Lately, I’ve been seeing questions in chat on how to get started in Empire Avenue.  Here are my suggestions for what to do on Day 1.

1. Set up your profile (My Profile>My Connections), including Your Accounts, Other Connections, and Blogs & RSS.
   • The first thing people look for on your profile is your Social Network Scores, which may vary between 1 and 100 depending on your audience and influence as calculated by Empire Avenue. When you first add an account, the score will be followed by a question mark indicating that Empire Avenue is still calculating what the score should be. The default score the account will be rated is 1, but some may start higher, for example, Twitter, if you have an established account, especially if it was traded independently of your main account before you joined Empire Avenue. The higher the score, the more you will earn in Eaves on content published on that account.
   • Blogs and RSS feeds are often ignored by new players, but they have several advantages. They add to your earnings, boosting your cash flow, and your dividends, as well as indicating that you are a seasoned social media participant who is likely to produce good content, making you a more attractive buy on Empire Avenue.
2. Add a profile picture (Settings>Change your profile portrait).
   • Your image is an important part of your personal or business brand. Adding an image to your profile indicates that you are not afraid to be seen and engage social media.
3. Let people know who you are (My Profile>My Biography).
   • Saying something about yourself provides an introduction to who you are and why you are on Empire Avenue while indicating that you are not afraid to engage social media.
4. Let people interact with you by letting Everyone leave shout outs and send you private messages (Settings>Privacy).
   If you don’t let everyone contact you in Empire Avenue, they will have to seek you out on other accounts to communicate, making it much less likely that other Empire Avenue players will interact with you and help boost your scores. You can block people individually from their profile if need be.
5. Join City and Interest/Brand Communities that fit your background and interests.
   • Many communities support their members by buying their shares and giving suggestions on which stocks to buy. Communities also give you a forum for asking questions and making yourself known on Empire Avenue.
6. Explore Empire Avenue and buy some stocks that interest you.
   • Buying others’ stocks indicates that you may become an active player and leads people back to your stock.

These introductory steps will help make your presence known, making your stock more attractive to buyers and encouraging interaction with you on Empire Avenue. Ultimately, you will need to decide what kind of player you are and the strategy you intend to pursue.

New Wealth achievements have been added to Empire Avenue from 2 million eaves, The Twice-Made Millionaire, up to 2 billion eaves, The Gill Bates. The previous top achievement of 1 million Eaves, Millionaire, is not difficult to achieve with perseverance.  There are already over 40 Millionaires in Empire Avenue.  However, the highest Wealth achievements will be nearly impossible.

The maximum number of stocks that one can own with all Buy More upgrades is 2,000.  The maximum number of shares that one can own in a stock with all of the A Bigger Piece of the Pie upgrades is 400.  It is very difficult to maintain a share price over 100 Eaves.  Only 1 stock is currently over 100 Eaves in share price.  Assuming that Empire Avenue continues to grow and develops a large number of stocks at about 100 Eaves share price, the theoretical maximum value of a portfolio is about 2,000 X 400 X 100 = 80,000,000 eaves. So, only 80 million eaves worth of stock can be be generating earnings at a time in a portfolio.  All eaves to be accumulated towards The Bill Gates must be held in the Bank after all upgrades are purchased and the Bank account does not earn interest.

