ADVICE: The Importance Of Tracking Where Your Peds Go

The surest way to lose money in any venture is to not keep track of your income and expenditures. You should track how much value your equipment has before you start a run. Write down how much ammo or probes you buy. Then, when you are all done hunting or mining, write down what you sold your loot for.

By taking a look at where your peds went, and your profits or losses, you will soon understand that you aren't doing as bad as you thought, or maybe you are doing worse than you thought. If the latter is true, then you should make necessary changes: i.e. more eco weapons and armor.

Over the course of a 200 ped hunt or mining run, if you lose only 5 or 10 peds you do well, and especially if mining, 5 or 10 peds can easily be made up by getting even one more ped out of each stack of resources you sell. Always try to get the best markup you can.

If you don't keep track of your results, it is much harder to make up for losses when you don't know what they are, or where you can cut back your expenses at. The more economic your equipment, the closer you will be to breaking even on every run.  And soon, you will be broke and wonder where your peds all went.

The other benefit to keeping track of your results, is that over time you will have enough data to construct a chart or graph which will easily show how much of the time you are on a down cycle and how much of the time you are on an upcycle. Many would argue this information is unimportant, but ideally, you want to do something as long as you are on the upside of it, and when it heads down, do something else.

It is very easy to waste peds if you don't track them. I think you will notice you do a little bit better if you do take notes and watch your finances in the game like a hawk. Stretch all you can out of every pec. Even if you only save enough to make one more click at the crafting terminal, that one more click might be what hofs you. I've seen it happen, even with my avatar. In real life it's happened to me so many times. Get down to my last 5 nickels on a poker machine and either hit four of a kind or straight flush. That actually happened four times in one session to me. I couldn't believe it! But believe it. The crappier your luck is, the more unusual the good luck will be when it finds you!

What Survivability Means

I have spent the past 8 years or more of my life playing and learning all I could about Video Poker. There is not a whole lot Entropia has in common with Video Poker. But there is one thing of great importance which I've hinted about in my earlier posts. Survivability.

Every statistical action in the world has results that are never predictable with 100% accuracy. In some cases, we know the mathematical probabilities that govern certain outcomes, and can thereby know our odds and if the risk is worth it. In Video Poker, I can tell you that a jacks or better paytable showing 9for1 on full house and 6for1 on flushes will return 99.5% over the long run, IF PLAYED PROPERLY. This is where the professional is able to actually make a profit where the casual players don't care or don't know, and lose a lot more.

If you play video poker properly, you can survive the cold cycles long enough to see it warm back up and start paying good again. If you miss a few proper plays, it can cost you a few hands on the end of your session. Those very few hands can make or break your entire session.

Entropia, there is no way to tell you the long term payback. Only Mindark knows this, and only they know how it is calculated (it's probably better that way LOL)... First lesson is though... Say you put $10 in a nickel machine and play 1000 hands. That's 5,000 nickels you wagered. You only got 4,800 nickels back. So even though you lost 100% of your bankroll, you got a 96% return. See, people fail to realize that those credits you are recycling ARE part of your return.

In Entropia, if you want to know your % return, you are going to have to track everything you spend on Decay, Ammo, etc, and track every pec you get back in loot. You might be doing extremely well but you won't realize it becuase losing a few percent at a time even, will grind a small bankroll into oblivion in no time.

If you have a large pile of peds, you will do much better. It will be much harder to go completely broke, and it will give you less volatility so that you may survive to see a hof that will greatly correct your losses. On a small pile of peds, you have a much greater chance of going bankrupt before you even see a global.

Too many times I am guilty of being a cheapskate, putting in $20, and losing it in a few days, and then i'll put in another $30, and then maybe a couple more deposits after that. What I should have done was just put my $100 in and not worry about it. At least by the time you cycle a full 1000 peds, you should have most of it back in loot by the time you reach the end of the run.

But you have to discipline yourself not to waste, not to lose faith in the law of large numbers. I had about 30 NRF's in a row on TI north recently, and it corrected with an XI. But what happens if you run out of bombs without hitting anything, but had you kept going, the correction would have been a XV, or a XX?

Three times I have had my very last hand in Video Poker result in Straight Flushes for 250 credits or Four of a Kinds worth anywhere from 125 to 800 credits depending on the variations im playing.Yes, it is a long shot to say my last bomb is going to save my run. Yes it is a long shot to say my last hand will be a Royal Flush. But the longer you can play, the better the odds of it being possible.

I hope this helps some of you better understand what a great return really means and why getting a great return can still mean you lose.That is why getting the most markup you can out of your resources is paramount to anything else. This is what bridges the gap between a 96% payback and a 101% return.

Money Management: Tips, Advice, and Why You Need To

Entropia is a lot like the real life. If you want to do something you have to budget for it and if you want your balance to grow, then you have to use care and caution to nurture your balance and it's growth. the basis of this post is, it is easier to save your way to a fortune than to win a fortune!

The number one tip I can give you is to take a few percent of every loot you get and pull it off your ped card and put it into storage. Over time if you don't touch this you will have a big pile of Peds. The idea is to save at least as much as mindark is making off of you. Very soon... Sooner than you think, you will realize you have enough peds to buy a shop or maybe even a land area!

If you budget 100 peds for a hunt, keep track of all costs so you can see what percent you got back... I would say any returns over 80% are good and at that point maybe run again or do something else. Split your profits and save some of them too.

Get every last pec you can out of things you loot and sell... Every extra pec you get is one less pec you eventually might have to deposit.

I do not advise buying things you don't need.

Do not over pay for something if you can get it cheaper elsewhere.

The only guaranteed profit is in trading or owning land. Crafting can be profitable but see my next post for details on why I say that!

If you save peds and don't touch them eventually you can buy whatever you really want even land! If you keep cycling all of your peds, eventually MA will get them!