The Bar Corporation's Space

Some of this may be old news to players, but I'm hoping it will be helpful to others.

So you want to advance in the composite ranking, but you're not moving. What do you do?

B$ is a game of ladders: wealth, ideas, artefacts, chips, karma, sigma. In order to advance, you need to work on all of these ladders. Work on each every time you play. Look ahead and see how much you need to move to advance.

1. Artefacts: A lot of newer players always question the need to build artefacts, particularly for the expensive ideas. It is true that you take a hit when you build an artefact, but in the long run, it's worth it. You will be able to use the artefact for shares play; you move up in ranking; and it may mean you can raid for profit. 

2. Ideas: it's not the number of ideas you have, but rather the number of industries. Don't waste money if you don't have it buying up thousands of ideas. You only need 1 per industry to climb that ladder. Now, if you do have the money, that's another story (and another article). 

3. Wealth: Cycle your blogs; raid and then sell; look into issuing bonds; get into making offers on the player's market or filling bids. 

4. Sigma: Add blogs, report deads, title changes. Use the bookmarklets http://ray.got.net/blogshares-bookmarklets.html to make this process easier. I also like to look at the holdings of inactive players. Quite often I find blogs to report (or acquire). 

5. Karma: Vote. Vote the obvious stuff (demographics). Vote your portfolio or vote someone else's. See above about inactive player holdings. 

6. Chips: be judicious in how often you cash them in. If you're low ranked every where else, then maybe this is an area where you can use chips as a method of generating cash.

Chances. I owe a lot of my holdings to playing Chances. This becomes a less productive method of game play as you advance. But if you're low or mid ranked it can be really good strategy to play a bit each day. Sell and report the deads. Vote the active ones. You often get rares or artefacts. It's the one time where gamblign does seem to pay.

Miss Melville
Member of The Bar

One night in the small bar, the bartender is lamenting the fact that business is so quiet on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. As he continues talking to his regulars a stranger, dressed in a tweed jacket and wearing sunglasses walks over and says, "I'm sorry, but I couldn't help overhearing your conversation. I'm a doctor at Psychiatric hospital down the road. I'm trying to integrate some of the more sane patients into the community. Why don't I bring some of my patients along, say, next Tuesday. You'll have some customers and my patients will have a night out."

Well, the bartender isn't sure, but the thought of more paying customers on a quiet night appeals to him. So he agrees. The following Tuesday, the man in the tweed jacket and sunglasses appears with about ten people. He told the bartender, "Give them whatever they want, put it on a tab and I'll settle up at closing time."

The bartender has a great time selling loads of drinks and encouraging the patients to eat plenty of peanuts. The patients have a great time, getting drunk, but they did behave themselves. At closing time the bartender added up the bill and came up to over $250. The man in the tweed jacket and sunglasses begins to organize the patients, so that they can go back to the hospital. The bartender approaches the man in the tweed jacket and says, "It comes to $250."

The man in the tweed jacket and sunglasses smiles and says, "That's fine. Do you happen to have change for a dustbin lid?" lol

Effective Blogs' Cycling by sharing 50% with a  partner - it's been recommended by Sage in the past and I found that  it's really effective to keep or cycle blogs. What are the benefits of sharing blogs:

a) After either 1 of the  partners has sold his 50% shares, the resultant p.e. would be higher that it's around 110-130 (most of the times) , instead of 50-70 after selling if you're the sole owner.

b) In case of point a), you can use less artes to hype pe to 200-250. Save artes up for cycling after 6 hours.

c) Higher resultant pe and faster process in hyping up pe to 200-250 would minimize the risk of being rst/hto by opponents during cycling.

d) If your opponent rst/hto your shared blog, he needs to spend more artes to complete his attack as it's a shared blog.

e) Then either 1 of the partners can take the blog back easily afterward. In general, after several failure of attacks by your opponent, he would give up soon. Then you can keep these big blogs again.

e) Finally, it's most important to have a partner whom you trust, since you both need to gift to each other sometimes. Both partners shouldn't mind their loss after gifting.

Carlos & I have been good partners in holding ,for long periods, the blogs below:

Yarn Harlot 

Flickr 

CrazyAuntPurl 

The Jawa Report 

Your comments are mostly welcome.

Cheers :)

Eric Kwan
Member of The Bar and teacher of the RPI Corp

My main Space (Cool Corner) is sponsoring a Movie Trivia/Quiz Tournament which will give a very cool award (made by a professional graphics designer) to the winner. Now if it turns out that the winner is also a "The Bar" member then this player will also get 5 T B$ in cash ;). Click here to join today to start practicing for the competition to start on June.

The Bartender
PS: The Movie Trivia game will be closed on Australian weekends (Friday & Saturday for US & Canada)

Jack Sparrow walks into a bar and orders a drink. The bartender looks down and says "You know that you have a steering wheel in your pants" Jack replies "Ay, it's drivin' me nuts" lol