Wow I was not expecting to wake up to this awesome review from Pudding! Thanks so much! And thanks to all who so far have also expressed appreciation for my efforts; your kind words makes this all worthwhile
Lately I have been thinking about typing up my story, how I started on this path and the trials and tribulations along the way. I think some of you would probably quite enjoy reading about my journey, my line of thought for each stage of growth; why I did what I did, all the successes and failures I had... And honestly, I think it would probably be very insightful for many if they bothered to read it, mostly just how much work, money and time it really takes to even get noticed as a shop owner in this game, it's really quite baffling. But it can also be very rewarding, actually in my opinion, the most rewarding activity in the game if you value helping people and making friends everywhere.
(Note that I will abstain from airing out any dirty laundry in here. Of course there were confrontations and threats and other things, and although that could be very interesting to read about for some people, it wouldn't be fair to the ones mentioned as it would only be my side of the story, not the full story. So instead I will indeed do my best to provide interesting details about how things went for me, without speaking derogatorily of anyone.)
Sizable investment (2010):
Was it 2010 or 2011? I can't remember now... Anyway. I read about the new Calypso Land Deeds that MindArk had released into the auction. At the time I had some money I wanted to invest so I decided to depo 11k usd I think it was. Once the money landed on my ped card, it was too late to buy any CLDs on auction, they had all gone already. I found someone selling some on this forum and connected with them in game. I ended up paying 1100 ped each for my CLDs at the time, so I spent all my ped and bought 100 of them. Then I logged out for over 5 years (of course I logged in every few months to keep my account alive, but didn't play Entropia at all).
My return to Entropia (2015):
After having parked my Avatar for over 5 years, I found that I had almost 70k ped just sitting there in dividend payments (I actually had to contact support to find it cause I didn't know about the PED Flow Center at the time, it was new since the CLDs had come out lol). I wasn't really sure what to do with all the ped but since the investment had been so successful, I knew I wanted to reinvest the money into the game, except this time, I wanted to play a more active role in the game, do something that contributes to it and actively earn ped as opposed to passively earning it. At the time, Land Plots were just being introduced and I didn't want to miss out on the opportunity so I paid almost 500% for the Composite Planks on the auction (crazy right?) and secured a Medium Land Plot at Livas Heights. This, by far, is the one purchase I regret the most in Entropia today, I didn't realize back then that 6 freakin' years later, I'd still be sitting here begging MindArk to develop them further... Oh right, I promised I wasn't going to speak derogatorily of anyone, ooops.
Humble beginnings as a shop owner (2017):
The first shop I bought was from
@morey in January of 2017. He was advertising it on this forum and it's what got me to actually travel to RT for the first time ever. morey met with me there and told me about the places of interest on Rocktropia, how to join the various chat channels, etc... The place was busy, there were people talking in chat, people at Lagoon crafting and trading, I liked it. I traded a few CLDs for his shopping booth at the landing spot without even doing any research at all into what it's actually worth, looking back I'm glad I was dealing with someone that was honest and fair. I experimented with selling different things there, At first I put a bunch of furniture in there cause that's what I had a lot of in storage lol. Wow to look back how I started, so funny. morey had offered to sell me all of his shop inventory really cheap but I had declined at first. After the first week and not selling anything, I contacted morey and asked him if he still had that shop inventory and bought it all from him (mostly just hunting gear). I think I spent about 6k ped in all, back then I thought that was a lot of ped but I wanted to learn to make shops work so I splurged.
The 2nd shop I bought was at Tangerine (a guy named Swampy_monster I think...). This one had a lot more item points in it. Wasn't really sure what to do with it at first but one day I had a revelation: All these years I had been collecting armors (really since 2007), it was the one thing I really enjoyed doing, so I thought "
well hey, I'm already passionate about armors, why not bring this passion into my shops, why not create an awesome armor shop!" And that's how my very first Armor shop was born, on RT of all places.
