Category Archives: Torn

Income, Trading

5 steps to self sufficiency

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So often I get new players asking me for money or tips. I wish I had time to give people personal tips, and wish even more I was rich enough to give everyone money. But I don’t and I am not.

I do however have a standard plan for new players to go from $100 to $500m and earn enough daily to cover points, drugs and further income. It will cost you time and energy (both game and real life) but you won’t need to buy DPs or risk much. If you want to make calculated investments you should check out the Skrumble Technologies website.

Step 1: Slut for someone (5 days)
So the first step is to build some funds. You should be able to ‘attack and lose’ to someone for about $200,000 per loss. There is a caveat here, some people in the forums are scammers and won’t pay you. Check the networth of the person offering, and if possible get meds off them before you make your losses.

You want to aim for 20m, which is 100 losses. You want to try and buy items that sell quickly and have a stable price to hide the money you make as you get it. If you watch the point market you can prepate for step 2 during this time too.

Step 2: Point trade (5-20 days)
Now you have a small fund you can trade points. The points market is a funny one, there are flower/plushie “traders” who sell points all day in big batches (500+), “bankers” who buy lots of points to hide money, “users” who want to just buy points to use for refills, then “skimmers” (like we will be) who buy big batches at low prices, and sell in smaller batches at higher prices.

The aim here is to have a high volume of points traded. You should be able to buy 200-250 point batches and then list 25/50/100 at 200-500$ more than you bought. thats $40,000 profit for every batch you buy minimum and up to $100k. 250 points normally sell every 30 minutes. As a test I listed 25 at 00:53 at about $400 more per point than I bought a batch of 100 points at, they sold at 00:57, that is 4 minutes. If I had more listings I may have sold 150 points in that time.

You are aiming here for at least $2m a day, and you will be capped at about $5m a day. Three weeks of this and you can skip steps 3&4

Step 3: Item Trade quickly (10-15 days+)
You can now start buying some of the quicker moving items, Xanax, Meds and Flower/Plushies, so if you haven’t already buy a bazaar (250 points from point building).

These sell more slowly, but the profit margins are similar and you have to do less work. You need to start by checking the prices graphs of a few potential items and work out which one is currently low. You can either buy from someone else’s bazaar, or check trade chat to try and find deals on bulk items. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and always be wary of scams and buy-muggers.

You want to aim for 1% profit per item, and sell all your items you buy within 48 hours. At 0.5% a day it isn’t as much profit as you can make from points, but is more hands off and may suit your real life life-style better.

If you allow $20m for point trading, then you should have $30m you can item trade with at this point – As you start to build your wealth you will find you either have too much stock to sell, or too much money to hide. You now want to start concentrating on higher priced items. The higher the price the bigger the change in pricing, and the easier profit is. The best items for this are Cans, eDVDs and Supply packs. You want to aim for having as little as possible in cash available at any time – Money in your wallet is idle, and a mug risk.

Again if you have allowed $20m for points trading, you should now have $50m+ for items trading.

Step 4: Invest in Benefit Blocks
You should now be earning between $2-5m a day, and at some point all of the above will be making so much profit you can’t keep buying points and items. It’s now time to invest in some stocks, and if you want to be lazy the best way is benefit blocks.

Start with LSC, it’s cheap and pays roughly $900k a week in payouts, or ~1.8% a week. Then TCHS if the medical supplies price is 1% of the BB cost or more.

Eventually you will want PRN, SYM, EWM, SLAG and finally FHG. But before then you will probably want to finish step 5.

Step 5: Banking
Hopefully at this point you will have been earning merits and have built up quite a bit of value. Spending your merits on banking can be a good idea if you are intent on easily making the cash for drugs and points. You want to be banking any “spare” cash weekly, which allows you to be flexible with what you buy and means your interest starts to compound. One day when you have $2b (or $3b in 10* oil rig) it is best to bank for 2 months at a time. But right now stick with weekly and NEVER use the caymans.

In conjunction with step 4 you should be banking 100-400m a week, and buying your ‘next’ stock block as you go. If you have the time and patience to do steps 2+3 as well you could be earning $100m a week, $5.2b a year.

I hope the above was informative, and thank you for reading

Competitions

Competition Strategy – Dog Tags

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So this year the dog tag competition is a little different. Each Tag has a score, which increases each time it is stolen, and each tag can be traced to it’s original owner.

So the more times a tag moves around the higher the scores will be.

But the more you target a player the less likely you will grab a tag off them, and you need 250 to get the second honor and this will probably get you 10 points if you hang on to them all until the end.

There are special tags, and you also get 10x the score of your tag if you have it at the end.