There are 4 ways that eaves can be generated in the game.  Wealth can only be generated by selling shares after they have risen in price, through activity earnings, by earning dividends and by selling shares.  Activity earnings are limited to an approximate maximum of 300 eaves per day, not including taxes, because only your top 5 networks count towards activities and only a limited amount of activities are counted per network to avoid spam.  It is very unlikely that a stock that has fallen far below 10 will later become a high performing stock over 100 eaves per share.  The maximum that one can gain by buying a stock low and selling high is approximately 90 eaves, the max share price of approximately 100 minus the starting share price of 10.  Attaining a share price over 100 typically takes months because the average gain of a stock is probably less than 1 eave per day over the life of a stock.  However, for the purpose of calculating the how quickly one could generate eaves, I’ll assume that one could eventually find 2,000 stocks on a regular basis that gained 1 eave per day on average, which would generate about 1,800 eaves per day after trading fees. Relatively few stocks provide a dividend over .50 eaves per day because few people have high enough network scores on multiple networks to generate that high of a dividend. However, there are a good number of stocks that generate .40 eaves per share dividends. So, a reasonable amount of dividends per share with a maximized portfolio is 2,000 X 400 X .4 = 320,000 eaves per day, not including taxes.  Share sales of 1000 shares per day at a share price of  100 will generate 10000 eaves per day.  The theoretical maximum wealth able to be generated per day is 300 + 1,800 + 320,000 + 10,000 = 332,100 eaves per day.   One could also purchase 30,000 eaves per month, or about 1000 eaves per day.  Eaves can also be earned through super rewards, but even if one participated in all of them one could gain less than 1 million eaves.  

Generating 2 billion eaves in cash will take at least 6019 days (18.5 years) starting with an 80 million eave portfolio, not including taxes.  I hope Empire Avenue lasts over 20 years and that someone has the tenacity to reach The Gill Bates, but I’m fairly certain it won’t be me.  My goals are to still be alive and have grandchildren by then.

As announced in the Empire Avenue blog, dividends will no longer be based on investment earnings. Dividends will be paid based only on activity and network scores. The exact date of this implementation has not been given, other than it will be before December 17. On the bright side, dividends will not drop when the shares available are increased. However, this completely decouples the stock’s portfolio from dividends.

Because the top five network scores are taken into account and few people have high network scores on more than two networks, whether or not someone is active on Empire Avenue will have little impact on their dividends.  There’s already a high incidence of ghost accounts, that aren’t actively trading. These will be worth reviewing for dividends. “Dividends are there to encourge (sic) you to buy in people who produce good content in valuable networks.” Unfortunately, this change doesn’t encourage people to be active Empire Avenue participants if they are active in other social media. Expect businesses to continue join Empire Avenue as advertising and abandon their accounts and the proportion of personal ghost accounts to increase.

Another recent change that impacted dividend investing is the immediate impact of network scores on share price. New players who connect their accounts no longer have to wait for their share price to increase dramatically based on trading.  The quickest way to generate cash is investing in new players because many of their share prices rise dramatically from the 10s to the 50s in a couple of weeks based on their network scores, outweighing dividend investing in the short term, and there is little risk to investing in brand new players who hook up at least one network because almost everyone’s stock price rises more than 10%, which is the cost of buying selling shares. Sell stocks when their share price levels off and dividends per share are below .40.

Yesterday, Empire Avenue, among several other changes, introduced free automatic share availability upgrades.  The good news is that you no longer need to save up e250,000 for your next share upgrade, which allows you to invest more in buying shares.  The bad news is that shares no longer have any intrinsic value.

When a product is infinitely available for free, individual units of that product are worthless.  Shares are intrinsically worth the amount paid for an upgrade divided by the number of shares made available, about e20 on average.  Now that the number of shares available is infinite without restriction of currency, the intrinsic share price is e0 because anything divided by infinity is 0.

The ongoing value of a stock is determined by the share price and the dividends.  Share price tends to increase when shares are available because the sale of shares increases the share price.  So, share price is a more important dynamic in the game that previously.  However, dividends are still the most reliable way to accumulate Eaves.  This change was implemented with automatic share upgrade turned on, so many stocks that had been waiting for the next upgrade experienced a sudden drop in dividends per share due to the sudden increase in shares available.  This is a short term concern for your own stock because automatic upgrades can be turned off.  Be sure to go to Settings and Disable Share Upgrades to maintain control of the number of shares available in your stock, so that your dividends are not automatically diluted.  You will also need to monitor your investments more closely to catch when their dividends per share have been diluted to the point where your opportunity cost of trading is worth a change in investment.  New players will be more likely to leave the option enabled and lose value more quickly than before.