One day, also in 2017, some people on RT had been talking about Monria and one guy was trying to sell his shop there so I went to have a look. When I got there I went hunting in the caves and really enjoyed it. I checked out this guy's shop (
@Leland). The shop itself was pretty cool, they are on 2 levels over there and have these huge windows, I thought I definitely could have some fun making a really cool shop there. Another thing I had noticed was that the damage types for the 4 mobs on Monria were not all known in the wiki, so I could already see myself figuring that out and making a shop that was specifically geared for those mobs. Only thing I wasn't sure about was the price of the shop. I asked another shop owner his opinion on value and realized this guy was asking way too much. So in my mind I came up with what I thought would be a fair price and made an offer which was I think about 4k ped less then what he was asking. I thought he was probably going to turn it down and was prepared to walk away from it but he accepted. So I flew back to Monria, bought the shop and got to work.
I figured out the damage types for the other 2 mobs on Monria (
there and
there) and created signs that told you what the exact damage was for each mob (except the shoggoth cause most people just hunted it naked or with noob armor anyway). Spent quite a bit of time researching all the armors and plates that would be the most helpful and found that all the more useful armor plates were RT dragon plates. For example for the Cultist, the absolute most useful plate was the Joplin Dragon plate. The Hendrix dragon plate was also very useful. For Shubs, the absolute best plate was the Neverdie dragon plate. So I kept looking on the auction for mats to make them and kept asking around if anyone had any dragon parts but to no avail. To make matters worse at the time, the loot on RT was all messed up and dozens upon dozens of items were no longer dropping since loot 2.0 had been released and that included a lot of dragon parts. Long story short I did find some small quantities of mats, and I also found someone that had some left over that was willing to craft some plates for me. So for a while I did have those plates in stock at the shop and I'm pretty sure that in all of EU, this was indeed the only place you could buy Joplin plates. So anyway at some point I had all these awesome plates, I had Joplin plates and Neverdie plates in the shop but sales were very rare. Every once in a while someone would say something about prices being too high or something, so the plates just sat there, no takers. I reviewed my prices and lowered them a bit, hoping that someone would recognize the value in those plates. Then one day, someone came and bought the set of Joplin plates and re-listed them on the Caly auction for about 30% more markup... This was really heart-breaking; all this time and effort spent to try to be of service only to see your hard work go completely unappreciated and wasted frankly.
Around that time I began to think about moving my operation to Calypso. I thought:
I bet if I was on Calypso I'd have more exposure and my efforts would end up being appreciated more. I was also beginning to realize that most people who go to Monria with a plan to hunt any particular mob is already bringing the armor they need with them, they're not relying on anything being available locally. And the persistent Monria community is actually very small, I think my biggest customer in all my time on Monria was actually DME, the community manager (hard to be sure cause you actually can't see who bought what in your sales notifications over there, some bug with it that MA still hasn't gotten around to fixing after all these years... ooops did it again.. Sorry!). So it became more and more clear that if I wanted to succeed long-term, I had to be on Calypso.
Merry Mayhem was coming up so I decided I would test the waters. I used my Medium Land Plot at Livas heights that has 2 snugs on it and placed 4 shop keepers full of armors in each snug. I had to pretty much rob my RT and Monria shops of shop keepers and all the best armors for this but I had to make this worthwhile so I did. I advertised it like crazy in game during that time to see if I could generate a decent amount of sales. In the end, it wasn't great, but it was better then all the sales on Monria and RT combined so I decided I had to have my main operation on Caly.
Twin Peaks mall (Spring 2018):
I was really getting tired of these shops that were hard to find and that I had to do a ton of promotion in order to even get anybody to come visit so from that point forward, I had decided the only shops I ever want to own are shops that are in the most desirable places, that have the bonus of being randomly visited, I wanted to free up all this advertising time to focus on other things like getting new inventory, crafting, making improvements, etc... So the first thing that came to mind was Twin Peaks mall, it was the obvious choice.
I bought my first shop at Twin Peaks mall in the Spring of 2018 which was the one where the Robot Armor shop currently is. I bought it from a guy in the UK that was selling out. Then only a couple of months later I secured a deal on the large enhancer shop that used to be where the Mutant Armor shop is. Both of these I bought with CLDs and some ped to make up the difference. Around that time I sold my shop at Tangerine but I wasn't ready to give up on Monria yet after all the time and effort I had invested into it.
