Disclaimer: this post is meant to share an objective review of the CM economy and the average value of the diamond, and not provide specific prices. Additionally, data was gathered to the best of my ability but I know it may not be 100% accurate.

Because I know this will be a particularly long post, here's the abbreviated part first:

This first graph is the graphical representation of the averages of the 10 items of what 1 diamond is worth in the respective categories in 2 week time intervals starting from December 28.

This is the trend of the value of the diamond over the course of my study. The diamond is worth 86.04% to what it was at the beginning of the 2017 calendar year.

I drew out the graph to see that in the next 6 months, assuming nothing substantial in-game happens, this number approaches 78.5% with fluctuations +/- 0.05% around it. This means the value of the diamond is being realized at a steady pace in the community as player’s place a value on their time spent to mine or trade for them for most of the items and stabilizes to about 78.5% to what the diamond was originally worth at the start of 2017.

I would say based off this information the economy is doing well, and there are a healthy number of trades observed to show high activity amongst players yet still shows a low overall change in prices over time.

Now, the long bit for those who like to know more.

Disclaimer: this post is meant to share an objective review of the CM economy and the average value of the diamond, and not provide specific prices. Additionally, data was gathered to the best of my ability but I know it may not be 100% accurate.

Background:
One of the main reasons for a reset of the previous map was economy imbalance brought about through creative-generated items and non-vanilla vendors. The idea of a “balanced” economy is an interesting concept, and I wondered what that meant. The map reset late last year gave me an opportunity to observe and document what I could perceive a free economy, where the primary currency, the diamond, ran unaided/unhindered towards some value determined by the players.

Fortunately, it coincided with a period where I’d have a lot of uptime on CM and downtime to properly document my findings, so I made it a personal project to analyze the state of the CM economy with reference to the primary currency, the diamond. This report represents the first quarter of the CM economy.

Methodology:
1. Picked a start date: since it can be assumed there would be mass fluctuations in item prices at the start of the map as players felt out the supply and demand of items, I opted to for a period of time to elapse for the market noise to settle down and players started settling on prices. I chose December 28, since it was at about 1 month from the map reset, and landed on a holiday period for most players, where many would have the time to increase the inventory of diamonds and general goods, and also determine their inventory shortfalls for whatever project they were focused on to establish a baseline “demand.”

2. Identified traded items that would be a useful, representative group to track the changing prices. Based off of the demand, I selected 10 items:

a. Enchantments/books
b. Potions
c. Slime Blocks
d. Elytras
e. Iron Ingots
f. Emeralds
g. Gold Ingots
h. Shulker Boxes
i. Wood
j. Stone Blocks

I had reasons for each, but the primary reasons I should state overall was to capture the most items that had the most diamonds passing between hands. Additionally, I selected generic items like wood and stone blocks to diversify my list.

3. Record trades. Obviously the most tricky yet crucial task. Here I wrote down items done in a completed trade seen in chat (and noting pushback in chat on overpriced items). Given that I had about 6 hours a week at various times to record this first-hand from chat at first, I asked a few friends to note any trades they had observed, although this kind of help was sporadic and incomplete compared to my own notes. But at the very least, it allowed me to verify my own recorded prices.

Additionally, I took to the forums to write down every single trade post that appeared to have led to a completed trade, and weighted it by the number of thread views to create a confidence value on the price posted. For this I followed the 3 main shops on the forums: Cellexya’s (1.0 and 2.0), OptimusJag, and OtherGreenGamer. These shops made a significant impact to the CM economy in that they provided an easy and stable price reference with a high inventory to players. A little more on that later.

4. Break up the average prices between time periods. In order to create a “reliable” data point for an item’s price, I wanted at least 8 documented trades (although I've had dozens of trade entries for some items), and deleted the highest and lowest values to account for outliers so that I could take a closer average. I broke up my numbers into 2 week intervals, so my data point timeline looks as such:

Dec. 28, 2016
Jan. 11, 2017
Jan. 25, 2017
Feb. 8, 2017
Feb. 22, 2017
Mar. 8, 2017
Mar. 22, 2017

I was able to get the necessary data for all 10 items except for wood (Jan 11 & Mar 8), stone blocks (Dec 28, Feb. 22, Mar. 8), and gold (Dec. 28, Feb 8, and March 22). In those cases I had roughly 2-4 recorded trades – enough for me to create some kind of average.

5. Graph and analyze. Below are the graphs of my data. I will try to speak to each one by one.

First image: All 10 items, with average prices as a function of 1 diamond.

Second image: Zooming in on the graph by dropping the highest 3 valued items.

