Pandora:
Thank you, but a slight correction here–Snowfish was confirmed by an employee of AE to be female, so I’m the #2 woman. Still, an honor to be close, and much higher than I ever imagined being. And yes, I’m certainly very passionate about playing the game! I like to encourage this passion in all players, whether they are a “megawhale” (spent astronomical amounts of money) or the large majority who are f2p (free to play).

Pandora:
I live in NJ, where I am semi-retired, but I teach medical English to doctors overseas (online work) and occasionally do translational work for Asian pharmaceutical companies. Our family’s main income comes from real estate–like the non-virtual kind. That’s actually how I started with AE–I wanted to buy the virtual land “under” the real properties; it kind of offended my sense of ownership otherwise, haha. Our family owns dozens of rental properties in NJ, but we also invest in new construction in Seoul, and now, parts of Japan–so I do have a secondary reason to be there (along with other reasons, like the translational work, and visiting family in Asia).

I am fortunate enough to do most of my work from home, when I’m not on one of my frequent trips abroad. I enjoy being out in Nature and outdoor activities like camping. I love plants and animals, and my Basset Hounds are my other obsession. Oh, and I collect hundreds of rare plants; I have a small business selling rare plants, which I propagate from imports.

Pandora:
I have only been playing for a little longer than a year. I am one of the newer large whales in the game. It didn’t take long for me to get from “This is crazy how much some of these players are spending in this game!” to “Oops, I guess I’m one of the crazy ones.” 😆

Pandora:
I started just like a lot of ordinary players, with curiosity about a geolocating game, and with the intention to just use it as a beer money app. I actually did quite a bit of research on it before I bought my first plot. I watched a lot of videos from the Beer Money Network on YouTube and found it interesting–I read up on the different types of strategies, fully believing I would be “f2p+” as they called it (free to play plus Explorer’s Club), definitely NOT a whale. However, this game has a way of sucking you in. I can and do spend a lot on entertainment/hobbies, so this went in that category–but unlike in other games where you can “whale out”, there is actually the possibility of not only earning the money back one day, but profiting largely if the game outlasts your breakeven point. I consider this like closer to high-stakes gambling than secure investment in that regard. There are no guarantees or safety nets in this game. I’m “all-in” at this point, but I do believe in the longevity of this game. I have issues with this company, but in general, I see it doing nothing but growing lately.

Pandora:
It’s a long and sordid story I’m not going to go fully into, but it started with South Korea. I spent a smaller amount of money for presidency of that country when it first came out because I happened to be in that area anyway (for work and family visits). I was nervous about it taking so long to get approval for native downloads, but an ex-employee of AE felt confident it would, so I asked if I could get some guarantee of return if it didn’t. Turns out, I had a right to be nervous, because it was the first country to be rejected by the local governing bodies in charge of gaming. AE made good on the promise, though, and I got a large amount of ABs refunded *and* to keep my parcels (I am not allowed to say how much, as part of my deal, but it was significant, and I’m pretty sure they will never make that deal again with the current management).

On the flight back from China, just by chance, I was going through two Japanese airports on the second day the country on AE was open for buying, and I had the large pile of ABs from the South Korean deal. I do feel a strong connection to Japan due to having some Japanese blood (I am mixed race). I also love Japanese culture and food.

However, the story was complicated because of a whale war with another whale I’m not going to name specifically, but who is rather notorious in the game, after communications broke down. There are two sides of every story and all I can say is we both felt slighted by the other at some point, and we fought over it based on principles that went beyond game strategy. I’m not here to badmouth him or dredge up the drama further now. What I will say is he is a formidable competitor, and I don’t take for granted that I won’t have to fight him again over Japan just because I pushed it up to be the second most expensive country. This is also why no one should take for granted that just because someone is lower in the leaderboard, that they will just be easy pickings and roll over for the higher player, either. Nothing lasts forever in this game and I can’t ever rest on my laurels.

