Hello and hi!

BotB Economy is pretty simple at the moment.
You earn boons for plays, donloads, profile visits, submissions to hosted battles, votes on ur submissions etc...
All these earnings are a BotBrs *income*.
These incomes can vary depending on the voters INF and some other weird formulas. Let's just keep the income as it is for now, because it is already rather arbitrary anyway and heavily depending on the activity of BotBrs.

Now we also have Boon payments. These include some dynamic numbers like:
- bumping a thread costs ur level in boons
- updating your avatar costs the size of the image in boons
and a few more. Let's keep these how they are as well.

And we also have very static numbers like:
Palettes cost b10,
Bulletins cost b25,
Lyceum Articles cost b33,
Playlists cost b56,
XHB Hosting costs b725, b975 or b1323 (depending on the hour count)
(XHB hosting is a little more complex than this because it also depends on how many XHBs you're already hosting.)

BotB has the boon bank, which started with a million boons total and is responsible for all the transactions on the site.
It is in the reds for a few years now, which is why we have taxes (x% of your boons taken away from you with x being the age of the website in years).

I feel like the static numbers of Boon payments don't reflect the economy very well. We are currently in a boon crisis! It should be heavy inflation! The bank needs to recover! My feature request is the following:

Make the static numbers listed above dynamic too, depending on the boon bank debt.
A possible approach could be this: [fixed multiplier] * (1000000 - boons_in_bank)
Fixed multiplier could just be the current price divided by a million.

Examples:
Multipliers for the different payments:
bulletins = 0.000025
palettes = 0.000010
lyceum = 0.000033
playlist = 0.000056
host1 = 0.000725
host2 = 0.000975
host4 = 0.001323

we have -600000 boons in the bank, which means we would end up with the following numbers:

OHB Host: 1160.0
2HB Host: 1560.0
4HB Host: 2116.8
Playlist: 89.6
Lyceum: 52.8
Palettes: 16.0
Bulletins: 40.0

pretty expensive right? well, obviously. boon bank is in the red.

But now think about the numbers when the bank would have 0 boons, which means all the available boons would be distributed among all the BotBrs. They would just be normal and how they are today.

And in case the bank earns more money and ends up with, let's say 500000 boons, it would mean the BotBrs would have less boons to spend, therefore the prices would be this:

OHB Host: 362.5
2HB Host: 487.5
4HB Host: 661.5
Playlist: 28.0
Lyceum: 16.5
Palettes: 5.0
Bulletins: 12.5

This (or a similar) approach would give more value to boons and bank debts would have an even larger impact on everyone. It would also be rather simple to implement i guess(???)
On top of that, it might be worth thinking about stealing all boons from accounts that didn't log in for 2 or 3 years everytime its tax day, so that the money will actually end up on accounts that would actually use it.

Thanks for reading and lmk what you think!!!

Hmm I'm not a big fan of economy myself (even in video games) but it's not a problem at all if other people have fun with it!

I'm just a bit concerned with the XHB costs, I'm afraid it could discourage people who are willing to host when the costs are increased, especially in these cases:
- when you get your first badge: in this case it's already pretty hard to gather b750 unless someone give you boons
- when one of your XHB boonloss and you don't have enough boons to host a new one: higher costs means it will happen more often and it will be harder to get back enough boons to host again

first of all: the multiplier can be whatever feels best, mine was just an example. - so in other words: maybe it wont ever be higher.

when your xhb boonlosses, the boons stay in the bank, meaning the total amount of boons in the bank is higher, therefore the cost to host is lower.

and: since the community is able to directly impact the deposit amount by how many boons they keep (for no good reason other than capitalism), and with the 2nd idea of stealing all boons from inactive botbrs, the chances are higher that the bank will become positive again instead of spiraling down into negativity

my qualms are basically the same as Opilion's, otherwise it's pretty cute

it would be kind of a bummer for costs to be so steep after we fought so hard for the cost reduction on 2HB and 4HB hosting (...even though this didn't affect 2HB/4HB frequency really lol)

initial OHB hosting cost is already restrictive by design indeed, you really have to just ask for help unless you've done a ton of submitting to majors already, and i personally think that's fine, but i don't fancy the idea of making it more so. as far as asking for help goes, i don't think it makes a difference, people will get you there. but it would also probably have an effect on hosting habits

i'm not opposed to there being a much higher tax rate for botbrs who haven't logged in for a very long time, but it's also worth mentioning that the majority of folks who have a ton of boons are actually still visiting the site or even outright participating, they just don't host or don't interact with the community in such a way as to be giving boons away to others

edit: i checked the roll call list and only 7 botbrs with >5000 boons haven't logged in within the last two years, compared to 30 who have (nearly all within 2024 as well)

but remember there are thousands of accounts with a few hundred boons who just sit on them while being inactive too.