Third image: Zoom-in +2, dropping the next 2 highest valued items.

Fourth image: Zoom-in +3, dropped another 2 items.

As you can see, likely because of the increasing diamond inventories, there is a general downward trend showing less buying power of the diamond (inflation). I should also note that the 2 individual items going upward, as far as getting more per diamond, are the shulker boxes and the elytra, which are tiny increases in fractions, (ex, 1 diamond is worth 0.05 of a shulker box).

The next graph shows what this all means.

Fifth image: Graph depicting the average change in diamond prices over time.

Now we’re getting into what’s going on with the economy here. This is a graph of the average percentage changes of all items, to the value of the diamond. There are clear markers of significant events of things happening in the economy.

Dec 28 – Jan 25 : Although there were a lot of individual trading going on at the end of Dec, beginning of Jan, this period is where many of the shops or bulk traders started cropping up. I’m assuming somewhere around this time Cellexya shop 1.0 started up, as it was a notable contributor to the rapid inflation of the diamond this quarter due to the steep change in prices of enchanted books she was able to successfully price. After her shop opened up, I noticed a price matching on CM between individual players for books that accounted for much of the frequent diamond trades happening. By forming a benchmark that was accessible online she in particular determined the price for enchanted books that are still being matched today (or priced slightly lower to be competitive against her prices).

Jan 25 – Feb 8: Here’s where it starts to get interesting and the graph starts upward. Although the shops and trades made a dramatic devaluing of the diamond the month before, their net change in price approached zero at this time. So other items that had less dramatic price changes and still continually being traded moved to the forefront as far as changes in prices go. Particularly elytras and shulker boxes. I want to note these items have experienced the most dramatic price changes of the items I tracked, and they happened to be in the positive direction (meaning a single diamond got you more and more of the item). This can be accounted for the market saturation introduced by more people wandering into the End for these items, plus the purchases of the elytra for crafty credits – the only item still available for purchase through command blocks.

Feb 8 – March 22: The market prices on the items have begun stabilizing. In this period, about 3/5 of the items on my list start to approach a zero % price change. The exceptions being stone, wood, and elytras, whose trades prices seemed to fluctuate depending on one-time only trades with players with a specific need for them at that time. I would describe the behavior as a stabilizing oscillation.

6. Lastly, is my correlation of all this data to the value of the diamond, indexed at when I first began my study at the end of December.

This is the trend of the value of the diamond over the course of my study.

Today the diamond is worth 86.04% of its original starting value in 2017. This is an inflation – a weakening of the purchasing power of the diamond. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, as players started making everything more available, the value of the diamond began to flesh itself out. If I had indexed this to the start of the map, the value of the diamond would likely had shown a steeper downward curve because of the high demand for diamonds.

I drew out the graph to see that in the next 6 months, assuming nothing substantial in-game happens, this number approaches 78.5% with fluctuations +/- 0.05% around it. This means the value of the diamond is being realized at a steady pace in the community as player’s place a value on their time spent to mine or trade for them for most of the items and stabilizes to about 78.5% to what the diamond was originally worth at the start of 2017.

I wish I knew the previous map’s value of the diamond at its end to actually rate this number, but I’d guess, based off of the current market prices and what I remember some of the previous prices, that the diamond was around 28% of original value here (maybe lower). So I’d say this is really good in terms of the CM economy today on this map, and is projected to continue for the in 6 months.

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In addition, I took a swing at trying to weight the values. To do this, I had to weight each item from 0.00 to 1.00, which is the scale of how many diamonds were used in trades for each particular group. This is much more theoretical than the standard average above, but my hope is that I'm able to give a more precise description of the behavior of the diamond's value.

Using the Elytra, potions and the enchantment books as my 3 highest values and accounting for more than 60% of diamond trades, the others came in at significantly lower percentages (less than 0.25 each for the remaining items). This graph shows an adjusted change in the average price of the diamond, based on general amount and frequency of diamonds moving between hands for the items in this study.

This results in a smooth (and hopefully a little more precise) curve depicting an adjusted diamond value. Here it shows that the diamond today is actually worth 80.46% that of the diamond at the start of the year. Continuing the graph, I estimated that the final value in settles at around 72.56% in 8 months. Still close with increasingly smaller changes in prices over time.

So what exactly does this mean to you?

There are competing interests that want different outcomes on the value of the diamond:
Producers - those who provide inventory in exchange for an increase in stockpiled wealth - drive the value of the diamond to go low. Their goal is getting the most diamonds for as little produced items as possible.

