How long could I deposit 100$, before I need to start spending more.

Let's say I deposit 100$ on a monthly basis.

1. How long could I do this before I would need to start depositing more?

2. Could I do this forever, maybe the occasional big deposit for an event such as Migration, or MM? Or maybe just a big deposit for a set of armor, or a gun.

3. Currently I'm level 21 Laser Pistol Hit and 19 Laser Ranged Damage. If I do need to start depositing more later down the road, how much would I need to?


I guess these are more personal questions then anything, I mean it'd be cool to have 100$ last awhile, but what attracts me the most is hunting some big creatures, which I'm sure requires the big bucks.

I read alot of Hunting logs, and I see people cycling a lot of PED, but also losing a lot of PED.

It's got me concerned if I could stay up with the amount of ped I'm cycling, compared to the amount I'm depositing.

Don't start spending more . Deposit 100$ but play on the same level. Same dps , same cost/kill until you figure the game out . Build up a bankroll so you can stack loot for MU and you can ease thru bad loot swings .
Log your hunts and you will figure it out by then how much more you need to step up .
Bankroll management is a key element.

I would say 5 years... Assuming that every other month you buy 1 CLD at 1800 ped. By this point you would have enough for 100 ped dividends per week play. Assume your return is 75% than that is a few cycles of ammo/probes per week

I miss read the initial post. If you invest that 100$ a month wisely then over 5 years you should be able to deposit less and less every month until you find a nice balance and can stop all together. At which point only depo for new gear.

matthew said:

I would say 5 years... Assuming that every other month you buy 1 CLD at 1800 ped. By this point you would have enough for 100 ped dividends per week play. Assume your return is 75% than that is a few cycles of ammo/probes per week

I miss read the initial post. If you invest that 100$ a month wisely then over 5 years you should be able to deposit less and less every month until you find a nice balance and can stop all together. At which point only depo for new gear.

Click to expand...

I mean't while hunting and using the 100$ to hunt, which in turn can lead to me losing it all. Or gaining some, I just wanted to know because I see higher level players buy about 3k peds of ammo per run.

Well I personally do use a 3k ped ammo per run and hunt prots, bigger the mob bigger the gamble from what I've found myself, u have good days and u have bad days, it all depends on luck really, u can hit big or loose big, I panic when ped card shows lower than 10k so that's generally when I stick in a deposit, that's not to say it's right or wrong, play to your ability and try not to over stretch, it's a game after all no point struggling to enjoy it,

A very broad answer would be that that $100 will last as long as you want it to. If you're playing many hours every day it might not last a long time but depends on what equipment you're using and what mobs you're hunting. Over time of course the cost will come down as your skills increase and you have access to weapons/equipment that is suited for your level.

$100 used to last a LONG time for me in my early days and could still do now, but depends on what I want to do with it. Remember that every player 'plays' the game in different ways and what works for others might not necessarily work for you. Every bit of advice you get might be useful but it's really down to you to find your own comfortable way to play that is within your means/budget. I guess you need to get stuck in and find what works for you - you'll get good days and not-so-good days :-D

if you swunt low level mobs like I do, 100 € can last a long time... and at the moment I'm content with the skill gain, so it's fitting perfectly fine in my long-term plan

Until you stay on punies and using TT gun 100 USD will last long.
Keep in mind that high lvl game play may cost a lot.

For example MM T10 +amp 204 hypercharged, no scope, no sights, no ares ring or no any other type fast reload buff - ammo per shoot 3374, 86 shoots per minute multiplied by 60 minutes will be like 171 USD plus amp Decay 17 UDS plus pistol decay about 3 USD and not countin enchancers broken will be about 190 USD per hour.
Ofc you need to add armor decay, fap decay, enchancers, additional decay for scope and laser sights ect.
It will be about 250 USD/hour.
Sure you will get some back in loot but before you sell it you need to have enought on ped card...
Wana play 6 hours daily each day?

But at that lvl you cycle like 120ped/h. Meaning if you use eco setup its 6ped loss/h average.

So if you play less than 5h per day you wont loose more than 100$/month average. If you do way less you might be able to build up some money and invest in CLDs or whatever to improve your income/month if you get to higher lvl.

And thats the key: Use equipment and hunt mobs depending on your PED card/income. Not depending on your lvl. If you only have 10$ a month you wont have fun with a lvl100 gun. But even 10$ can last very long if hunting puny.

mace9 said:

But at that lvl you cycle like 120ped/h. Meaning if you use eco setup its 6ped loss/h average.

So if you play less than 5h per day you wont loose more than 100$/month average. If you do way less you might be able to build up some money and invest in CLDs or whatever to improve your income/month if you get to higher lvl.

