The Two Currencies of RoF

two currencies.png

When we re-opened RoF back in May, we didn’t just release a new update with some new additions—we wiped all ranks, money and inventories. This wasn’t done for no reason; it was a deliberate first step in an attempt to fix RoF’s economy. RoF’s economy was completely broken, with some players having over a million cookies—it needed desperate fixing. In case you’d like to read more about a pre-wipe perspective on RoF’s broken economy, you might like my two-part blog post on here called Big Data.

Anyhow, almost all major changes in the new updated were hugely related to the economy of the server:

  • We added a sellshop, in which you can sell your materials for cookies
  • We removed ironman, prestige and supercookies
  • We added Ascension Tokens, earned by surviving rounds

These three changes may seem weird but they were very calculated and a lot of thought went into them. Since its launch, RoF has been known as an AFK server—and for a good reason. This is because pre-wipe players were able to just make a quick house and afk in it. It didn’t matter if you built a 3x3x3 dirt house or a beautiful mansion; you got free cookies at the end of the round as long as you were in a non-safe zone with at least 20 blocks of air.

timemoney

This is what I call time-money, and it’s one of the two currencies used in my proposed Two Currencies system.

Basically, there are two kinds of currencies on RoF:

  • Time money ($T)
  • Work money ($W)

or passive income and active income. They kind of speak for themselves: Time money is earned just by being on the server and spending time on it, while work money is earned by actually working—through mining, mobfighting or whatever. The big problem with old RoF was that Work money didn’t exist at all.

There was initially only one source of income, $T, which would gradually increase as you ranked up. This would mean that people who spent more time would automatically earn more too, regardless of effort. The sole basis of your income was being online.

The addition of ironman, prestige and especially supercookies was both genius and idiotic at the same time. It offered a much-needed engame post-grandmaster. I recall asking to be reset to Player rank two or three times because being a Grandmaster was just boring. The prestige shops were a great addition to the server and things like the Efficiency X iron pick and rocket boots were very fun and much appreciated.

Its foundation, however, was a disaster both economically and in terms of gameplay: Supercookies allowed people to amass a ridiculous amount of wealth very quickly due to supercookie to cookie conversion, and ironman caused people to AFK because almost all of its features punished moving around. Supercookies were really just a more overpowered, redundant $T currency. In fact, because people couldn’t even build in ironman, it inherently forced people to just build a house and go AFK or chat. In short, there were two major problems:

  • Economy: Players amass huge amount of money doing nothing
  • Gameplay: Players are forced to AFK and don’t actually play

workmoney

Our solution was removing ironman, prestige and supercookies and replacing it with Ascension Tokens. Tokens are the post-wipe replacement of the old Cookies, a $T kind of currency, while the new Cookies are a completely different kind of currency– $W, meaning players are forced to actually play the game and sell materials. So, by adding Ascension Tokens, we basically fixed two of RoF’s biggest problems.

oldrof

  • Players are forced to actually play the game by collecting & selling resources for Cookies
  • Players are forced to be online for a long time and complete rounds as well as surviving the lava to gain Tokens
  • Economy: Players get rewarded for effort
  • Gameplay: All players need to spend same amount of time to gain same amount of tokens (=fair system)

newrof

This is also why tokens to cookies conversion or cookies to tokens conversion would not work at all. In fact, it would break the entire system we so carefully constructed. If we were to add tokens to cookies conversion, this would mean we’d get rid of the $W currency. This means we’re back exactly where we left off with the old RoF. Same issue with cookie to tokens conversion: This gets rid of the $T currency, meaning players don’t need to actually survive the rounds and can just earn money by selling stuff.

This also means that, theoretically, someone could just get a bunch of stuff from another player and obtain a lot of tokens/cookies that way. They wouldn’t even need to play. It’s an utter failure both for RoF’s economy and gameplay. If you want Ascension Tokens to be able to be converted to Cookies, what you really want is Supercookies, and the old RoF system—a broken system.

We Are The 99%: Big Data – Part Two

Calculating the total amount of Cookies in circulation & playersthe-truth-about-wealth-inequality

In my previous blog article, I discussed cloudmario’s wealth and explained how much that is exactly in various ways. While I was calculating all these comparisons of his money, one question popped into my mind: How wealthy was he compared to all players on the entire server? What percentage of all Cookies were his? I figured it would be impossible to know this, but I figured it had to be high. I had no idea of where to start looking to find out how much money was in circulation on RoF. To get this kind of information, I’d need to be an administrator or someone else with “inside knowledge”, right?

As it turns out, this is not the case. Using /money top Cookie 2, you can see the second page of the richest players list. Type /money top Cookie 3, and you’ll see the third page of richest players. And on and on it goes- until there are no pages left. When I discovered this, I quickly realized two things:

  1. If I keep loading more pages, eventually I’ll have seen everyone’s money and be able to add those up to determine the total amount of Cookies in circulation
  2. The total number of players on this list is equivalent to the total number of players on RoF

However, I also realized the following:

  1. Retrieving this data & formatting it for analysis in Excel would take a lot of work

I figured there had to be hundreds of pages of /money top. This could take hours or even days, I imagined. I also had to save all of the pages at once (or in a short time span, anyway) as to not skew any data. Formatting and editing the saved pages to make them fit for Excel analysis could take even longer.

