How to have fun on Empire Avenue

Noticed some people on the #EAV channel on twitter discussing Empire Avenue. As often happens there are some people upset with share price dropping. I previously discussed ways that influencers could stop me from selling them; see post#1 and post #2).

This time around I thought I would explain how I’m playing the game now that I’ve passed the million-dollar mark in wealth.

The Avenue has multiple levels of user engagement. An influencer’s share price is a biggie — everyone loves to be on the leaderboard, right? Increasing your share price involves buying shares in people and hopefully being ‘interesting’ or aggressive enough that other users buy you. But there are multiple bottlenecks in the game, which require you to spend a lot of virtual money to upgrade to continue selling shares. Once you stop selling shares your share price has a difficult time of increasing (with each upgrade I can boost my share price by about $5 and then it stalls once that batch of shares is sold out). For some people this flatlining can be frustrating. How do I deal with it?

I just play to have fun now. I’d be lying a bit if I said I don’t care at all when my share price flat lines or drops but as I slowly drop from the leaderboard (think I’m about #30 now, for a while I was in the top ten) I’m finding other opportunities to enjoy myself on Empire Avenue.

So here’s what I do:

• Achievements – I love hunting for achievements, whether secret achievements or the ones displayed to us. This is another layer of upgrade that continues to be fleshed out as the Empire Avenue team adds new achievements. I’m involved in several discussions across various communities that are searching for how to find them and this is a great opportunity to interact with others.
• Communities – After I sold out my last batch of shares I started building my Robot Minion community. While it is still quite a small community I am having fun recruiting new members and dreaming up subjects to discuss with them. A lot of the interaction is now spread across in other places, with the various Robot Minion community members interacting outside of the community. I am also engaged in several other communities, though not at the same level of activity. I enjoy reading through them though and when appropriate commenting on what is being discussed.
• Social – I ‘know’ a few other users and Empire Avenue provides a nice ‘in-context- way of having discussions with them.
• Reading Content – with the content filtering on the main page I can easily move between various lists of influencers to read their blogs or other content they have posted (and rate it). This was a big draw for me when I first joined Empire Avenue and it has only gotten better (a lot better!) as the team has has time to improve this.
• The Dividend Game – I make a lot on nightly dividends (well, compared to some users not really but it still seems like a lot to me). I enjoy spreading those eaves across the members in the communities I am in, or adding community slots so I can join more communities. I like going through the portfolio daily, just doing that gives me an at-a-glance idea of what everyone in my network is up to.

So yes, share price dropping sucks but with all the other interesting things going on, I never (hardly) notice it.

p.s. New users can check out my newcomer’s guide.