And thats the key: Use equipment and hunt mobs depending on your PED card/income. Not depending on your lvl. If you only have 10$ a month you wont have fun with a lvl100 gun. But even 10$ can last very long if hunting puny.

Click to expand...

What he said.

Over the past 10 years, playing every single day, my average deposits comes out to $42/month.

This is because I can control my play style to conform to my ped card budget (mostly ). My biggest problem is that despite the MU I chase, when my ped card gets to a certain amount, it seems I lose most of it due to bad playing at that moment. So I cycle again, build up again and lose most again. Rinse, repeat.

But even still, $40/month for playing hours and hours is worth it to me.

But you, OTOH, seemed to be destined to burn your money quick because of this fact...

Moignus said:

what attracts me the most is hunting some big creatures, which I'm sure requires the big bucks.

Click to expand...

I'm almost positive that you will look at your ped card, and say "Man, I have enough to kill a whole 20 Dasps. FOMA here I come!"

With that play style, on $100/month you'll play until the 3rd of the month, then be broke. Every. Time.

Drop down your activity, but make it challenging. Instead of killing Atrox Old Alphas, try to kill as many Youngs as you can wearing only Adj. Pixie, no plates. Then see how many can you kill wearing no armor at all? All without dying or having to fap a ton.

Or skip trox and find a mob that has good MU and camp them for as long as the MU lasts, again making it challenging enough to be fun, but still allowing your budget to last weeks, factoring in selling loot. When it dries up, search around.

Happy hoffing.

JohnCapital said:

Over the past 10 years, playing every single day, my average deposits comes out to $42/month.

This is because I can control my play style to conform to my ped card budget (mostly ). My biggest problem is that despite the MU I chase, when my ped card gets to a certain amount, it seems I lose most of it due to bad playing at that moment. So I cycle again, build up again and lose most again. Rinse, repeat.

But even still, $40/month for playing hours and hours is worth it to me.

But you, OTOH, seemed to be destined to burn your money quick because of this fact...



I'm almost positive that you will look at your ped card, and say "Man, I have enough to kill a whole 20 Dasps. FOMA here I come!"

With that play style, on $100/month you'll play until the 3rd of the month, then be broke. Every. Time.

Drop down your activity, but make it challenging. Instead of killing Atrox Old Alphas, try to kill as many Youngs as you can wearing only Adj. Pixie, no plates. Then see how many can you kill wearing no armor at all? All without dying or having to fap a ton.

Or skip trox and find a mob that has good MU and camp them for as long as the MU lasts, again making it challenging enough to be fun, but still allowing your budget to last weeks, factoring in selling loot. When it dries up, search around.

Happy hoffing.

Click to expand...

I tried smacking around some Atrox at jurra. Lost 300 ped, I probably needed a bigger gun and some more ped to cycle to get past their dry times. This was over 2 hunts as well, no globals or minis. Seems like Trox are hit or miss.

Since people are all different it is very hard to predict your real costs later.

From 70% return to 150% anything is possible in a single hunting session. Im <60 Profession level and with my current gear i can spend roughly 550 ped each hour in ammo and decay (<2% def cost) With that i hunt mobs with low threat levels around 24-32 and around 2000 hp hitpoints in average.

Thats not really big mob play but if i had only 1000 ped on my card a 2 hour hunting session could cripple me when going bad and leave me out for days until i sold my loot in auction, where most of the mu is eaten up by fees because i wasn't able to make big enough stacks to sell.

As others already stated, build up some peds first to deal with bad swings and after that it is all up to you how many peds you gonna lose each month. To get better averages consider team hunts on bigger mobs to get more loot events for your peds wich result in more outbalanced result

I think that you will be very comfortable as a hunter playing 2-3 hours a day by depositing $100/month for several years, until you hit over level 60. I bet you can even use your highest SIB gun possible for that entire time. Once you get over 60 and start hunting mobs over this level, things get much more expensive.

Mining and crafting takes a considerable amount more.

Why would you deposit 100$ every month ?
the goal is to pay forever now?

"Real cash economy", normally economy goes both ways , hey

At level 80 I still depo the same ~$150 a month (nowadays it mostly happens in the form of strongboxes) I did depo at 50 lvl 5 years ago, playing about the same 5-6 hours a day, sometimes more, solely hunting. I don't lose those money by the end of a month, I'm just not in a hurry to sell some of the loot, and the peds slowly get stuck in the storage. And when I finally free them up, I buy something nice and upgrade my gear. I've never withdrawed yet.