So I did that. Using the chatlog mod, I saved all the /money top pages. It took me 22 minutes and 45 seconds to save all pages, saving 741 pages or 7403 players. Another 6 hours later, and I had a full list of all players’ wealth, ready for analysis.

Ready for the big data drop? Alright- Let’s go.

18,061,785

That’s the total amount of Cookies in circulation on RoF. 18 million 61 thousand 785 cookies. 

7403

This is the total number of players who have joined RoF since it launched on the 29th of September, 2012.

Those are both big and interesting numbers, but let’s try to put it into perspective. How about a few observations, starting with the total Cookies in circulation?

The first thing I did was calculate the average wealth of all players as well as calculate the mean. The mean (average) is 2439,79 Cookies while the median is 56 Cookies. The difference between these two is laughably big. Usually, the mean and median tend to not differ much from each other, unless there’s a terribly big imbalance and inequality regarding distribution. The first thing I thought when I saw the average was: “Wow. That number is a lot bigger than I thought. RoF, in general, is much richer than I expected”.

average-is-over

But just looking at the average isn’t a reliable way of determining things. Let’s put it into perspective: The average (of 7403 players) may be 2439,79 but there are only 427 people who actually have more than 2439 Cookies.. That’s right- Only 427 people on RoF have more money than the average, leaving 6976 people in the dust. This means there are a few really big numbers at the very top skewing the results- There’s an immense wealth gap.

The median is a more realistic representation of the average RoF player, albeit a bit on the low side. It’s the “halfway” amount of money; there are an equal amount of people who have more than that as there are people who own less than that. This number is a lot lower when compared to the average, significantly so.

The mode is 24. For those who don’t know, the mode is the value that appears the most often in data. So in this case, this means there are more players who have exactly 24 cookies than there are players who have something else. There are 791 people on the server who own 24 cookies- That’s 10.54%!

9446-200

The second mode is 25, with 384 people or 5.11%, and the third mode is 0 with 121 people or 1.61%. The fourth mode is 23 with 107 people or 1.42%, and the fifth mode is 45 with 103 people or 1.37%. The sixth mode is 52 with 101 or 1.34%, and the seventh mode is 5 with 99 people or 1.32%.

These results surprised me, especially the first mode. I was completely sure that 25 would be the mode, for one very simple reason: This is the base money that people start with when they join the server. I figured a lot of people never spent their money, or logged in and logged out without ever playing the game, etc. It made the most sense to me. But surprisingly, 24 emerged victoriously- and by a difference of over 400 people, too. I have two theories as to why this is the case:

  1. Most players tended to check out the shop and maybe accidentally or intentionally buy one item (all Player items cost 1 Cookie) but never actually finish any rounds
  2. I believe there was something in the Tutorial once in the older days of RoF which could be bought for 1 cookie (cake?). This probably resulted in a lot of people buying that item and consequently having 1 less Cookie.

Here’s a table of the first seven modes:

Mode number Money Amount of players Percentage
1 24 791 10.54%
2 25 384 5.11%
3 0 121 1.61%
4 23 107 1.42%
5 45 103 1.37%
6 52 101 1.34%
7 5 99 1.32%

Although the details were a bit surprising (24 being more prevalent than 25), the mode(s) in general are not all that surprising. It makes sense that there are more players with the (near-)default money or other low amounts, as a lot of players don’t ever actually play or leave soon after first playing.

Proving wealth inequality
The wealth inequality is especially obvious when you begin actually analyzing the data here. Consider the following: 1% of RoF (74 players) owns 78.18% of all the Cookies. This is… one of the biggest economic disasters one can have, period. In the US, the top 1% own 40% of all money, and stuff is already pretty bad there. The top 1% of RoF has double that. In comparison: The poorest 1000 players own 15,665 cookies combined, or 0.086% of all RoF money!

There are 118 players on the server who have more than that on their own—The richest 118 players on the server have more money each than the poorest 1000 combined. Those are some insane statistics. The poorest 5000 have it just as bad: They own a mere 219,181 cookies or 1.21% of all money. The poorest 7000 (out of 7403!) are in possession of only 6.59% of all money with 1,190,701 Cookies! This also means that two players on the server both own, on their own, as much as the poorest 7000 combined.

Perhaps even more striking: The top 0.1% owns 9,333,643 Cookies, or a little more than 40%. The ten richest players own 10,073,345 Cookies or 55.77%. There are also 677 players with more than a thousand cookies to their name. Wealth inequality on RoF is a lot worse than I initially thought—It’s clear that the economy is very unbalanced.

Remember the reason I started collecting and analyzing this data- calculating what share of all Cookies cloudmario has? Well, I was able to calculate this too, and it did not dissapoint: One single player owns 20.76% of all money in the game. I think that says enough about wealth inequality and the state of RoF’s economy.

