Does MA Take our Suggestions Seriously?

 The short answer is yes. Please use extreme care when sending MindArk suggestions about changes you want to see in the game. Everything I've ever suggested they've implemented. But they've always implemented my suggestions in the poorest way possible making me regret ever having suggested the things I've suggested. Those of you who know me know to what I am referring. Those of you who don't know me, nope, I am not going to admit to anything lol. Just take a look around you at the costliest activities currently surrounding this game, then you will know the devastating effect that a good idea can have when someone like MindArk attempts to implement it. 

It would seem we do have some ability to urge MA to make necessary changes to benefit our experience in the game, but we must be careful with how we word our suggestions, and anticipate every way in which our ideas will be used against us. 

Consider the damage done to us by Loot 2.0. A lot of people complained of the runs of no loot mobs on a given hunt. I used to get dozens of no loots in a row back in the old days. As many as a hundred no loots in a row, which shouldn't be possible really but it did happen. A lot of us complained to MindArk, I wasn't the only one, and Loot 2.0 was their solution. Personally, I believe all they needed to do was mitigate some of the no loots, not all of them. So, we get loot every time now, but the result is multipliers are far and few between and there is almost nothing in the way of items dropping either. And no multipliers has taken a lot of the fun out of hunting. Oh sure, there are a few lucky enough to hit something. But gone are the days when there was a four or five digit Atrox on the hof board at least a couple times a day. Or ambu for that matter. Now there are times when the SandKing doesn't even hof for five digits. If a mob like that can't hit five digits, it doesn't make me feel like its worth the bother to hunt. Yet, we still hunt.

Ultimately, I would like there to be an option for loot. We should have the choice of low volatility, medium volatility, or high volatility. Low volatility lets say we keep loot 2.0. Even though it is not so stable, it is considered less volatile since there is loot every time. Medium volatility lets say there are some no loots, high volatility would be the old loot 1.0. You can still give everyone the same percent returns, but allowing us to choose how these returns are distributed would let us see the results we wish to play for according to our risk-reward mentality.

There are ways to improve the game to everyones satisfaction, including MindArks. How many of you quit playing because loot has been too bad? Does that benefit MA at all for you not to be playing? If you felt loot was in proportion to your effort, would you feel better about continuing? Yep, I know I would. And this would benefit them as well as us. But how do we talk to them about it in a way they will comprehend, so that something meaningful can be done about it. I am sure they all must be sitting back thinking "All these players want is more loot, bigger loot..." No, we want fair loot. We don't want to grind an entire mayhem to have nothing bigger than three digits when we are whipping out $100 bills every few hours to keep grinding. There has to be something more equitable for all to be done with loot.

Some players are happy to grind for small ups and downs. Some of us aren't. Usually it is small ups and large downs that we actually end up with. 

Easy Way of Making a Few Extra Dollars to Deposit

Disclaimer: Nothing in this post is to be construed as financial advice.

Yes, the economy sucks for the entire world basically. Inflation is off its rocker, and it is supposed to get worse. Many of you are losing your Entropia budgets to inflation. Your electric bill, your fuel bill, your food... So here I am to present one option to add some extra funds to your budget that has always worked for me, its simple enough, really. Nope, you don't have to buy anything or sign up for anything. Just take a close look at what you already have. It hasn't been my intention to deviate from all things Entropia, but since Entropia for most of us requires money to be playable, lets face it, non-depositing is only going to work if you went that route from day 1... Someone who's deposited thousands of dollars into Entropia is simply not going to be satisfied to sweat for a few cents an hour. And its bad enough that many of those people have been forced to do so.

The in-game means of earning free peds either require investing a LOT of deposited money, i.e. shares and deeds... Or investing a LOT of time for very little monetary gain, i.e. sweating or fruit and stone walking. Virtually any real-world activity pays more than sweating, and with a lot less effort. There is one commodity we all have to some degree or another at any given time. And volumes of it generally pass through our hands at some point. This commodity is loaded with desirable anomalies that collectors are paying ridiculous premiums for. What am I talking about, you ask?