Before 50 lvl I was fine with $50 a month or less, but I did use the same breers m2a + A102 (10 dps, mostly grinded little argos when they still were worth grinding) for 5 years straight, so it's not a kind of fun for everyone

Moignus said:

I tried smacking around some Atrox at jurra. Lost 300 ped, I probably needed a bigger gun and some more ped to cycle to get past their dry times. This was over 2 hunts as well, no globals or minis. Seems like Trox are hit or miss.

Click to expand...

ALL mobs are hit or miss. But with a smaller budget requires hunting a smaller mob, in order to be able to kill more of them. Bigger chance to even out or hit rare MU. As I was saying, you may need to find ways to challenge yourself in order to make hunting smaller mobs more enjoyable.

When I said trox, I was not pointing toward a specific mob. There are over 500 mobs in this Universe. Over 150 on Calypso alone. Plenty to choose from.

In any case, once you learn budgeting, then $100/month can last you for-freakin-ever.

tribalwind said:

Why would you deposit 100$ every month ?
the goal is to pay forever now?

"Real cash economy", normally economy goes both ways , hey

Click to expand...

Oh, so you never pay for your entertainment? Ever?

Yes, a small amount of players can make more than they spend here. However, MA needs to pay their bills and employees, else the game dies, so NO business model can allow most/all customers to make more than they spend.

How long would Disneyland or the local movie theater stay open if all folks could make money on their properties, using their resources, but never had to pay them?

tribalwind said:

Why would you deposit 100$ every month ?
the goal is to pay forever now?

"Real cash economy", normally economy goes both ways , hey

Click to expand...

Just to be clear this was a question, not how much I deposit every month. I just wanted to know how long 100$ could be stable for. I could be depoing 500$/month right now as we speak, but I just wanted to know.

Also as I said, I could go all out on certain Events like Merry Mayhem or Migration periods. You know maybe during those months I deposit like 3000$ just for the hell of it.

Moignus said:

Just to be clear this was a question, not how much I deposit every month. I just wanted to know how long 100$ could be stable for. I could be depoing 500$/month right now as we speak, but I just wanted to know.

Click to expand...

If you cycle 100 ped @90% return you keep losing 10 ped every cycle. Eventually your skills will improve, u switch to higher dps weapons and your cycles will be 1000 ped - which @90% return means 100 ped TT lost every cycle.
When ur skills approach the top levels in the game you will easily cycle 100 times as much as when u were a newcomer hunting small mobs.

The trend seems obvious (disclaimer: 90% here is just an arbitrary number, I have no idea what is the average TT return all over the game):
90% from 100 = 10
90% from 1k = 100
90% from 10k = 1000

And then you ask the next obvious question, Why should I go up there if all I get is bigger loss?

Well the thing is, it's not linear. Average TT lost on the higher lvls won't keep growing according this simple linear formula. It's just what I can observe but I can't tell what's the exact mechanism behind this effect.

One could argue your eco may play into that. I mean the overall eco not just weapons (like as you progress the higher and higher lvl mobs will start missing you almost every time, thus decreasing your defensive costs, etc).
I have a reason to doubt it's that simple. Even if u take into account the higher eco of the gear + effects from the higher overall eco there's still a difference between expected average TT return and the real TT return. It seems there's some additional mechanism at play. My best bet is a multiplier that *slightly* increases your TT returns proportionally to the total amount cycled per hour. Explains why top level players have repeated this "cycle more" like mantra as long as I can remember...
With the emphasis on the word slightly. The effect is very weak. At lower levels you have to use very uneco weapons to be able to generate ped flow necessary to see any effect. Even then it's still so weak that it can never offset the overall increased loss per hour (assuming all other factors remain equal).
The trick is, it doesn't have to. As long as there's some MU in your loot your increased ability to generate higher volumes of high markup loot with smaller cost per unit you are golden.

It's not a recipe for a low level player to make profit, no. It's just an attempt to explain the world towards which u are headed as you progress... and could prolly explain some odd effects u have observed already.

This game is more complex than it might seem at 1st sight...

Moignus said:

Just to be clear this was a question, not how much I deposit every month. I just wanted to know how long 100$ could be stable for. I could be depoing 500$/month right now as we speak, but I just wanted to know.

Also as I said, I could go all out on certain Events like Merry Mayhem or Migration periods. You know maybe during those months I deposit like 3000$ just for the hell of it.

Click to expand...

Here's a thread I made long ago explaining just how difficult that is to answer. Short answer: It depends on you.

As many said this is a hard question to answer since each player will spend a different amount. But for me, 100USD +/- a month is about how much I deposited and that was with me not really selling anything off. After each hunt the only items I sell are ammo, Shrapnel and Animal Oil Residue along with some limited weapons with more than 50% decay.

I am as well a very un-eco hunter. I mostly hunt only low level mobs with my Opalo SGA.+ A101 combo.