Empire Avenue – Stop me from Selling you. Please.

I spoke a while back about why I sell people on Empire Avenue.

Now that the game has matured I’m trying to adopt a bit more casual of a gameplay style… still want to make the big bucks but want to focus my time on producing content rather than winning the game.

To achieve that I’d really like to spend less time updating my portfolio. Normally I do this each morning — trimming the dead weight and finding sweet dividend paying seeds to plant. This is time consuming even considering how the new interface changes (the Dublin release) have improved my workflow.

So please here’s two simple tips that makes it less likely that I will sell you (and will save me time, because fewer poor performers means less times I need to click the sell button).

1. Be active. I generally don’t sell low performers — people who produce low dividends — as long as they producing something. But I sell people who have missed a couple days of activity… I start to worry and wonder if they have abandoned the Internet to go live in the mountains.
2. I’m a softy. The final tilt when I am deciding whether to sell someone who I have noticed has not had activity for a few days is whether they own shares in me. I’ve held onto people who have been inactive as long as a week simply because they owned shares in me. With the new interface changes it is even easier for me to verify whether an influencer has shares in me. So if you’d like some stability and protection from being sold make sure you’ve invested in your heaviest investors. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels guilty selling someone who has shares invested in me.

Disclaimer: When it comes time for an upgrade I will sell people I don’t want to in order to afford it. That’s the nature of the game. I will try and buy back into them when I can though, as long as I don’t think I’m wasting their ‘share slots’ in so doing (i.e., I try to avoid buying people I’ve bought multiple times because they don’t receive cash from the purchase AND I end up holding valuable share slots that they could get cash from if someone other than me bought them.)