers to produce stuff, then moving the stuff back to their home country, selling it, buying gold with their own currency, buying Russian money for gold, and then paying workers with that. That roundabout cycle meant gold was always flooding into Russia and their currency was weighed down with it.


Their solution was to print money. For them it was like another source of income- because they got 200 currency for every gold, but 200 currency was worth 6 gold, they made 5g profit every time they did it. And they did it an awful lot. The thing was, normal countries couldn’t do that without devaluing their currency a lot, and so the actual price of gold was usually around 25-40 currency in every national currency. Devaluing in those days meant pissing off citizens because it reduced the value of their money.


Now however with a single global currency, there’s nothing stopping governments printing their gold to make a (small) profit. Hey, all that gold in your country accounts is basically worthless to you anyway, might as well print with it! Countries can even accept donations from citizens, convert it to currency, and give it back to them. In fact I have no idea why countries aren’t doing that right now.



Secondly, most of you probably saw my last article about housing. If you didn’t, go read it! You’re a bad person for not reading all my articles! In the article I asked for feedback, and though a lot of comments were just bitching about how erep sucks (tell me something new), there were a few positive contributions which I’ve taken on board. Namely:

1. Murti Bing suggested that I change Q6 housing regen to 12 and Q7 to 20. This is sensible since Q7 is basically Q10 in every other industry (Q5*2). I also changed it so Q7 had double the tank of Q5 instead of just 50 more than Q6.

2. Detharon pointed out that my maths sucked. Although I thought this was a bit unkind since I didn’t actually work anything out mathematically, just pulled some random numbers that looked right (the admin method 😛 ) I did actually plan to do it properly. I’ve included two different coefficients in this, both of which answer the criticism that each increase in Q should result in a proportionally smaller advantage than the last, to make sure that all qualities of housing are valid.

3. Zordacz made a really interesting point about how with no WAM, housing raw materials are basically rubbish. Because you can’t work in them yourself, only Q5 will be profitable. I’d write a proper response but to be honest I’d need a whole article to tackle such a big issue, so I’ll do it later when I have time to focus in depth. Still he made some good points I’d like to build on.

4. I also changed it so that all of them had the same duration (I chose 7 days) just because it’s easier to make a comparison that way. The way the formulas work, it calculates coefficient based on works/duration so it doesn’t really matter anyway.


The options so far







Cool stuff! In case you’re mathematically inclined, the formulas are:

Option 1
=SUM((1-(2^((((1-(2^7))^2) / ((1-(2^9))^2))*2*(10-x))))^2)*(2/(1-(2^((((1-(2^7))^2) / ((1-(2^9))^2))*2*9)))^2)

Option 2
f(x)= 0.0001x^4 + -0.005x^3 + 0.08438253968x^2 + -0.6495650794x + 2


As always, feedback would be great. If you don’t want to oust yourself as a nerd here, feel free to inbox me your opinions. However I’m only interested in solid suggestions not just listing things that are wrong with what we have now.



Finally a few days ago (24 hours in Iain-time) Helen challenged me to do the eRepublik ice bucket challenge. I’m not really sure where this came from, but apparently I’m supposed to give 2g to three random “new” players then nominate three other older players to do the same. I feel a bit silly to say this, but I don’t really know any new players since I’m not involved in the nurturing noobs part of the game at all. Also I don’t like giving gold since I can only buy 10 a day.

So instead I just gave 500cc to the last 3 players under level 30 to comment on my articles. Well done to Vitalikus, Petro Sagaydachniy2 and Kanselier. I don’t know whether you’re lovely new players or multis or what, but enjoy the cash.

I’m going to nominate three people from Unity who I know can spare 2g a piece:
Count Drakula
Destriant
Kravenn

Have fun with that.


Until next time o/


Iain