siniri

Finally, a profitable spin! Today I received a +10 agility boost on my battle pet, who takes 7 codestones/training. A couple of months ago, I determined the average price per codestone was ~5k, but they've inflated quite a bit since then, so this spin was worth over 350,000 for me.

 

1) nothing

2) 25k

3) nothing

4) +10 agility boost (worth 350k+)

 

So now I've probably broken even. I'll continue spinning for a while, at least until I determine probabilities for the various outcomes to see if it's profitable in the long term..

Got nothing today, so that's 300k spent, 25k gained for a net loss of 275k. Eep! But the chance of landing on something good must be fairly high since so many others are doing it, so I just hope I do before everything deflates below 100k. And I get the avatar quickly...

How do you put the "asking price" on it? I know I can set a starting bid & what the bid increment should be, but I see other offers that say what they're "asking" price . . .

Your starting price is not the minimum bid; they have to bid the minimum increment above that. Say you wanted to sell the paintbrush for 6M NP, and you wanted to get exactly 6M, no less. By setting the starting price at 5M and the minimum increment at 1M, the first person will have to bid 6M if they want your paint brush. The second person would have to bid 7M, which is unlikely to happen if the paintbrush is only worth around 6M. So the first person might be willing to offer more on your lot to be guaranteed winning vs. fighting with others to time the auction end. If no one wants to pay 6M, your auction will end and you'll be free to try again. JellyNeo has a good explanation on how to set up an auction. The site automatically calculates everything related to the auctions based on what you enter at the start; no user actually posts "asking prices" on auctions, just on the trading post.

I spun and got an Ultra Nerkmid! I got lucky this time but I doubt that this wheel will be a regular thing for me. I still don't have the Alien Aisha avatar but the lure of 300k profit for this nerkmid is too much.

My plan, if I win a higher nerkmid from the wheel, is to sell it, and then buy a cheaper nerkmid to get the avatar. But first I have to win one! I think nerkmid prices will plummet, too, so I'd recommend selling sooner than later.

Coldtome Screenery

 

What's more disgusting than an orange?

I've made my annual color-coded NP/ACP ratio chart, and I thought I'd share so other procrastinators can get the most bang for your buck.

 

 

Basically, the prizes towards the top are worth more now. The color-coded prizes may appreciate more in the long-run because they're either expendable or wearable, etc. Obviously prices will continue to fluctuate as people try to buy what they think will be worth more, causing other items to become relatively rarer.

I won 25k today after nothing yesterday. It teased me, hesitating on the paintbrush square before ticking over. I've heard you can win Mystery Island paintbrushes from it. Since my training is 7 codestones right now, this wheel could be very profitable for me; it just depends on what the probability is of landing on each square. I'll probably spin it at least a few more times, until I get a decent prize.

 

I agree that Habitarium is a great way to earn NP, but it's gotten very Flash-intensive. Never let your Habitat get filled with items or you'll get locked out if your browser or Flash crashes or you lose your internet connection. I've been locked out since January, just after reaching level 50, and so I've lost out on millions of NP I could have earned (TNT will not reset it for you if you get locked out; you have to wait until they fix the bug, which they haven't done in 4 months now).

Wait, so the Wheel of Knowledge avatar is actually possible? I have spun that wheel everyday ever since it has come out (as have several of my friends), and I don't know anyone who's gotten that avatar.

 

I think they're all profitable except for Misfortune. I've won scrolls of freezing and minor and greater healing scrolls from Knowledge, so I'm sure it's paid for itself. Excitement is pretty expensive now, but a 20k makes up for 40 "nothing" spins -- and usually, I at least get the question mark or 500, making up some of the cost of spins, anyway. Mediocrity is awesome after the revamp; I frequently win 500 or 2k from it. Codestones and certain foods from Monotony make it worth it in the long run. I had a streak where I was winning codestones 1 or 2 times a week, but now I haven't won one in over 3 months.

I got nothing. I'll probably spin this occasionally, but probably not as a daily. I'd love to win a nerkmid (I wish I'd bought one when they were under 100k -- or hadn't sold one for 99k when I couldn't find one on the SW back when I was new to Neo).

Make it less boring and less likely to cause repetitive stress injuries. Seriously, I only got to rank 11 last year and barely managed that. I thought the challenges last year were a nice break from the monotony, but some of them really made my hands hurt (especially the MSN ones).

Sell them. They can cost anywhere from 1K-200K+

If you're selling any token-redeemable neggs for 1k, I'll gladly take them off your hands. Heck, I'd give you 1500 for 'em! ;)

 

(Plain "negg"s are going for around 2k currently, since Keyquest is giving fewer out during its spring prizes.)

Well, for the pattern ones, there's usually a hint on where to look for the pattern. Sometimes Google is your friend (e.g., I've put the string into a "site:www.neopets.com" search before, or even just individual words from the string that might be rare on-site, and that gives me starting places). Common starting places are games, the Neopedia, or shops, and sometimes timing helps (e.g., at the start of Daily Dare, they might more likely be games). I think the more you look at solutions of past conundrums, the better you're able to guess how the writer's mind works.

 

I've gotten top 250 submitting late in the week before (I hardly ever catch the news, and never sit around waiting for it), so it is possible. You just need patience to solve the really tricky ones. This week's would be a great example on how to recognize the pattern, but I can't tell you until it's over. If you don't solve it and can't figure it out once the solution is posted (sometimes the solution doesn't explain it), PM me and I'll tell you how it was done.