Each attack will have a random chance of taking a single tag – regardless of it being a leave/mug/hosp. The chance is further modified by how many times you have gained tags, and also how many times the person you are attacking has lost tags.

Ways to  approach the competition

So how do you get a high score?

Late Entry Theory

Well I suspect the best way is to be a late entry. Let people mug you and attack you can you get left with no tags. Then in the last week or so you start attacking for tags. The tags you get will have higher scores (as they have been around a lot!) and most players will have stopped trying to get tags as they only need to reach 250 to get the merit, not keep 250.

Run and Hide

Travelling overseas, attacking all in site, and travelling again is another, more difficult, strategy. Basically you can’t be attacked while in the air, so less likely to lose your tags. Downside? You have to be around all the time, and you have to time things well to make sure you are there when you land. If you get attacked abroad it can take ages to get out of hosp and then fly before you get put back in again

Play the numbers

You can make about 40-60 attacks a day easily, 3x Xanax is 30, refill and ‘wake up’ energy (12),  FHC (if you can afford it) is 24 and natural energy is about 20. If you are in hospital for 15-45 minutes every time someone tries to steal a tag off you then you are at worst going to lose 2 an hour, 48 a day, so using all your energy every day will put you out ahead (assuming all attacks gain a tag, or lose a tag).

Self Hosp

Easier to self hosp than fly, as it needs less organisation, but it’s the same idea. Attack in batches and then put yourself in hosp somehow (SEDs will get expensive quick, but bad blood bags might be usable).

 

Target Hunting

Of course then there is the issue of finding targets. I normally add ‘collectors’ to my blacklist and just hit each one daily – but with the new system it will probably mean I stop getting tags from them after a week.

Another way is to go through companies, factions or hall of fame lists and just attack each person one by one. If they give you their own tag then don’t hit again, if they give you someone else’s then add them to a rinse and repeat list (until they stop giving).

You can also head to your dog tag page and see who else has been taking tags (any tag that you got from someone other than it’s owner usually). Just wait 4-8 hours between attacks and you will probably get a tag off one of the inbetweeners.

Ideas for making money during the competition

There will be a lot of market movement both early and late in the competition for anything that can be used in attacking or self hosping. Points will probably also rise in value for a bit. So one way to make some cash is to buy and sell as quick as possible.

An alternative method I have been thinking about is by selling tags back to the original holder. Remember they get a bonus for that tag so they may be willing to pay you for it! Bit of a gamble though as you can’t trade them, so beware of scammers 🙁

Updates:

There are a few threads in the forums about how players might get better scores. One suggestion is score farming your tags, swapping between you and a friend over and over.

I’ve not tried this yet, but I imagine two problems: It only takes one outsider to mug you or your buddy to lose the tag, and if you have more tags you may find you and your buddy don’t score farm the same tag before it gets taken by someone else.

If you do go and read the threads make sure you attack some of the posters, they are sure to have tags on them, right?

Gambling

Are you Keno to do some more gambling?

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So Keno is kind of a boring game, but at least it’s easy and quick to play. The idea is simple, you pick between 1 and 10 numbers and then Torn draws 10 numbers randomly. If you are looking for an online platform to play Keno, here is an imp source, that will guide you.

If your numbers match the drawn numbers you can win a prize (if you choose more than 7 numbers you need two matches to win a prize)

Now the odds of this game aren’t good, and they don’t change (unlike blackjack, hi-lo and poker). Here is a table of expected returns:

Picks Return per 1 bet
1 1
2 0.984177215
3 0.973101266
4 0.991303001
5 0.991319016
6 0.99760486
7 0.984712671
8 0.994884466
9 0.995126594
10 0.988061744

As you can see there is no correlation between how many numbers you pick and the odds of winning. The best ‘loss’ is the 6 picks, as you only lose 0.0024 of your stake. But of course your max win is only 4b.

Personally if I have no time to do slots or blackjack I play Keno with 10 numbers – As the prize and odds of the top prize are the best, even though in the long run I lose more than 9 numbers. The trick here is to win the jackpot before you’ve played 10b worth of games, so is better to try to play in casino games online with options like lucky tiger casino that specialize in this area.

Here is the winnings table:

Picks/Matches 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 8
2 2 38
3 2 7 80
4 2 3 10 300
5 1.5 3 5 50 2b
6 1.5 2 4 10 200 4b
7 0 3 10 25 150 1000 5b
8 0 2 7 20 200 500 1b 10b
9 0 2 5 10 70 200 1b 10b 10b
10 0 1.5 3 10 50 500 5b 10b 10b 10b

If you do play good luck!