A very important part of running a “Company” in a game is managing your human resources and time correctly. Because of the competitive nature of most games, it is very important to not have anyone wasting time so that people will actually buy your products. For example in rust right when you start, many people just kind of run around looking for something to do. Normally when I start, it is very important to distribute work between all of my teammates, each person doing their own job to help the team. This gets all of the hard stuff done at the same time which is much more efficient that doing each part individually. In my next post I will tell you a story about a time when my management skills were put to the ultimate test.
With the newest rust update, a new item has been added, tea. This item doesn’t seem like anything special, but I believe it will change the game forever. Previously there was an almost useless farming system that was added a long time ago. At this time, it was only really useful for getting food. Now, there are new berries that are going to be added soon in order to make tea, and this tea isn’t just a luxury. At the best tier, Tea increases gather rates of every resource by 50%. I think there is a whole new market for these teas because they are also very difficult to produce. At the end of the day, I think it will be very profitable to have a large berry and potion brewing center and selling them for other items. This will be my project for the next few days.
I did some research beforehand, 2 days before the update was launched. I decided to figure out how to farm normal food items because I had no idea how to farm previous to this update. After taking a day or so to figure out a system, I came up with a plan. I needed a few different items and supplies to build my farm in order to produce the teas, so I decided to take the first few days of playing after the update to prepare.
Today I’ve decided to test my previous experiment one more time while adjusting my strategy a little bit. This time, instead of being laser-focused on one single objective while ignoring the rest of the game, I will make a bit of progress and be on par with the rest of the players. The last iteration of this experiment was not successful because other people had superior equipment than us and were able to steal the spoils of our work. In this experiment, we were able to accommodate for this by also gathering our own supplies and not falling behind in other aspects of the game.
This time, though there were a few bumps along the road, we were successful in destroying the Bradley tank and gathering its spoils. Because of this accelerated progression, we outmatch much of our competition in the quality of weaponry and were able to rocket ahead from the worst to the best gear in the game. At the end of the day, by just taking a few hours of extra time we were able to save many hours of grinding for high-level guns and gear.
Today I decided to do a bit of an experiment in rust on rushing production and whether it is a good idea or not worth the effort. To conduct this experiment, I decided to destroy Bradley in rust. Bradley is a tank that kills players that roams around one area of the map. When he is destroyed he drops very rare items that would normally take many hours to get. Because of this, he is also very hard to destroy requiring explosives which are very difficult to find normally. Instead of spending many hours trying to find explosives, I discovered a new way to destroy him only requiring scrap, the currency in rust. You can gain this currency quite easily at a rate of about 15 per minute with the correct method. There is a shop that you can purchase grenades from on the map, and here you can turn scrap into explosives. With enough scrap, it is possible to buy enough grenades to destroy Bradley, only requiring about 400 scrap. This means that in only about 15 minutes you could farm enough scrap to buy enough grenades to destroy Bradley. Once I decided to do this experiment, I was able to get to the point of Destroying Bradley in about an hour because of some minor setbacks. The only disadvantage we had was that while we had spent all of our time preparing for Bradley, other people had been gathering combat supplies, so once we went to destroy Bradley, other people came with superior weaponry and stole it from us. So at the end of the day, I would say it is not very efficient to rush one production item because other people will be able to get ahead and surpass you. I will be attempting this experiment again tomorrow so I will post again with more results.
Its time for another update! I’ve kind of just left my portfolio alone for the last couple of weeks to see how it would go. I expected to actually lose money because most people that start trading fail. This, however, was not the case. I actually ended up making a good return and beat the market overall. I made about a 2% return a day with a few days going down about 1%. Overall, I have made $8,000 on my initial $100,000 investment. My best investment so far is Moderna, which I have made a 33.67% return on.