Airiya, I only entered the Random Contest once, over 4 years ago. I think the rules have changed since then. According to the rules linked from the RC page, the image should be no more than 50k. But as long as they let you upload it, I think it should be okay. Is it too late to try attaching a higher-res pic?

 

My submission was an audio file. I remember it being too big, and I had to search on the internet to figure out how to reduce it to upload it, but it ended up sounding fine in the end.

Nah, it was glitched. I cleared my cache and was able to spin again yesterday, which means it was just glitched (didn't let the spin finish, of course). Today, the spin lasted a reasonable amount of time.

My wish came true! Except it didn't give me the avatar that I wished for; instead it gave me Wishing On A Star. Still, not too shabby!

Wow, beautiful job! Even if there were a lot of entries, I bet you'd still get first place. Out of curiosity, how did you make it?

I used to base my purchases on the Neodaq's grades, but sometimes stocks change over time, and that's unpredictable (just look at how expensive POWR was for years -- or look at KSON now vs. what it used to be). Diversification (having your purchases spread across several stocks) reduces risk (a very, very few have gone permanently bankrupt), and so I buy 1,000 shares of whichever stock currently priced at 15 that I have the least of (a handy link to find those stocks) every day. If two are tied, I just pick one. This tends to make me buy more of the "better graded" stocks, anyway, because if they have rapid turnover, I probably have fewer of them! And it's fast enough that I have no excuses not to buy my stocks every single day.

 

The most important thing about stocks, if you want to play safe, is to always buy low (15/share, maybe 16 or 17 if there are none at 15) and sell high (most choose a sale point of 60, or maybe 45 or 90 or 100). 60 seems to have a good balance of stocks hitting it fairly often, while giving you a nice profit.

Apparently not, since it's been at least 3 hours (nearly 9 total) and it's still spinning... I had a nice lucky streak where I was getting a Bri codestone once or twice a week a few months ago; after I mentioned it to someone, I haven't gotten anything besides a lottery ticket or a cheap item since.

P -

 

This shouldn't be too difficult to write a sentence that does not contain the letter which this sentence does not contain (along with several others).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expo_'70

 

Really? I thought I'd copied something since then. I was watching a special on Tarō Okamoto on NHK World, and there was a quote I wanted to capture (something along the lines of "Harmony is a collision; it happens when two opposite things come together" -- except it was much cooler; sadly, I couldn't find it).

If you do auction it, make a board to advertise it, and hopefully get a few more interested people aware. If you can post the exact ending time and bump the board when it's close, you'll get a lot of snipers competing with each other, and the price can jump a lot in those last few minutes. Or if you want to get a guaranteed amount for it, set the bid increment really high (can you set it as high as 1 million?) and price the appropriate amount under it to get a single bid at the price you want -- many users will pay a bit more to be practically guaranteed they'll win the auction.

I used to have a price chart with the various neggs you could get from tokens vs. the current price of neggs, and I could always find at least a few that would give more NP per token than I could get from selling the most common basic neggs (the ones available from Keyquest) -- and it was a lot easier to cash in for tokens than price neggs every time I got one. From my memory, Kaleideonegg and Silver Knight Negg were often the most valuable -- before Armoured Neggs came out, at least. Once I had a decent amount of tokens, I'd only have to price a plain Negg (to get the price/token), and the 3 or 4 that might be worth more per token.

 

Once I got up to 6 codestones/training and codestone prices inflated, I discovered that it was cheaper to train defense using armoured neggs (now that neggs have also inflated, the cut-off for which is cheaper is probably different). It also helps me train faster. So now I just convert all my (common) neggs into armoured neggs; I actually have to buy extras off the SW to keep up. I always price rarer neggs to find out if they're more expensive per token, and anything that's limited time, I keep in the SDB indefinitely (to sell after they've inflated -- which of course they never stop doing).

You can also try playing Dice-A-Roo. Note that some worlds have their own RE's and don't seem to have the normal ones (e.g., Moltara, and maybe Terror Mountain and Space Station -- these last two have their own, but I can't remember if I've ever gotten a normal one at either place), so don't go to those worlds for the Tooth Faerie avatar, for example. (But really, hers is so rare that I wouldn't refresh hoping to get it.)

 

Also, note that TNT has been a bit ambiguous about whether refreshing to get things on the site is okay. It used to be okay to refresh as long as you did it manually, and many people would refresh at Terror Mountain to get paint brushes, neggs, and the ice treasure chest. Then TNT said it wasn't okay to refresh just to get items there. I would assume the same rule applies to Faerie quests as well. But refreshing in particular locations to get avatars is of course, fine (I mean, that's how TNT designed the avatars!). At any rate, I'd recommend playing html-based games or wandering around the site to get your page-views, just to be safe.

 

It's not even DSL, either, but AT&T's allegedly faster (and more expensive) Uverse service. It goes out quite often, especially when it storms, but AT&T won't come out and service it -- even though we have a utility cable down across our driveway (every utility company claims it's not theirs). Really not happy to be paying more for such terrible service (I just moved here a month ago) -- I can barely use Skype, which is my only phone service.

For my gallery, I have 3 items over 1 million NP that I'd really like: bag of sand, bottle of magic sand, golden shell. The bottle of magic sand, in particular, is a Hidden Cove item, so I'm very unlikely to ever be able to afford it.