Saving for the upgrade created scarcity in the only marketable product in the game.  Now that upgrades are free, a major goal has been removed from the game dynamics, creating a gap in incentive to play the game regularly to accumulate the e250,000 needed for the next upgrade.  The developers of the game have placated the short term annoyance of having to save for the next upgrade by removing a long term incentive to play the game regularly.  Buying and selling shares incurs a 10% transaction fee, which strongly disincentives trading.  You will need to be even more diligent in verifying regular participation in the game, as evidenced by in game posts and increasing portfolio value, to ensure that your investments will produce optimum dividends as long as possible.

In summary, take these steps to protect your stock and portfolio.

1. Disable Share Upgrades in Settings.
2. When considering a stock purchase, verify regular participation in the game.
   1. Check for recent in game posts in the stock’s Profile.
   2. Verify that the stock’s Portfolio Value graph is increasing regularly.
3. Watch for ongoing drops in daily dividends and dividends per share as a cue to reinvest in other stocks.

Today some minor, but very helpful, changes were rolled out on Empire Avenue for people interested in maximizing their dividends.  On the profile page, dividends per day and per share are now listed below share price, making it much easier to spot high performing stocks.

Also, one’s portfolio can be sorted by Daily Dividend.

Dividends per day and per share are a great starting point for evaluating a stock for purchase.  However, I’m not sure how it’s calculated.  For example, for (e)PHMC I recieved e527.14 on 400 shares, which is 1.32 Eaves per share, but his profile says .95/share under the Dividends heading.  The dividends per share listing is an accurate relative scale when compared across stocks, so it’s still very helpful, but I’m not sure how it’s calculated.

Being able to sort one’s portfolio by Daily Dividend is very helpful.  I was sorting by Daily Earnings, then eyeballing the Daily Dividends.  The sort makes it much more straight forward, although I would love to be able to sort by dividends/share more than Daily Dividend.  However, since I maximize my share ownership in high performing stocks, the sort is equivalent for most of my portfolio.

I still buy one share and look at the Earnings History before investing heavily in a stock because the Daily Dividend numbers can be misleading if someone had a particularly good or bad day. I’d love to have an Earnings History graph available.

Thanks to the Empire Avenue developers for this great update!

One of the main advantages of purchasing stocks based on dividends over share price is earnings stabilization.  Because I’m invested in stocks that consistently provide great dividends even with flat share price trends, the growth of my portfolio is very predictable.  Note that the angle of rise in my portfolio value is consistent except for extrinsic events, like selling investments to purchase upgrades, having shares for sale, and receiving refunds.  There is very little cyclical variation in my portfolio value because I have enough variety of stocks that share price variation among them is essentially random.

The downside for many people to this strategy is that predictable returns lack excitement.  As a game, knowing that I will make the same percentage return every week does not provide the thrill that gambling on a share price increase does.  If everyone followed the dividend maximization strategy, Empire Avenue would probably fail as a game because it wouldn’t provide much more excitement than a chat room about social media influence statistics.

Basic tools that one might expect to monitor dividends and earnings are missing from the game and graphs are deliberately manipulated to emphasize variation over stability.  These are features that I would like to have in Empire Avenue to maximize dividends:

• View Earnings History without having to purchase stocks
• Graphs of Earnings History and Dividends paid per day
• Dividend per day, week and month clearly stated in the profile
• Graphs display statistics from start of account, not just 1, 7 or 30, preferably with selectable dates
• Graphs origins at (inception or first chosen display date, 0), not (first display date, first display date quantity)

However, the Empire Avenue developers probably choose to obfuscate earnings and dividends to maximize the gaming atmosphere.  A basic problem with the game is that the Eaves currency is not useful for much more than making more Eaves through trading stocks.  Perhaps when more extrinsic rewards exist in the game, like real rewards one would use regularly or being able to purchase something other than just stocks and upgrades with Eaves within the game, i.e., a virtual environment like a company headquarters, the developers will be willing to provide these features.