Today I decided to make a few trades, I bought more Amazon with their acquisition of Zoox the autonomous car company. I also bought some stocks for the contenders in the race to the coronavirus vaccine. I bought Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Moderna in smaller amounts. My plan is to watch the news on these then buy more if I think one is getting closer than the others. So far I haven’t really made any money, only a 0.067% positive return so far. So far I’ve been focused on the stocks that will benefit from the Pandemic, however, I might start looking into some other stocks that may bring profits next week.
Today I decided to start up an investment game on Wealthbase. Wealthbase is a super simple program that makes investing really fun and easy, perfect for me who is super confused by all of the other programs. Today i decided to just do some super simple investments like amazon, google, and apple as a nice base to my portfolio. Everyday I make a trade, I will log it on this blog.
As my first point of research In Albion Online, I am going to look at different methods of making money and what the profit margins are. In Albion, each character can specialize in one or more skills by learning new or better skills on the “Destiny Board” Which is Albion’s equivalent of a leveling tree. As you do more of one task you become better at it, be that crafting, combat, or gathering. In this post, I will be looking at the options of the Destiny Board and which are the most profitable. The main options are high-level combat and clearing dungeons, crafting high tier weapons and armor, refining raw materials into ingredients, or gathering raw materials. Each has its own skill tree and each has ways of making money. While crafting in Albion, there is a mechanic called Focus where while crafting with focus you get some of the resources back. By doing this, one can almost double profits from crafting, specifically crafting raw materials into Ingredients. This is my prediction on what will have the best profit margins. In my next post, I will go into detail on the process I used to find out the best method.
Hey everyone, I just found a new game to play! I’ve been finding that rust is becoming less and less fun with each wipe as its kinda the same thing every time, so I’ve decided to switch games for this blog. The new game is called Albion online, and there is an entire economy run by only players. I just got started with a couple of buddies and I have started working on the best way to game the market and get rich quick. The market is completely player-run, so prices fluctuate hourly, making short term investments is very possible. For the next few weeks, I am going to be looking at this game and using this as my place for research. During this time, I am going to be researching how to make the most money, how to game the economy, and how to get started the fastest.
After playing for just one day, I already decided on the first project. I wanted to figure out how to make the greatest amount of money with the least amount of effort. From my first day of playing, I can tell you about the game in general. There is a tech tree where you can learn both combat, gathering, and crafting abilities. In the market, you can buy anything and sell anything all to and from real players. By using this system it is very easy to make large amounts of profits if you have the right skills.
Most people would say that in rust, you have a few ways of getting items:
Farming
PVP
Raiding
Today we are going to look at which one of these methods is actually the best way of getting loot in two aspects. First, how much “stuff” you get on average, and second how much fun it is. To do this we are going to look at the Production Possibility Frontiers for each of these modes and also how trade can optimize your production. My theory before any research is that farming is the most efficient, raiding is second, and PVP is least efficient. I will also e rating each of these methods with a fun score from my teammates that I will average out
So it was Wipe Day(when the server resets) and I was just getting started. I already had a team of 4 together before the wipe that I had played with before and we all loaded into Welyn’s server. We decided to build near Sewer Branch, Supermarket and oil rig. We put down a 2×2, made some bows and headed out. We had no BPs on this server so we were on the search for guns, garage doors, scrap, materials, and explosives. Our goal for this first day was to mainly farm the road and some nodes. I would consider this first day our farming day and we spent most of the day running the roads, monuments, and farming nodes. At the end of the day, we had quite a large rock base, 3 floors tall and around 60 rockets to main loot. We also filled up about 2 full loot rooms filled to the brim with loot.
In economic terms, I would say this was a productive day. I will be measuring success in large boxes of GOOD loot, I will not be counting junk. By the end of this day be had around 8 large boxes. Though we did have to do some PVP, it wasn’t the main goal so I will not be counting this as the PVP day. We met most of our goals and ended up very well off.
