20 6 / 2012
Day 70: Evaluating Vacation
My “Vacation” ended on Sunday. Following are some lessons learned:
#1 Overpaid: I have to admit, I bumbled my way into my 7-day paid vacation. I bumbled because there was very little information to work with. For starters, I double paid for the vacation (EA did refunded the overpayment). I’m still a noob here, there are many things I didn’t know and it looked to me like I needed to pay both the $4.99 payment and 150,000e. I only discovered the overpayment at the end of my week when I finally found my way to the “End Vacation” dialog in plain sight the home page (unfortunately, I always log into my profile page and never saw it).
#2 Sell-off: During the vacation, I checked my profile every day to see how my share price was holding up. As promised, it only slipped a few pennies. However, during the week about a dozen of my shareholders bailed. That was expected but surprisingly, about an equal number of new shareholders bought in. The big surprise came the day after I returned, three very big shareholders bailed (ones I’d not have expect to) and these sales are largely responsible for my shares downward move for two days.
#3 Dividends Paid: According to the paid-vacation instructions, I wasn’t supposed to be paying dividends. However, when I checked each day it seems I was paying dividends on a declining scale, down to .94e. I’m not sure my shareholders actually received dividends though.
#4 Communications: Based on comments I got throughout the week, I doubt that most EA players know much about Vacations. But worse, I doubt that most EA players read their shareholder mail or comments or any other form of EA related communications, and this seems unwise.
#5 Rankings Plummet: I get the impression that the analytical reporters who maintain share databases, do not have a facility for dealing with vacations. So I’ve seen my shares plummet from relatively high ratings down hundreds of ranking positions.
#6 Storming Back: I came back to EA with some changes to my network connection interfaces and there is reason to believe these changes have made an immediate improvement in my Network Activity. Consequently, my earnings and dividends appear to have resumed immediately at their previous high levels. And my Average Dividends are climbing back to previous levels each day powered by record daily dividends.
TACTICAL BUYING: The sell-off (especially by 3 big shareholders) caused me concern. I felt some tactical buying might help and I was lucky that I had built up a reserve of Eaves while I was on vacation. I decided to commit all those eaves (plus everything I could earn, plus my refund) and add-on to existing positions. I couldn’t afford to buy shares of everyone but I bought shares of as many as possible till the Eaves ran out. I believe this helped stop further selling, plus I’m even seeing some great reciprocal purchases. In fact, shares are up +.15 atm. Yay!
All things considered, the time I spent figuring out the changes I’ve implemented (and resolving technical issues) was worth it based on the improved Network Activity. Plus I’m pulling in 37,000 eaves on a daily basis (up 4,000).
