Empire Avenue

Empire Avenue – Why you shouldn’t delete your account

One of the reasons I’ve seen people give for leaving Empire Avenue is that they weren’t going to be active online for a while and didn’t want their stock price to crash and ruin their friend’s portfolios.

While this shows their admirable character, they really shouldn’t worry. Stock prices don’t really crash from low activity. I don’t know the details behind the scenes (I still have not met the mathemagics entity who controls Empire Avenue) but there is a stabilization effect that comes into play.

If I haven’t met the entity, how do I know this, you ask?

Simple. It happens to me all the time. I have spurts of time where I’m focused on writing and not terribly active. Yes, my share price drops by a few eaves during a period of low activity but then it stops dropping… not a plummet so much as a little dip.

If you are going to be offline I suggest instead that you just post a status update on Empire Avenue like ‘gotta get back to work for a few weeks. See ya in a bit!’ (don’t send a shareholder message, that will make your stock price plummet). Just a nice status update so that when an investor (like me) is looking at your profile and wondering at your lowered activity I know not to sell you.

And if you are quitting because you can’t keep up with Empire Avenue itself (i.e., playing the game) consider keeping your account around anyways. There are many people, some of them high in the leaderboards who aren’t active on Empire Avenue but are active elsewhere. (One example of a really good investment is David Brin, the author — he isn’t highly active on Empire but earns great dividends).

Keeping your account active lets you continue to earn eaves and perhaps take part in some of the cool new things that will be coming out down the road.

p.s. This message is in no way endorsed by my overlords at Empire Avenue (or the damn squirrel). Just my opinion.

Former lead designer at BioWare (Dragon Age: Origins, Neverwinter Nights). Creator of Raiders of the Serpent Sea.

6 Comments

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.