I've talked about buying wars, and how you can use that to make yourself money -- as long as the other person is left holding the pet.
An easy way to ensure that you won't be left with the pet is to find an owner who has a pattern of buying their pets back. Look at the history on the pet to see if the current owner always buys the pet back. Even better is when you find somebody who keeps buying their girlfriend or boyfriend back. They simply won't quit!
A few months ago, I found a couple who owned each other. Gold! I bought the girl, and he bought her back as expected. So I bought her and bought the guy. They each bought the other back. I kept doing this until I could not afford both of them, but I had more than enough to buy just the girl. Then she got too expensive, but now I had enough for the guy! This went on for a few days... then the girl didn't buy him back. Oops! Now I was stuck with some dude on my pet list! Oh no!
Eventually, she did buy him, and I stopped messing with them. I had made some good money.
And hoo boy was it fun!
I Was Mean
Feature Request: Improved Wishlist
(this is the first "feature request" post ... I'll be posting these periodically with my/your thoughts on suggested changes to FFS)
I've mentioned before how long my wishlist is... hundreds of potential pets (652 currently). This makes my Dashboard quite slow to load, and it even crashes the browser on my iPhone. I'd really like to see an improved wishlist...
I believe a solution is to move the Wishlist to a tab under the "Pets" menu. This tab would be a companion to the existing Friends, Everyone, On Sale, and network tabs. Within that tab, you could then filter your Wishlist by male/female, and sort according to price and activity. That would go a huge way to solving my Wishlist issues.
Also note that the lists under Pets tab are paginated, and they also display the purchase price (a problem that I discussed yesterday). This would greatly improve the usability.
The above change is mostly "cosmetic" and doesn't change the base functionality of the Wishlist. One functional change that I'd like to see is to have two Wishlists. I would like to use the second Wishlist for tracking people with interesting pets, but whom I do not want to actually buy. I just want to revisit them periodically and raid their pets.
Standard Value Table
In my post, Spending Cash, I note how I try to buy the most expensive pet possible as part of my "upscaling" plan. When looking for a pet to buy, my primary source is my Wishlist. Unfortunately, that list shows pets' values rather than their purchase price. So if I have $35k to spend, then what value should I search for within my list?
My solution was to build a spreadsheet listing "standard" values and purchase prices. If a pet is never put on sale, then their value will follow a standard sequence as it grows. From that table, I find a standard value of $29,509 selling for $33,711. That is the most expensive "standard" price for my $35k. I then use my browser search function to look for "$29," in my wishlisted pets' values. Note that some pets may have non-standard prices, so I will also search for "$28," and "$30,".
I've made my spreadsheet public, so you can also use it.
Keeping a Pet
Two words: You. Can't.
I have seen lots of questions about how to keep a pet. How to prevent others from buying the pet. What strategies to use to ensure you can always buy the pet back.
In short... there is nothing you can do. Sure, you can keep a pet for a while. But not forever, so learn to deal with it.
People may argue that it is possible, but there is a very simple explanation about why you cannot. Consider my previous post about Buying Wars. If somebody wants your pet, and has more cash than you, then they will own your pet at the end of the war. Done. Fini. End of story.
This buying war might occur over days or weeks, and among multiple people, but eventually you will run out of cash, and somebody else will "keep" your pet until you can manage to get enough cash to buy it back. For a little while.
Your allowance of $2,000 every four hours will generate cash to buy your pet back, but it does not work well for an expensive pet. Let's say you have a pet with a value of $100,000. Somebody buys the pet, you get $106,000 back. The pet's value is now $112,000. You will need to buy the pet for about $125,000. That means you are $19,000 short, which will take 40 hours of allowances to come up with.
In a pinch, you can use Invites to generate cash. But that is a limited option, and your friends may not like the invite spam.
Coming up with cash through allowances, invites, or waiting for other pets to sell are all tactics to generate money to buy your pet back. But you still can't keep the pet.
The Buying War
Buying wars occur in a number of scenarios, and you can even trigger them in some cases. But what is it?
In the simplest terms, a buying war occurs when two (or more) people keep buying a pet back and forth. Sometimes this can happen in the span of just a few minutes, or other times over several days. The pets value goes up with every trade, so the war usually ends when somebody runs out of cash and can't buy the pet back.
During the war, note that the pet is getting a slice of every purchase. Wars are terrific things for the pet since some serious cash can be dropped into their account.
At the end of the war, there are two (obvious) outcomes: who is holding the pet? If you have the pet, then note that your investment has been driven up by the war. What may have started as a $1,000 pet is now a $7,000 pet. You haven't made any profit (yet), but will make a good bundle when your pet finally sells. On the other hand, the person who walks away without the pet has made great profit from the very last trade.
So this post is pretty short... I just wanted to get the term "buying war" out there, so I can write more about wars in future posts.
Eek! I've Been Raided!!