Pandora (continued):
Japan later began to take on another shade altogether and became a means to an end for revenge. Not even against my obvious opponent, but there were others who were trying to intimidate me out of the game by doxxing me and at one point, making up a false report of me to send to the company (which was investigated and proven a lie). When you get to a certain level in the game, people are willing to play dirty because of jealousy, etc., but I wasn’t going to leave their attacks unanswered. These players all conveniently stood in titles along my path to retaking Japan, so I called my last trip my revenge tour–I was able to take out 4 in one trip by piling on thousands of parcels over their heads in the process. I think it really underscores the fact that people play the game for different reasons. Mine was for both strategic and personal reasons, and in that last aspect, worth every penny for the entertainment.

Pandora:
It’s funny because people seem to think I’m very outgoing and friendly from my interactions online… Maybe it has to do with my teaching style. In real life, I am actually more introverted than anything; I don’t like being around many people. These internet communities are more of an escape. And as mentioned, this game has ended up making me more cynical about trusting people, but it has also shown me who my true friends are here. There are some who continued to support me through highs and lows, and I appreciate them like my brothers. This is the double edged sword of social media, I guess. You have to pick and choose carefully who you trust. I’m outspoken and you get my unvarnished opinion every time, and that makes me both friends and enemies. I have undying loyalty in my heart for some whom I consider my “ride or die” allies in this game, and for everyone else, I’d like them to get to know my petty and vengeful side. As Machiavelli said, “It’s better to be feared than loved, for fear is a more consistent motivator.”–haha.

Pandora:
I have met isolated Japanese players through Reddit and Discord randomly. I only recently joined a Discord server for Japanese AE players. I think they were a little shocked when they found out who I was and didn’t really know what to make of me (their emojis showed it all, lol). I wouldn’t say colonizing someone’s cities with thousands of parcels usually makes you tons of friends, but they’re nice and respectful to me enough, anyway, ha. I’m not really in there to make friends, but just to gather intel on the perspective of natives there.

How is it going in Japan? Well, it seems they have many of the same complaints as other players around the world–about glitches/frustrations in minigames, the game being less fair to non-US players (ad payouts, minigame pots, etc); all valid concerns. However, they are excited about playing AE, and the game continues to grow in popularity there.

Pandora:
Ah yes. There’s certainly strategy to that. As a non-local “colonizer”, I don’t have the luxury of building up slowly at my leisure. This wasn’t my own invention, this was tried-and-true strategy from watching all the larger whales, from KOQ to my biggest rival in Japan–if you take a title, you should bury it. Spreading yourself too thin is a killer because even though you gain more titles temporarily, you will waste your energy constantly traveling to take places back.

I always knew Tokyo would be the biggest prize, and important to hold–it has a population of nearly 14 million people and is an international center for commerce and tourism. AE is funny in that it splits up some large cities like Seoul, Tokyo, Berlin and Mexico City into smaller mayorships (and the megacities themselves count as governorships), whereas other large cities like Paris, Rome, and Rio de Janeiro remain simply mayorships. So with Tokyo, I strove to control not only the governorship as a whole, but also all the central “wards” that make up Tokyo (and I did the same in Seoul). This ended up hotly contested, but I am committed to holding on and doubling down. In this last trip, I spread out further to Nagoya, Osaka, Saitama and Yokohama with big numbers that took the largest city and the gov simultaneously (as mentioned, the decisions being made strategically also coincided with personal revenge). I now hold governor titles of the 6 most populated prefectures of Japan, along with some of the biggest mayorships within them. Most whales go “all in” on the high yield cities, and I stick to that also. Burying a fellow whale is just harder because we both have money, so you can’t just +1 the competition; you can’t even just +2000 them and feel safe, in the case of countries.

It also helps if titles are “stacked” (or you could think of it as nested). For example, if I buy in Shinjuku, it also goes towards my numbers in Tokyo, and subsequently, to reinforcing Japan. I chose not to pursue a higher title in NJ and just help my allies there (including KOQ, who I encouraged to become governor of NJ), so anything I buy near home in the States cannot be “stacked”. Yes, there are added travel costs to buying abroad, but I either get these reimbursed for work, or they are trips I am taking anyway/on free miles. It’s just more worth it for me to place overseas, which has a high growth trajectory.