For a while I just had 2 shops at Twin Peaks mall. They both only had 150 item points indoor at the time and 10 points in the display areas. It was really difficult to decide what to offer in each shop. The best thing I could figure out to do was to have a rotating stock in one of them and keep the other one as the Robot Armor shop. So depending on the time of year the large shop closest to the Televator would either be called the Mayhem Armor shop, or the Migration Armor shop and be stocked accordingly with suitable armors and plates. But that meant I had to strip everything down 4 times a year and re-stock it completely with different armors and plates. It was very time consuming but this was a stage at which I was struggling so I felt that time was one of the commodities which I had and could leverage, so I just went along with that plan for a while. If you go back through my early posts in my Animal Armor shop thread for example you can see that I was calling it the Migration Armor shop back then. So I had 3 shop threads: Robot, Mayhem and Migration, but only 2 shops.
Another interesting aspect of this that should be noted here is that at the time, my Manufacture armor skills were pretty low, I couldn't even craft Zombie armor. When I first started creating armor shops, the Tech Gizmos didn't exist so the only way to skill up Armor Crafting was by making actual armors. I had often felt overwhelmed with this whole scheme I had, I felt it would just never be possible for me to catch up on that and be able to craft the uber armors since it was extremely difficult to sell the lower level armors with the recent changes MA had made to how armors decay in loot 2.0 (basically no penalty anymore for being protected inadequately so most hunters just used Perseus for everything, which I couldn't make). Things were not looking great for me and what I was trying to accomplish, sometimes I felt like I was probably just wasting my time since there was just no way I could ever compete with better established armor providers.. I'm not going to say I felt despair, but I definitely felt overwhelmed and felt like the odds were just not stacked in my favor at all. When Tech Gizmos came out in the Fall of 2017, I experimented with it a bit but the losses were just so large that I couldn't see it as a sensible means of skilling up at the time.
The competition with Genesis begins (Fall 2018):
Obviously lol, the elephant in the room that no-one is talking about... It's so funny that to this day people contact me sometimes and pretend like I don't know that Genesis exists. Of course I know it's there, I discovered
@Drakil's operation back in 2017 when I just opened my first armor shop in Tangerine. When I opened my Armor shop on Monria I even messaged
@Auktuma hoping he could help supply me with some crafted armor plates. In the end that never happened but I was in awe of what they had over there and in some way was thinking to myself:
Yep, that's the sort of operation I could see myself creating in the long-run.
One quick side note about Genesis, which I think might be somewhat insightful for people and help you understand what formed the concept for my Armor shops early on: Auktuma makes all of these armors for the Genesis armor shop, he is the uber Armor crafter in the game and this operation at Genesis is in my opinion primarily aimed at selling crafted armors. I don't think this is a secret, in fact, on the first post of his shop thread I think Drakil says specifically that he is working with Auktuma. So anyways there's nothing wrong with that, in fact it's very much needed and very much appreciated by the community. However, I think that this Armor shop concept is going to be a bit conflicted internally. What I mean by this is that for example, it serves them to only have a few parts of Rutuba on hand; why would anyone buy the Rutuba if there's only 3 parts available at 160% when next door you have a full set of Perseus at 145%? So I thought this internal conflict between looted and crafted armors is not likely to go away anytime soon and I felt like that was something that could play in my favor because in contrast, my aim was just to be able to offer all the best stuff, whether it's looted, crafted, upgraded, mined, limited, unlimited, I don't care. So instead of just throwing in the towel before even getting started, I realized I
can cut myself a portion of the market, it's
possible to compete and I
can succeed with this. The key is just to have no bias, period, or, have the purest of bias; a bias towards the best armor options and nothing else. That would be the one thing I have that they don't have over there and which they might find hard to have even in the future (note that a lot has changed at Genesis since then and I will get into that later but that was my line of thinking back in 2018. Also note that the goal here is not to speak derogatorily of anyone or their shops, I just wish to convey to you what was going through my head at the time, that's all. They obviously have an amazing shop which to this day I still struggle to compete with).
But anyways, the one very obvious aspect which I had difficulty competing with at the very beginning was item points. If there ever was one thing that Genesis was doing that basically no one else could do was the shear volume; the abundance of the offering. Just overwhelming. I think at the time they had something like 70 shop keepers there, so that's 70 x 20 = 1400 item points of armors and armor plates. Now granted, in the looted armor room those shop keepers were not full, but still, what the heck was I supposed to do with just 320 item points? It was pretty obvious to me I was going to have to invest in more shops and more item points.