Consumers - those who use diamonds as a means to an end to acquire a desired good - drive the value to go high. Opposite to producers, their goal is getting as much produced items for a diamond as possible.

Staff: they don’t care of the value be it high or low, but are more interested in keeping the % change bounded within reason to the original value of the diamond (or at least their perceived value of it), so there is a high frequency of stable trades going on.

An active economy means an active community, with players having reasonable access to items to do whatever suits their fancy. If the value of the diamond ever shoots up or plummets, trade frequency will drop and the economy stagnates as more and more consumers don’t see value in spending their diamonds on what they perceive as outrageous prices, save only the very wealthy who could keep up, or producers stop producing because they don’t want to make something that they feel doesn’t fairly compensate them for their time creating the inventory. As a result, the community activity slows and as a corollary, the onus defaults to the staff to step up to reactivate the economy through direct intervention (a consuming task).

The trend on the value of the diamond shows to meet most of everyone’s interests, with the biggest winners being the early shops, as they are able to cash in on the lower value of the diamonds they’ve stockpiled when it was still a relatively high value.

I should add that with the introduction of the lottery system and potentially many other future staff endeavors that stem from it, where diamonds and other desired goods are redistributed among players (or possibly taken out altogether), will have an interesting impact to the economy, because if managed properly, could further stimulate the economy through increased trading from those previously lacking currency to buy desired goods in bulk. I wish I could have the time to continue this study to see what comes of it.

I hoped this was a good read for you, I had fun doing it, and surprisingly it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Hopefully someone is able to see ways this study can be improved or continued and provide us with another updated reference. But at the very least this can be used as a reference of what a free economy looks like at the startup of a new map.

I skimmed through this because I have limited time rn, but this is an extremely interesting read for people it effects.

I encourage you to continue this throughout this map and see what you get over a long period :)

This is probably the most accurate index in the forum, I really appreciate the time and effort you have spent collecting this great piece of data.

Valgys at his best as always!

Funny how a video game could establish a quite deep and functioning economy that you can study and graph.

EDIT: I'll write down every order I take or give for the next month ish. Once you're ready I can send it your way @Valgys (Keep in mind there won't be any names given besides mine)

@Valgys this could be more accurate if you asked people at trade post what they traded, plus the added boost of coord selling I feel is something that will affect these graphs. The purchase of information in general would

@JKELLER4000 So what is the M0 supply of diamonds?

That is beyond the scope of my study unfortunately. I am only able to observe through a small peephole, the diamonds as they pass hands. This allows for me to determine accepted prices, perceived values, and the average velocity to which the diamonds move between players (if I had bothered to quantify that in the study). As far as how much altogether is behind the door, I don't know without going into some economic theory, which I have little experience in.

@JKELLER4000 Has the rarity of diamonds mining started producing any M1 diamond supplies?

I know lots of players are not active(some odd 1k+ new players each month but only about 30 active players). but it would be extremely cool if more people were willing to sell on credit!

I would say no M1 alt currencies. Players have been fine acquiring the diamonds through trades, raids, or mining. and it's been increasing as more players mine out the diamonds. I don't see M1 diamonds out there but I also don't see the diamond as an overly rare currency.

@OtherGreenGamer I'll write down every order I take or give for the next month ish. Once you're ready I can send it your way @Valgys (Keep in mind there won't be any names given besides mine)

Thanks, but this concludes my study. Unfortunately I will lose the free time to follow this farther and decompose into graphs and analyses. You can always study your own trades as a subset to the economy though!

@GrinningBobcat @Valgys this could be more accurate if you asked people at trade post what they traded,

You're absolutely right it would be more accurate if I asked the players at the trading post. However, it would become more of a chore to log on only to survey players at the Trade Post, and besides the time spent to do it, how many are willing to talk to me about every trade they make?

@GrinningBobcat @Valgys plus the added boost of coord selling I feel is something that will affect these graphs. The purchase of information in general would

This falls into the services category of diamond trades. This is something more difficult to quantify because it is information being bought. The selling of coordinates is mostly bounded not just by the value in the information relative to the value of the diamond at the time, but more specifically to the demand of the buyer in the transaction. As a result, there would be higher fluctuations in price that I feel would hurt my study more than help when it came trying to understand the trend in value of the diamond.

Both good ideas, but they would require someone smarter than me with more time to do them.

You're absolutely right it would be more accurate if I asked the players at the trading post. However, it would become more of a chore to log on only to survey players at the Trade Post, and besides the time spent to do it, how many are willing to talk to me about every trade they make?

I suppose i could do this instead of afking a blaze farm

Wow, really impressive what you did here. It is good to see how inflation is going