This isn't a get rich quick, or slow, scheme. This isn't a scheme of any kind. And the sought after items of interest are perfectly legal and sell themselves without any effort at all to speak of.

Coins. Specifically, coins with errors. Mint Errors. Also paper money have errors too. 

Of course error collecting isn't limited to coins and paper money. There are errors to be found in baseball cards, or any other printed or manufactured collectible that isn't normally supposed to have errors. The no-name Frank Thomas card sells for five digits, and yes, I've had a real one offered to me and I passed on it not knowing there actually were late 80's and early 90's baseball cards worth something :( But its ok. I try not to think about the things I've missed out on. 

But the beauty of coins is that almost everyone collects coins. Collectors are found in every level of society, in every part of the world. And usually only the smallest of towns are without coin dealers; pawn shops usually will buy and sell coins, but not always. And even if you run an advertisement in your local classifieds to sell the mint errors you've found, you probably won't have to wait for long for someone to be interested; but naturally you want to be smart about meeting a buyer. Public place, maybe not go alone, etc. Just be smart, things can and do go wrong, though fortunately not as often as it could. 

"How much could an error possibly be worth?"

As of this post, a 1982 Roosevelt dime with no mintmark is actually selling for around $150, easily selling for that is, and they aren't that uncommon.

Then there is the matter of paper money. Mismatched serial numbers on the same bill are worth thousands of dollars. Serial numbers with all digits the same are also readily selling for $1000 to $5000. 

If you have jugs of coins sitting around, hell, you can even look at them while you sweat in Entropia for that matter... You could have a fortune easily enough found.

Most desirable errors are double-dies, which will appear as slightly, or very pronounced doubling of letters and numbers or otherwise some portion of the design of the coin. Or you can have a mintmark that is doubled. If that is the only thing doubled, you have a repunched mintmark. But, if you have two different mint marks on top of each other, S over D or etc, these can be extremely valuable.

Mule errors exist where the wrong two coins are stamped on the same coin... You may have a quarter that somehow managed to end up with a dollar being struck on the other side.These can be insanely valuable.

You can have blank planchets which are worth anywhere from $5 to $100 each depending on what denomination the planchet is. It will literally look like a blank disc of metal, but it will be of the same size of the coin that was supposed to be struck on it.

You can have coins with chunks of metal missing from the surface like it was popped out, which are lamination errors, and indeed thats what happens due to imperfections in the sheet metal from when it was made.

The errors you can find are absolutely endless, all you got to do is figure out what coins you have, look up the errors for those particular coins and those years of coins, and you should have no problem finding values or at least images of what you are looking for. A simple search for mint errors will give you some ideas too.

I really won't go into a lot more depth here, since if the topic were a horse, it would have been beaten to the point its a mere grease spot on the ground. Probably a million books and millions of webpages exist on the topic of mint errors and coin collecting. I am just here to point out every day someone is finding thousands of dollars worth of highly sought after errors or varieties. If its not you, it will be them, and I'd rather it be you than them.

What happens to Entropia if everyone suddenly has more money to deposit? Everyone plays more. More trades are done, more items and gear change hands. Everyone does better. The game does better. The whole point of this blog is to help everyone in the game do better. I don't necessarily care if Mindark does better, they are literally bending us all over on loot right now. Nevermind the strongboxes... Those are so bad lately I don't even get the obligatory garland or candy cane anymore. I probably will never open another Xmas box again to be honest.

Good luck to you all! And I hope this has helped you find a new path to refilling the old war chest.

Not the Usual Post, but a Helpful One (Fixing your Laser Printer Blank Page Print Problem, Time Saver!)

