Feedback Request 01/13/2013 - Trade Totems

[Xira]

Here, let me explain WHY I'm right, rather than just stating what's going to happen. Since it seems the devs aren't listening to simple statements, perhaps a historical argument will work.

In the USA back a long time ago, we backed our currency with gold. In fact, gold was often used as currency by itself among people. When the government decided to go off the gold standard(Nixon) they faced the problem that more and more people were simply using gold itself as currency. They wanted people to use their new thing, unbacked bills, to trade with. People refused to do this, so the government sent men with guns to many, many houses and demanded people's gold. It was made illegal to trade in gold. Enforced by men with guns. People were jailed and killed over their refusal to use unbacked bills. Eventually it became accepted to use unbacked bills, by governmental force of arms, and they repealed the laws making barter and gold owning illegal. People are still jailed over attempts to barter with gold and silver, if the owner of the business owed complains.

Since you aren't going to remove nails from the game and you can't stick a gun in our faces, you must provide something of value in return for your 'currencies' to create a demand for it. Until there is something of value given in return for currency by the game system to create an initial and ongoing demand, you are going to have a totally useless feature. I'm really not sure why you are developing it first, rather than something useful, but perhaps you just don't know how an economy works.

I liken it to Amazon Coins or BitCoins, the first is a disaster in the making and will never be widely adopted, the 2nd does provide value in that it's slightly harder for the government to control and confiscate, but is still not widely adopted because there are already established systems in place that are 'more legal'.