One of the things which is both scary, yet fun, is to be "raided".
A couple months ago, I was just kind of trolling around, looking at peoples' list of pets trying to find people to buy and to wishlist. I stumbled upon a guy who appeared to have similar interests, so he had a lot of pets that I wanted to buy. "Cool!" I thought, and bought three of his lower-valued pets.
Well... he didn't seem to think that was too cool, and he normally hangs out with lots of available cash. After he bought back those three pets, he proceeded to buy another five pets from me. He was merciless. Stomped my growing list of pets back to the Stone Age.
After I recovered from battle shock, I soon realized that I was sitting on a very nice cash pile. "Woo! Upscaling, here I come!" ... I bought myself a very nice and expensive pet with the proceeds of the raid.
And learned a lesson: be careful of buying more than one or two pets at a time from a single person. Especially if they have a cash pile. But the result can be so, so good...
The Wishlist
As I've described before, whenever you have cash, then you should spend it. The immediate problem that comes up is, "on which pets?"
I use my wishlist extensively to track pets that I find interesting. And when I say "extensively", I've got literally hundreds of pets on that list. I try and keep pets in a large variety of prices. When I have some cash, then I search my wishlist for the most expensive pet within my means.
As I play the game, I look at people's list of pets and wishlist interesting ones. Sometimes, I'll see somebody interesting who has commented on a person's wall. Other times, when one of my pets is purchased, I'll look at the buyer's list of pets. If they are buying my pets, they may have others that I'll find interesting. In all these cases, I just keep adding to my wishlist for future purchases.
It is hard to keep inexpensive pets on the wishlist, so see my post about finding inexpensive pets. I will write up another post on how to find (more) pets at a given price (too long to include here).
The wishlist is a great way to track pets you like. It could be easier to find pets in a certain price range, but it is decent way to find somebody to spend your cash on. I also find it interesting to watch the growth in value of pets that I've previously owned ("Wow, she's at $200k now! I remember buying her for $1k!").
Invites
A quick and dirty way to earn fast cash is inviting your friends to install FFS.
For every friend you invite, you will get $1000, regardless if they install the app or not.
Facebook app invites can be considered worse than email spam these days, so be careful. You don't want to lose friends over virtual cash.
Personally, I send an invite to a random pool of friends of the same name:
Most of the time, they will reject the app invite, but some will install. FFS is more fun anyway if more of your friends are on it, so send some invites! If they have a problem, have them contact me :)
Where's My Allowance?!
I've seen comments on the discussion board, on this blog, and (most recently) in a message to me asking "Where is my allowance? It has been four hours!"
This has happened to me before, too... I look at my Dashboard, and an entry says "You earned $2,000 for logging in. 7 hours ago." But I do not see a similar entry for now. However, when I look at my cash in the upper-right corner, it might say "$2,349". Since I always spend all my cash, then the fact that I've got over $2,000 says that I received my allowance. What gives?
The simplest answer is that the Newsfeed on your Dashboard is out of date. You got the allowance, but it isn't showing up in the feed. The FFS application keeps a copy of your feed which it will show you when you view the page. That copy will sometimes be wrong.
Here is a trick: under your feed, click on the link to "page 2" of the feed, wait for it to load, then click on "page 1". FFS will recreate its copy of the first page of your feed and that page will show your allowance.
Now. I will remind you to spend all of your cash. It should not be hard to tell whether you received the allowance or not, if you follow that rule.
And now that you have your allowance... go buy some pets!
This is a Game
In the comments on a previous post, Chivy asks if there is a way to play this game with just your friends. She is upset about being bought around by other people, and bought back every time one of her friends comes to the rescue.
There are a couple things here...
First, if you have installed the game, then you are choosing to participate in this game. Everybody can buy you, from friends to coworkers to strangers. If that upsets you, then remove and block the application. One day, maybe, Siqi and Alex will add some controls to allow you to play just amongst your friends, but I seriously doubt it. One of their goals is to help people make new connections.
Second, the people buying Chivy back every time is a basic strategy for making money (though eventually, they'll have to not buy her back to realize that gain), or maybe they simply like her profile picture and truly want to keep her. To stop them, she could change her profile picture to something awful (see The Hamster Problem), have a friend buy her away, and then (later) change the profile picture back in hopes the traders have forgotten about her.
The simple fact is that FFS is a game. If you install it, then you're placing yourself at the mercy of the rules of the game. People will buy pets you want to keep, they may buy you and apply terrible nicknames, and total strangers may buy you from your friends. Don't get upset at them, and don't leave nasty messages on their FFS wall. It is all part of the game, so just go with it and enjoy playing!
Finding Inexpensive Pets
There are two primary times when you want to buy an inexpensive pet:
* use up remaining cash
* grow your total count of pets
The cheapest pet is valued at $500, and with taxes and the value uptick, you will buy that pet for $571.
So how to best find them?