With tax season coming up, and all of the other deadlines we have in life on a nearly daily basis anyways, I know some of you work for yourselves, some of you don't work, some of you are students, some of you are retired, yet the printer you have is your lifeline to the world, in order to meet your deadlines for paperwork. And I know some of you know very little about Information Technology, yet others who will read this undoubtedly are engineers who build the very things we curse at on a daily basis, such as these laser printers. So, as a public service, and to make the world a better place, especially when you might have been or might yet end up at, the end of your tether in dealing with the problem I am about to mention, I offer this solution.

In my case, I run a Dell e525w, the print quality is great, and if it was any cheaper to use, Dell would have to pay me for printing with it. (No, I don't buy the factory toner... 2K peds for a set of new brand name toner? Nope not happening. $19 on eBay. And I have yet to see proof that the quality varies between the two... I can't guarantee there aren't unscrupulous oddball sellers cutting their toner with talcum powder or something, of course. For my IT background, I pride myself in figuring out the unsolvable hardware problems. I could fix things my bosses weren't able to. When I had bosses. I always rather work for myself. 

What I am getting at is, the world runs on paperwork, but today my laser printer went from working perfectly to not wanting to print at all. It took half a day away from my Entropia game time because I had shipping labels that HAD to be printed today, these shipments were already a bit late because of holidays etc, and with new toner and a decently high-quality laser printer, it should be fixable right? 

I did everything the manual said, cleaning the sensors for the toner density, making sure the firmware was updated, etc. Nothing worked. I scoured the forums and Google, nothing remotely close to fixing this. I could only eventually find responses to an OP who's post I couldn't seem to get to, but I could read the replies... Something about a "Russian fix". So, I figured how would a Russian approach such a problem, other than blowing it up or shooting it, what have I got to lose. I unplugged the printer, carried it over to the middle of the room, and dropped it from about four or five inches on the floor. A few times. The result was a pile of miscellaneous toner on the floor. I plugged the printer in, let it do its cycling, particularly if you have an error code that won't clear, you will have to shut the printer off, pop one cartridge, turn it back on, put cartridge back in, if the code comes back, then you have to repeat with a different cartridge until you no longer get the error again. After doing this...

My printer works like new! Prints better than ever! And I was > < that close to throwing it out and getting a new printer. This of course will save you money which means you can deposit more, and waste less! Although, Im not entirely sure the way loot is these days if that's not the same thing. 

And for the non-Entropians who find this blog post, you really probably should at least explore Entropia and give it a chance if you like gaming, ignore the bad remarks sore losers make when ranking the game on various websites, just take a look around. Yes there is a lot to criticize, but there really is some opportunity here, and they have no real competition in the Real Cash Economy niche. To quote an anonymous gambler from the old west... "The wheel might be crooked, but it's the only game in town." 

I am of course not responsible for you being too rough with your printer and breaking it... It is just that if you are about to throw it out of the window or something, you've nothing to lose by doing what I did. And no I couldn't find any reference at all to needing to pull a cartridge to clear the error code; since I had no access to anything else integral to the printer, the menus all locked out buttons not functioning with the error code, I figured it had to be the cartridges. I suspect the manufacturer would leverage you into paying a ransom to their tech support for this information, hence why the error says to "call them" I am sure.

I do have some new Entropia related posts to make soon. I haven't forgotten about this blog, it's just, MA changes and implements things slower than a turtle can make a 'Round the World trip. Many of my posts are obsolete from long ago, many aren't, but anything obsolete is kept around strictly as a time capsule and record of the way things once were, or at least probably were and possibly still are. 

Also, Google has permabanned me from making any revenue with Adsense, so you have a relatively ad-free experience here. Please take a look at the few banners or links I have up, and if anything is useful or interesting to you, your taking a look is greatly appreciated. Everything advertised here is either something I've made or done myself, or is something of exceptional utility and quality that I felt was worthy to bring to your attention. Afterall, it does me no good to advertise things that are not of use or interest to my audience.