To keep in the spirit of my previous blog post, wherein I calculated what spending possibilities cloudmario had, I did the same for the total amount of money in circulation:

  • It would buy four diamond picks for every RoF player to have ever joined and still have 58,000 to spare
  • It would be able to get 318 players all the way from Player to Grandmaster
  • It’s 4.8x cloudmario’s wealth

Note that this list I created of all people’s money includes banned players, too. Two people I recognized were Jubjubers (47th richest player on the server) and Bastix38 (105th richest).

Players
Knowing that there are 7403 players on the entire server, there is one very interesting thing we can calculate too: The amount of new players that have joined each day since launch. Since September 29 2012, 5.82 new players have joined RoF each day—a way larger number than I expected.

Conclusion
So, to sum up (rounded numbers):

  • There are 18 million cookies in circulation on rof
  • 7403 people have joined the server since September 29, 2012
  • The average wealth of a RoF player is 2439,79
  • Meanwhile, the median is 56
  • The mode (most commonly occurring money a player has) is 24
  • Wealth inequality is real and a way bigger problem than expected
  • The richest player owns 21% of all money
  • The ten richest players own 55% of all money
  • The 1% (74 players) own 78% of all money
  • The poorest 1000 players have 0.086% of all money combined
  • The poorest 5000 players have 1.213% of all money combined
  • The poorest 7000 players have 6.592% of all money combined
  • There are 677 people who have more than 1000 cookies
  • Since the beginning of RoF, 5.82 new players have joined each day

If anyone has an idea of something else I should calculate with this data, or if you would like to know your position, feel free to tell me. Keep in mind that this data was retrieved between 00:11:22 and 00:34:07 on march 23 2016, and is thus already outdated. It will get more and more outdated and less reliable as time goes by. Also keep in mind that this list completely ignores supercookies—A good thing, probably, because I can’t even fathom the wealth inequality percentages if I’d add supercookies to the data.

If anyone is interested in having the raw data/Excel spreadsheet, shoot me a PM on the forums.


This is the second part of a two-parter in which I analyze RoF’s economy. If you missed Part One, check it out here!

The Richest Player: Big Data – Part One

102010-99349

Money is an integral part of RoF, and any (server) economy, essential for keeping the economy and shops alive. It plays the single most important role in any economy. I’ve personally always thought that the RoF economy was a bit unbalanced: The rich few had almost all of the money, it seemed, while others had few. Especially Nuehoujuu_ stood out as an extremely rich player. This is what /money top, displaying the richest ten players on the server, told me:

1: Nuehoujuu_ – 3,749,139 Cookies
2: tyukmn – 1,576,195 Cookies
3: virazu – 1,104,105 Cookies
4: bartcrestbreaker –  1,041,354 Cookies
5: kalliee –  962,569 Cookies
6: scottbot7000 – 492,546 Cookies
7: pigpiglwj – 407,735 Cookies
8: thoughtcarton – 341,653 Cookies
9: Starburst_ – 204,061 Cookies
10: kuyajer – 193,988 Cookies

Something that should immediately catch your attention is the fact that Nuehoujuu_, better known as cloudmario, has 3.75 million Cookies. That makes him a RoF millionaire- a title shared with only three other players. None of the other players even manage to reach 2 million Cookied. It confirms my suspicion: cloud is filthy rich. Some interesting observations regarding cloud’s wealth:

  • It is 19.3 times kuyajer’s wealth, the 10th richest player on the server
  • 180.5 times shadow5980’s wealth, the 100th richest player on the server
  • 90.2 times the 50th richest player on the server
  • 2.4 times the second richest player on the server

I could go on and on with comparisons like this, but I think you get the point. There is a clear class divide, and Nuehoujuu_ is its prime example. To put things even more into perspective:  If you were to combine all of the money of the 50th to 100th richest players, you’d still need to multiply that by a factor of 2.7 to get the same amount of wealth as cloudmario.

Now that we’ve established how rich he is compared to other players, here are a few more fascinating observations. With his money, cloud would be able to:

  • Rank up all the way from Player to Grandmaster 66 times
  • Buy 3000 diamond pickaxes and still have over half of his money left
  • Buy everything in the Player shop- 113000 times.
  • Buy everything in the Player and Crafter shop- 52000 times.
  • Buy everything in all the non-prestige shops 6.8 times- costing him 550000 Cookies each time.

A Player earns between 10 and 30 Cookies each survived round. Taking the average, that’s 20 each round. This Player would need to play 187457 rounds to catch up to Cloud. The average round length is 25 minutes, meaning he’d have to play for 4.68642375×10^6 minutes. That’s 3124 hours, or 130.18 days.

It would take a Player 130 days of playing RoF non-stop to amass the same amount of wealth as cloud.

Of course, no man would ever reasonably keep the rank Player forever without ranking up and earning more cookies each round, nor did I take Supercookies into account. But I thought this would be quite interesting anyway.

Puts a perspective on things.


This is the first part of a two-parter in which I analyze RoF’s economy. If you liked this, be sure to give Part Two a read– in which I calculate total cookies in circulation and more interesting observations based on obtained data.