Pandora (continued):
The last point I want to make is that when you are playing at a high level in the game, competing over presidencies, time becomes almost a more limiting commodity than money. Last trip, I went all over Japan and bought 20,000 parcels in a week and a half time (which may be a record in this game). The reason was to force my competitor to spend more than 2 weeks doing nothing but placing parcels all day if he chooses to come back and fight me, something that is difficult for people with work schedules and other obligations (things I do not worry about). Casual players do not realize the amount of time it takes to place 3700 parcels a day–this is not the kind of thing that you can do while nonchalantly sightseeing with family on vacation. It’s kind of miserable and you barely eat or sleep, just obsessively and repetitively push a button for 16 hours a day. Placement is not only limited by the time, but you have to constantly move to avoid filling up the screen. My strategy there was to take public transportation–buses, subways, trains, even a water taxi at one point–just to mix it up and keep moving with minimal effort. It also made the boring task of continuously pressing a button a little bit more palatable when you can enjoy a view, as did making pixel art with parcels. Look for my dragons in Seoul, the airport I renamed in Incheon after a friend, and my Korean name stamp all over the world.

Pandora:
I am definitely in saving mode. I think most big whales must maintain a large war chest of hundreds of thousands of ABs at any time, especially if you buy overseas and plan to defend. I bought a little bit in NJ near where I live, but that doesn’t help me maintain my best titles overseas. The unfortunate thing about saving is it’s not only boring, you lose out on potential rent from placed parcels. However, I do believe that when it comes to overall badge worthiness, it’s worth it to save for defending titles overseas. I’m not going to be starving or broke for not withdrawing a bit of rent, and I will probably convert some as well, at the end of the year conversion sale.

Pandora:
Badge income helps to lower your breakeven point in the game. That means less time for AE to repay the debt whales dig into; it makes a difference, but the Catch-22, of course, is that no title lasts forever if you don’t defend it, which restarts the vicious cycle of spending. The gamble is whether the game will last long enough for one to see breakeven, especially in this dynamic landscape. I don’t think any big whale can go in feeling 100% confident it will happen; but the possibility is the temptation. I am realistic about this game being addicting in that respect, but paradoxically, that’s also the reason I think it will continue for a while. This game capitalizes on human inclinations of greed, wrath, envy, gluttony (a theme which inspires my game handle, Pandora). That part of human nature is not going away anytime soon, so I think the game will last for a while and I’m willing to gamble on that.

An added secret in the game that smaller players don’t realize is that the trend for breakeven times getting longer is not linear. You can play around with numbers on AEcalc.com. As you buy more land, yes, your time lengthens, but not proportionally to the added amount you spend. With badge income and the refund from Korea, buying tens of thousands more parcels did increase my time before I see profits, but not as drastically as some people might think. In fact, even the top megawhales have breakevens closer than many might guess, especially if they are getting tons of badges to cut down that time further.

That said, no whale that I know of (a whale is defined as having spent more than $5K USD equivalent in the game) has profited yet, so we are all talking theory and gamble. Every smaller player will see profit before us, just in small trickles; but this will flip dramatically if the game hangs on a few years.

Pandora:
Absolutely. Well, I can’t speak for all the bigger whales… I heard some of them don’t even boost outside of SRB. Not me, though. You’ll be hard-pressed to find my boost button in the green “off” status even though non-SRB is only 15% of our rental income–unboosted is a cardinal sin. I’m all about the hustle. I collect diamonds, spin the wheel, boost 24-7, grind on arcade and surveys. About the only thing I don’t do is minigames (because I’m not great at them, I think it’s a waste of time for me personally, although I admire people who can devote that amount of focus for hours). I won’t hesitate to buy AB packs if I need them (because there’s no way to grind a million atlas bucks in the short time needed for a country takeover), but I also supplement by any means necessary. I am proud to say I have every challenge badge to date, including the first one (which I was also the first player in Discord to get). In other words, just because I can afford to waste money doesn’t mean that that should be my first choice. 😂

Pandora:
Ha! That’s a joke, right? Nah, not at all, I think it’s a common misconception. If I have a problem, I go through customer support like everyone else, and half the time, they ignore me or frustrate me by barely reading my question (but they are admittedly getting better).