You can find a cheap pet via the "On Sale" tab under the "Pets" menu option. The biggest problem with this approach is that everybody else is looking there, too. When you see a listing for a pet valued at $500, it occurs all-too-often that when you go and try to buy that pet, they are now valued higher. Or the pet is immediately bought from you, leaving with cash to dispose (again!).
The best way is to choose the "Pets" menu option, then select one of your networks. In my case, I choose the "San Francisco, CA" network. It will show you a list of all the most expensive pets in that network. Narrow it down by selecting (say) "Show Girls", and then switch from sorting by cost to sorting by recent activity. You are now looking at (female) pets who are currently active. Invariably, the values of these pets are high or they are climbing as you look at the page.
Here is the key: scroll to the bottom, and hit the link to bring you to page 100. Go to the end of the list. These pets' values are stable, and they are typically very low. These are the people who installed the application, but haven't done much, and/or other people have not bought them. You will be able to find plenty of inexpensive pets here.
Use this technique to find cheap pets and build up your list. Or use your remaining cash.
More, More, More!
The other day, I hinted that there is sometimes a reason to not buy the most expensive pet possible. Let me explain further...
So far, I've explained that you want to invest in pets. They give you a four percent return when somebody buys them. "When" is the key word.
You might buy a pet, only to have it bought back a minute later. Or you might buy a pet and hold it for five weeks. The best way to deal with this unpredictability is to have a lot of pets. I'm talking like a minimum of thirty. The more, the better. Sixty? Seventy? Go wild.
It comes down to basic statistics. If an average pet is bought once per week, and you have 35 pets, then five pets will be purchased from you every day. Once a week isn't typical, but I'm trying to show a point... the more pets you have, the more pets will be purchased each day. And each purchase represents profit!
Back to the original point. If you're "low" on the pet count, then it might actually be more advisable to stock up on a bunch of inexpensive pets, before worrying about upscaling your existing pets. This is definitely a strategy to use if you don't have a desirable expensive pet in mind. Just bail, and by three or four inexpensive pets instead, to get your count up.
Oh, and don't go buy all of your friends to get your count up. Many of your friends might not have the application installed. Thus, non-friends cannot buy them. Thus, they do you no good when it comes to your pet count. Buy pets that people can, in turn, buy from you. That is the goal!
In my next post, I'll talk about how to find inexpensive pets. They are crucial to building your stable of pets!
The Hamster Problem
A cautionary tale...
Once, a few weeks after I had discovered FFS, I had acquired a beautiful expensive pet. I was quite excited. My pets' values were going up... things were going great.
And then...
This is practically criminal, mind you.
She changed her profile picture to one of her pet hamster. A frickin' hamster, for crying out loud! There was no way I'd ever sell her as a hamster. Even if I put her on sale (mind you, this was before I truly discovered that fallacy), there was no way somebody would buy her. And I now had a hamster for my second- or third-best pet.
She eventually changed it back to her beautiful self, and was bought off me. I may buy her in the future, though I just checked... she's quite expensive at this point, so who knows when I ever could.
But lesson learned. Be wary out there. You have no control over your pets' profile picture. They can and do change over time.
Upscaling
In my last post, I mentioned how I always try to buy the most expensive pet possible, given the cash that I have on hand. What happens a lot (especially if you don't log in maniacally) is that a pet or three will have been purchased from you, and then throw in an allowance. You now have the means to convert many less-expensive pets into one more-expensive pet.
Why would you do this? Simple: the more-expensive pets are typically more desirable. If you want to have the most beautiful pets, then you need to start spending more on them. I call this "upscaling your pets".
Earlier today, I was purchased and made about $10k. Throw in the $10k bonus for today, plus a $2k pet and a $2k allowance, and I had a bunch of cash. That allowed me to buy a pet for nearly $24k. That $2k pet that I lost can easily be purchased again in the future, once I get another allowance, but it is much harder to have $20k on hand, so you take the opportunity as soon as possible.
There are some minor exceptions for going with the most expensive pet, based on a strategy of having many pets. I'll detail that later.
For now, just know one thing: buy the best you can!
Free $10,000 bonus today
Login to your FFS Dashboard today and locate this bonus cash in the top left corner of the screen. Is it an April Fools Joke? Click it to find out!
Spending Cash
One cardinal rule that I try and maintain is to spend all of my cash when I can. The reasoning here is very simple: when you hold cash, you get zero return on it. If you buy a pet, then you'll get about four percent when the pet is purchased from you.
Make no money, or make some money. Easy choice.
Choosing which pet to buy is a subject for many more blog posts, but in general I will buy the most expensive pet possible. Then if I still have a little bit of cash, then I'll find an inexpensive pet to use up the remainder of my cash (the cheapest pet is just $571 to purchase).
Just now, I had $23,995 and bought a $23,994 pet. Yup. I'm sitting on a single dollar now. Andrew has actually managed to spend all of his cash once.