again, my feature request is not "make xhb hosting more expensive". maybe xhb hosting cld actually be LESS expensive.
right now, the amount of boons people earn is in no way related to how much they are able to spend. if the prices for everything, (NOT only xhb hosting), wld be scaled better to how many boons are currently circulating, we wld end up with a more fair depost as well as a better awareness of botbs currency.

so if more boons in circulation, more expensive battles; and if less boons in circulation, less expensive battles, right? does this also mean stuff would get more expensive after a major battle? i think its an interesting idea, i just want to know what to expect

not necessarily because people get points after a major, and not boons.

it cld also promote other forms of boon-payments, like palettes or playlists. because people cld buy them "just in case" because you never know if they will become more expensive over time. better to invest into something permanent than to keep ur money on your account.

an extension to this wld be some kind of "host pass" which you buy for boons and then you are able to host a battle with this pass whenever you want. lol, but thats definitely just a random idea now, not what i am actually proposing

Let's just print more money

yeah my thought was, if we have inflation, to print more money

so right now the bank is over b250k in debt -- and if we printed that much money then the price of everything would go up over 25%
but that would also include payouts so income would increase

if we have tax day we could have an inflation day?
maybe 6 months away from tax day :thonk:

i've always felt weird about doing inflation
but taxes aren't quite fixing it either :shrug:

i do like the idea of creating a bandit that randomly loots accounts with very old logins -- would be best to leave a message

wait the economy is a real thing here? I thought that was just one of the goofy alerts

the botb bank is kinda losing by default, unless the entire economy system is revised, there's no point in making this

the viewpoint isn't botb bank, the viewpoint is to give boons more value and to add interesting spins to the economy mechanic of the page

please do the loot thing! could happen to anyone, but with different probabilities, so that an active poor user has a lower probability but NOT 0! because some looters are not nice! is it true!

the only thing is... bandit would rob people and give money to the bank??? isn't that a reverse bandit? we should be able to rob the bank too. it would cost something (supplies: rope, ninja outfit etc) and it would rarely succeed. that would teach noobs a nice lesson about gambling, such as do not.

items by 2030

botb bank lore:

inflation occurs as the cumulative result of numerous individual pricing decisions made by agents spread throughout an economy. since BotBrs have no ability to sell goods or services to each other, no BotBr ever makes a pricing decision. therefore inflation cannot occur on BotB even in principle.

if you would like to treat your play money like real money i would recommend that you get into eve online.

thats a lot of text to say "i'd rather like to keep things boring"

I love taxes, in the end though there's literally not enough boons in the economy.. but taxes fix this organically (provided taxes are proportional to the bank's debt). The debt of the bank *is* printing money

imagine a stock market

i would genuinely LOVE a stock market on this site. (i speak only for myself

Uh oh.



Ran into this guy in a dark alleyway. Should I be worried?

yes stock market please so I can avoid taxes by keeping all of my wealth in a stock portfolio

new feature request: unique special auras that are first, algorithmically generated such that no two are alike, secondly, auctioned off. This will let the market decide how valuable a certain aura is, and the money will be paid back to the bank. At this point many botbrs will rightly complain that these will be outside of their budget. That is why the bank will allow you to take out a 15-year fixed rate loan using your new aura as collateral, which will be repossessed and re-auctioned if you default, of course. At this point many botbrs will point out that botbrs with a lot of wealth, who are of course not paying taxes on it (because stocks are not money until they are sold,) can effectively get free money--because, as they are guaranteed to pay it back, they have extremely low interest rates on their loans of thousands of boons. The interest will then be passively be paid off with a major entry here and there. To these concerned botbrs I reassure that the chicken fries are back at burger king yes they cost twice as much as they did 9 years ago

If that happens, the new aura's icon could complement the 🧡 and 💀 as 💲.