Recently during one of the SRBs, there was a glitch that affected several people, but me in particular because I boosted seven times coincidentally within that few minutes it came up. I lost out on around $40 because of their error, and I had the screenshots with the photo metadata to prove the loss in that timeframe. They just made excuses not to reimburse, saying “it didn’t affect many players” and “it’s fixed going forward”. Honestly, I don’t care that much about $40 in itself, it’s more the principle, especially after I spent that much money freely and by my own will the month before. It’s really a point of contention with me–that AE spends so much money on dumb stuff few people care about (like promoting a reality show competition that is only marginally relevant and probably doesn’t really attract new players much)… but they can’t be transparent or accountable for things central to the game, like stable and reliable rent.

Building trust is important in a game like this. I feel like they’ve dropped the ball and missed valuable opportunities to engender more trust in their core followers (and yes, many of those are whales). For example, they took away game features like selling parcels and the referral program because players were abusing them to cheat. I get that they would want to control that, but why not set it up with safeguards like minimum pricing on certain rarities, and more limited bonuses for referrals? Without referrals, growth within the game depends entirely on local marketing. That seems to really limit the prospects of organic growth and dissemination of a game like this.

Pandora:
That is a tough one to limit to one. I and other players (mostly whales) would like to see an “AB ledger”. That means a visible account of the recent AB transactions–in or out (for example, +20 for arcade, +24 for survey, -400 for buying 4 parcels, etc)–similar to badges, but tracking every recent transaction. Again, this is about accountability and transparency, especially since some of these glitches are making people have to keep track of their own income and ab changes.

The other thing I would like to see is for them to not only take reported spoofers and other cheaters more seriously (which I do see them doing lately), but to have an appeal process in place in case of false reports (which sometimes happen due to jealousy). Recently, a French whale was banned after he spent more than €35,000 in the game. No reason was given, and he wasn’t even allowed to ask the question, he was just kicked out of the chat and deleted after he was very polite about requesting an explanation. I spoke with him at length and he had a very detailed accounting of how and where he bought every parcel in France, and even showed his train ticket receipts. He wasn’t one of these crazy obvious cheaters who bought a bunch of outlandish badges around the world impossible to do in limited time periods, he was just someone a rival reported (they claimed they did from a French group, but had no evidence he was cheating). Anyway, I and other whales were kind of outraged he couldn’t even at least show his evidence to defend himself, and was banned with no appeal possible (just summarily given the “read the TOS” form letter). Eventually, we did get them to reinvestigate, and found that he was banned for no reason. He was given an apology but they couldn’t undo the ban, so they had to give him AB back. The bottom line is they have a “shoot first, ask questions later” policy now, and I think there should be more humans involved in the process.

Like with my other suggestion, it’s about trust and transparency. I was happy to spend money in the game because I believed in it, but this kind of stuff makes you extra cynical. Don’t get me wrong, I still love this game and will spend money if necessary to defend… but I think they need to stop getting distracted by side projects and work on maintaining the core features of what makes this game great.

Pandora:
I don’t think that any player should see this as some sort of secure investment. They could pull the rug out from under us at any moment, and there’s no guarantees. If you put money in, only put as much money as you are prepared to lose and not have it affect your lifestyle.

That said, this game attracts people playing it for all kinds of reasons. If you’re primarily interested in it as a f2p player, there’s nothing wrong with that, just have a realistic goal. Do lots of research before you start–tier jumps, parcel buying vs badges, about how to get the best mayorships (usually these are high population cities and/or transportation/tourist hubs like those containing airports, highways or train stops). Scout out the competition before you challenge a mayor. You can look at the areas from afar on the AE webmaps, and you can also click on profiles in the leaderboards and learn a lot about competitors from their other mayorships and passport pages.

It is slow in the beginning, and I’m an impatient person, which is what started me on my whale path. If you are patient, though, don’t be discouraged and keep plugging away. There are guides online like Tasty Wallet (website), and Beer Money Network and Bronze Dragon videos on YouTube. There are definitely ways to earn money if you put enough time and effort into it. I think the best f2p player in the US has made thousands of dollars without putting in a cent. Perhaps your own website can become a valuable resource for Italian players to learn optimal strategies; that’s so encouraging to see.

Pandora:
Tiramisu. What can I say, I’m a sucker for desserts.

“Grazie a tutti i fantastici giocatori”– did I say it right? (Thank you, Duolingo.) And thanks, Italy Atlas, for your efforts!