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.
Standard Value Table
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!