Boxes of Loot
Fun score
Day 1: Farming
8
4/10
Day 2: PVP
–
-/10
Day 3: Raiding
–
-/10
On our second day of the wipe, we decided to use all of the guns we had researched and crafted the day before to do some PVP. There were 4 of us on this day and we started our day roaming around powerplant, launch site, and large oil rig. These were all relatively close to us and each other so we would switch often. We found that most of the geared PVP was around launch site where our hourly net gain in kits was around 5-6 kits an hour (not counting those pesky bow gods). Considering this we spent most of our day around launch having fun and really pissing off a nearby clan. Eventually, we had a really successful run but were killed by a silenced M249 and lost around 12 kits. After a few hours of these, we ended up with a net gain of around 3 boxes of good kits and loot and 2 of junk. Considering our losses this wasn’t that bad.
In economic terms, we would say that the profits for today were good for loot, but great for fun because of the marginal difference between this and the other 2 days in fun. When asked to rate the day my teammates gave it on average an 8.5/10 which is much better than both of the other days. Compared to the other days in loot, however, it was marginally much worse as with all of the losses and gains combined we only really gained around 3 boxes of useful items.
Boxes of Loot (net gain)
Fun score (average)
Day 1: Farming
+8
4/10
Day 2: PVP
+3
8.5/10
Day 3: Raiding
–
-/10
On our last day, we did one of the most anticipated things in rust, raiding. The culmination of all of our work so far, we started off the day by crafting up rockets and explosive ammo and picking out some targets. We already had some explosives from a counter raid we had done the day before and combined with rockets crafted from the sulfur farmed on day 1 we had around 30 rockets and 5 stacks of explosive ammo to work with. Now with all of these explosives, we could raid a lot of bases, but we had to pick our targets for maximum efficiency. As a prospective economist, I am the biggest proprietor of profit raiding, only hitting targets I know I will make sulfur profit on. Because of this the first thing I do is look in the snow where there is an increased amount of nodes to mine for materials. Most of the time I will look for stone 2x2s which only take 4 rockets to raid completely if you go through the roof. Our first target was a said 2×2 and had tons of sulfur and ore, but nothing else really good. We continued to raid these bases until we eventually accrued a ton of sulfur.
Eventually, we decided that we would do a revenge raid to end of the wipe as we were all going to get off of this server the next day. Before this raid we had made 7 boxes worth of useful items which was really good, however, we had spent about 2 to get that so it rounded out to about a net gain of 5 boxes. We used much of the sulfur and components we had made from these small profit raids to craft up enough rockets to raid the clan we had died to with the M249 the day before. We made around 45 rockets, a raid base and put down turrets in preparation for this large raid. it was very expensive so we had to execute this perfectly. It was going really well and we were almost at loot when one of the clan members respawned and killed us all with a grenade launcher. It was very unfortunate because they were then able to seal the breach and save their base. We lost everything from that raid and after that decided to call it a wipe and get off. I will not be counting the losses from this however because it was just for fun and the last hurrah, not part of the experiment.
Boxes of Loot (net gain)
Fun score (average)
Day 1: Farming
+8
4/10
Day 2: PVP
+3
8.5/10
Day 3: Raiding
+5
7/10
Now through graphical analysis, we can compare all of these methods in graphical form to see how efficient each method is and how they change as you mix them.
My first comparison was between farming and PVP. By using this graph we can visualize how efficient each method is compared to others and how they are when you mix them. This is a generalization so take it with a grain of salt. But through this comparison, we can see how much more efficient farming is and how inefficient PVP is.
In this graph, by comparing farming and raiding, we can see that farming is still the best option overall for efficiency. Because of this we now can make some hard decisions and can confirm that between all of these methods, farming is still the best, though the most boring.
This graph shows the comparison of efficiency between Raiding and PVP. In this graph, we can also see that there is a downward-sloping relationship between these 2.
In conclusion, in order to reach maximum efficiency for loot in rust, farming is the best option, PVP is the worst, and Raiding is right in the middle. This lined up with my hypothesis and makes total sense. The surprising part to me was how much of a difference there was because when you play, it feels like your getting about the same from every way of gathering loot. The only thing that is really different between these types of gathering loot that I didn’t take into account is what tier of loot it is, which I will be talking about in part in my next post about trade.