Back then, ped was a bit tight, shop keepers were only going up in price so I didn't really want to buy more of them... But one day I had an idea. I noticed that on the 2nd floor of Twin Peaks mall,
@Buzz Lightyear and
@Kikki Jikki both had large shops. I also knew that both of these guys also had an Armor shop somewhere else; Buzz had an Armor shop on the 3rd floor and Kikki Jikki had an Armor shop at Emerald Lakes mall. So I thought if I can get these guys to move both their Armor shops here to the 2nd floor, maybe together we can compete with Genesis because together we could get closer to 1k item points. At that stage, the 2nd floor would become a much more interesting place to visit if you're looking for Armor. Was even pondering catchy names to call the 2nd floor of Twin Peaks mall like for example: Armor Alley or Armor Row...
I sent both of those guys private messages in game telling them about my idea, asking them if they could move their Armor shops to the 2nd floor, even promised them to do free advertising for all 3 of us if they did. Buzz said he would think about it but he never did move his shops around. I think in the end it's just a huge endeavor and I think he probably just didn't think it would be worth doing. Kikki Jikki declined, said he was trying to sell out and so in the end I made an offer on his shop and he accepted, which effectively added some 200 more item points to my operation.
Growth, growth and more growth (early 2019):
I spent about a week figuring out what to do with this new shop and what to call it. In the end I just stayed with the Migration Armor shop name since I already had a thread here on PCF and a concept. I loaded it with some armors and plates I already had. It looked terrible at first; was just a couple of Tron displays in the middle with a bunch of armor hanging from them. Sales were very poor; really few sales. One day I decided it just didn't make sense to call it the Migration Armor shop since migration only lasts a couple months each year, so I messaged a moderator on PCF and asked to have the thread name changed to Animal Armor shop (this was before they updated the forum, now I can just change the thread title myself but back then you couldn't). It made sense, after all, I already had a shop called the Robot Armor shop which was doing pretty well right across from it, so I thought for those that don't hunt bots, here's an Animal Armor shop. So now I kind of had a theme going, I had a Robot armor shop for Burn/Pen, an Animal armor shop for Imp/Cut/Stb and a Mayhem armor shop for rotating stock depending on what's going on at the time. My operation was now beginning to really take shape.
Right in front of the Robot Armor shop there was a small shop for sale, I had noticed the deed was in a shopkeeper with a price on it. One day, when I kind of had all my shops how I wanted them to be, I started to think about how best to grow further and started to think about buying this small one, I thought maybe I could use it to put Electric protection in there, would make sense since it's right in front of the Robot Armor shop and some robots do Electric damage. I was slowly building up my ped card that week to buy it and was thinking;:
in a few days I think I'll be able to buy it. One day I noticed someone lurking around, checking it out, going into the shop next door where the deed was... I thought; Oh crap, he's thinking about buying it, I better do this now.. I quickly went to the TT and sold about 2k ped worth of Polaris armor and a couple thousand ped of oils or something, then went back to buy the Deed and it was gone! Gahhhh! The guy had bought it and was already setting it up! I was so pissed! I just missed it by like 1 minute!!!
So anyway since I had all this ped now I decided to go ahead and buy additional item points for the 3 large shops I did have. If I recall, I believe I spent 8k ped to add 80 item points to my shops which brought my overall capacity to 600 item points...
There is still so much to tell but I've been working on this for several hours now and I don't even know if anyone cares really.. So let me all know if you want to hear the rest of the story and I'll gladly tell it
As a sneak peek into the conclusion, here's some chapter titles:
My love-hate relationship with Perseus (2019):
The competition with Genesis heats up (late 2019):
Large-scale overhauling of the 3 shops +new signs for damage types (end 2019):
And then.... After all this time, I finally get noticed (early 2020):
The 4th shop on the 2nd floor (early 2020):
Armor Tech Gizmos to the rescue (mid 2020):
Re-inventing the Mayhem Armor shop (mid 2020):
My 2nd largest purchase ever in Entropia (early 2021):
The future (2021 and beyond):
Let me know if you want me to continue the story!!!
Cheers,
Legends
The Evolution of a Shop idea - Part 1 
