You might know me from earlier hits like “The market is fucked”, “That’s it, I quit”, “Fire sale” and “A newb beginning”. Well now it is time for me to compile all my knowledge gained throughout decades of being a donor into a viable strategy that is going to make me break even at minimum.
The idea is quite simple - I see people talking about profiting and I constantly see opportunities to profit or cut losses so for the past week or so I have been really certain that I am capable of doing so too. Since the grind is getting boring again, I decided it was time to try something new to keep my interest in EU alive.
Goals:
Play at break even or profit WITHOUT it having too much of an impact on gameplay
Hopefully share that it is possible
Keep my interest up
As with the Spawn Challenge, restore some discipline and limit my compulsive behavior.
Rules:
Since this isn’t about limiting myself in any manner like last time the only rule as of now is to make a summary around every 10,000PED cycled and refrain from further turnover until I am back at break even if I am at a loss. The reason for this is that otherwise I would start making excuses about returns regressing to the mean “soon” and keep cycling until I get overwhelmed.
I will continue depositing to build my bankroll up during this time and at the end of it I might treat myself to a new toy.
Strategy:
I will start caring about the few PED that I typically would ignore. I will lower my level of play and expect to cycle about 50,000PED a month. I will play towards an expected loss of 5% meaning that I will need to find about 2,500PED a month from something else than TT returns. If I am on a roll, I will still aim towards gathering that 2,500PED since things always regress to the mean.
I am going to find those 2,500PED in:
Shrapnel conversion. We have up to 500 PED in this alone.
AI and dailies
Markup. PP MU is quite decent and I will start tracking loot to determine the composition of it on Calypso.
Depositing through web shop. Every pill there has a value and there is no reason to do normal deposits.
Some trading aimed for players like me who don’t mind paying for fun. Always carrying pills and enhancers during events, check auction a few times a night.
I might throw in some sweating too if I am close to break even. I will do the math on TIRs and enhancers to see if it might be viable to tier weapons up and relist among a few other ideas.
Wish me luck! I hope this gets challenging and fun! I will reserve the first post below to update regularly so it is easy to keep track and follow.
Good plan, good luck! You should absolutely include some means of tracking returns in your routine, if you want to take control of game finances.
A while ago I made a very minimalistic tool for tracking returns by taking the difference between two inventory snapshots. It was made before we got loot tracking in chat, but it includes data which you still don’t get any other way, most importantly decay. https://sandals-eu.neocities.org/inv
There are other apps around which are more convenient and/or focus on different aspects. They are all advertised around here, I’d suggest to try them all out and see what you like.
I liked loot Nanny a lot but it stopped working for me for some reason. it kept track of skillgains and loot to. I tried Tally but haven’t explored all functions of it, it was hard to set up with my play style.
If you’re not bothered with the level of detail these apps provide, you could note down at least one number, the total item value at the end of your web inventory before and after each run. If you repair anything in between, you also need to note your ped balance before and after, because this is not included in the inventory. A few other things are not included there (mentioned in the instructions with my diff tool): Mounted enhancers, fuel in vehicles, pets and vehicles spawned in-world. The latter are probably not too important, but you can capture enhancer consumption (if you’re not using a chat analyser) by unmounting them before each time you take data from the web inventory. Also check that decay is reflected accurately (looking at one item should be enough, e.g. your main weapon) because there could be a delay until the exact state appears (they improved this a while ago but still good to make sure). That’s a lot of text for a few simple steps, doing it is much quicker than even reading this. It becomes a habit easily when you’re motivated to know exactly each time what your profit/loss amounts to.
We will see where we end up. As for specific hunting runs it will most importantly be decay, ammo and loot. However, I would like to create my own loot tables to be able to set an average MU for a mob since this will be important.
Enhancer consumption must be tracked since part of the plan is to tier weapons up and sell later.
I will just get going in a few hours and figure it out along the way. As per usual I am full of ideas but we will see where I end up. As detailed as possible in every aspect would be preferable but the most important part is that I have fun and don’t make work of it.
Most likely it will be a combination of tools and manual tracking.
First week has gone by, it wasn’t as easy as I figured but still doable. I didn’t put enough effort into it the first few days but was hoping to just hof which didn’t happen. Lowered my level at the end of the week and started taming. I should have enough stuff in inventory left to make up for the loss so far and end up in profit, so I ust need to put some effort into it and try to move smaller stacks as well. I can’t blame returns since I actually ended up at 95%. Will start this week at a lower pace and make a check in after 5k cycled to see where I am standing. -233 PEDs is still a victory for me compared to my typical weeks.
As I am leaving for the weekend I will drop the update now. Has been a really, really slow week. Haven’t been online much at all and since I have been lucky with positive hunting returns all week I haven’t done much trading to compensate. The little trading I have found is noted on a piece of paper that I lost somehow which I need to find since I have locked money long-term in a few things.
I found a few more ways to do stuff at break even and hope for multipliers and also found another few opportunities in auction. It really isn’t much but every time I find a way to make a few ped a day without and effort it pushes this thing in the right direction. I need to set up some goals though because all of this starts to feel aimless which is a big no-no for me. Thinking that the first partial goal will be enough profit to buy an ek2350 and start healing and the big long term goal is 30 million ped to buy RT.
With three weeks logged it is soon time to make a nice table in the second post which was reserved.