TOPIC: Run Profit Calculator

jedibcg wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: Since I am going to the cons to see my friends I don’t think I can full count my travel time as a cost.

You're free to do as you like - but if you're not attributing all the costs and effort of doing a run and liquidating the tokens, your number won't be comparable with other people's numbers.

I.e. you'll come up with some profit per hour (or loss) but since you're not counting your travel time your number will be higher than someone who follows the same procedure but count's their commute time as a cost.

I look at it this way :

Suppose I like TD so much I'd pay $100 to go on a TD run even if there was no treasure.

- I could fill out this sheet and set my my my ticket price as -$22 (e.g. TD pays me $22 for each run).

If I did that, the sheet might calculate for me in some sense the "value" I'm getting from a TD run in some sense.

But this calculation wouldn't shed light on whether or not someone could make money running TD.

True but if I am going to see my friends already (which I am) then how exactly can I count that cost as fully TD's. It is the same as my living in Indy. Should I count the cost of my mortgage as my housing cost for Gen Con when I stay at my home? It is already a cost that I deal without TD. To travel to see my friends is a cost I am already accruing without TD. I could be 'working' TD well I am already in the city to see my friends, because the best time to see them is at the cons when everyone else travels to them.

Sure - you can use the calculator to compute the "value" you personally get out of TD by zeroing out things you'd do anyway - that's fine.

I'm just saying this number won't inform others on whether they (or anyone) could "make money" by running TD .

I would leave out the mortgage during Gen Con as you're local to Indy - it would shed interesting light on what a local could do with regard to generating a profit.

I think we have known for awhile it isn't profitable to grind runs, however bringing new people into the game and watching them have fun I think that has immeasurable value. Plus I have lots of fun doing stupid stuff with you all so in the end .

Matthew Hayward wrote: I'm not sure what question you're trying to answer.

The profitability for TD for me. For me, if I did additional runs at GHC or Origins because I am already in the city seeing friends. Then I can make about $30 an hour if I find at least 4 other folks to go with me for free. I am including the cost of a badge as I might not get a badge to see friends since I can see them without a badge.

So in a nutshell if I have 3.5 hours to do nothing then I can make about $35 by playing TD. The 3.5 includes listing and shipping time using mostly your values. I imagine they would be alot lower, but I didn't drill into most of them. I made Charms of Transmorph $5 and monster bits $6. As I continue to do more runs though it increases as the cost of my badge is spread over the runs and my listing time is not increased much.

Matthew Hayward wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

jedibcg wrote: Since I am going to the cons to see my friends I don’t think I can full count my travel time as a cost.

You're free to do as you like - but if you're not attributing all the costs and effort of doing a run and liquidating the tokens, your number won't be comparable with other people's numbers.

I.e. you'll come up with some profit per hour (or loss) but since you're not counting your travel time your number will be higher than someone who follows the same procedure but count's their commute time as a cost.

I look at it this way :

Suppose I like TD so much I'd pay $100 to go on a TD run even if there was no treasure.

- I could fill out this sheet and set my my my ticket price as -$22 (e.g. TD pays me $22 for each run).

If I did that, the sheet might calculate for me in some sense the "value" I'm getting from a TD run in some sense.

But this calculation wouldn't shed light on whether or not someone could make money running TD.

Sorry, but that’s nonsense from a business analysis perspective.

Jedi is going to GC whether or not he farms. Travel, lodging, and badge costs are fixed. It makes no sense to attribute any of those costs to determining whether farming would be profitable.

Now, if the ONLY reason he went to the Con was to farm, then it would make sense to include all those expenses.

See prior post, I'm trying to answer the question of "Can one make money at TD if they treat it like a business or job."

You seem to be trying to answer some other question.

I'm not sure what question you're trying to answer.

But why are you trying to answer that question? I dont think it is helpful. Farming could be a problem LONG before this method would calculate a profit. The reason is exactly as other poster have stated. Think of it this way; we arent talking about someone who buys out 10 runs to farm treasure; we are talking about someone who buys out 10 runs INSTEAD OF ONLY 3! So, you have to calculate the difference in cost when you add those extra runs, thus that wont include any additional parking, hotel, or con badge costs. Yes yes, i know that isnt what you intended, but again, why does the total profit when including those costs matter? It isnt relevant to any real people.

James J Krot wrote: I think we have known for awhile it isn't profitable to grind runs, however bringing new people into the game and watching them have fun I think that has immeasurable value. Plus I have lots of fun doing stupid stuff with you all so in the end .

I think if anything Matthew's calculations show it is profitable to grind runs. If you are just picking up additional full runs to 'farm' because can make a profit on those runs. It is questionable how much of a profit you make. It is questionable if it is worth it because the profit is so low. But if you can get out the ticket cost in pulls seems like a big oh yes. I know that is not what Matthew attempting to show because he is talking about someone going to a con with the sole purpose of farming. However someone already at the con with the time to spare can make a profit by buying tickets to run.

Again I am not saying it is amounts that anyone is going to get rich off of. There were plenty of tickets available for thursday at Origins and Game Hole Con if someone wanted to do this. The return just isn't much, but it is there. Yes there are better ways to make money. I am not saying that. Again if you want to make money you would sell tickets at a reduced cost to those that want to play. If that starts happening we are in trouble.

@jedibc & kurtreznor: YES! You got what I’m trying to say.

And I’m not saying all farming is necessarily bad. If it soaks up tickets that weren’t sold anyway (e.g. Thursday morning) it’s more revenue for TD. The problem IMO is when newbies or casual players get TC-blocked.

And you don’t need one person going from 3 to 10 to have an impact. Seven people going from 3 to 4 would reduce supply by the same amount.

Most of us are cool people. But greed is a powerful motivator and, as Jedi observed, not all of us can be trusted.

Is I went ahead and ran my numbers for pax south and found what we knew to be true, unless you pull amazing, you still lose money doing runs unless you pull really really good.
So I basically broke even on pax south on the strength of pulling a CoAS, 5k gold bar 7 transmorph and 1 arganite.
I only lost $55 on the con
I did 11 runs pulled 220 pulls total at pax south.

So I would say if you can’t make money at a small con like pax south with some very good pulls, you can’t make money just doing runs.

Also while I did a lot of runs, I did no ghosting, or loaning TEs with an expectation of getting extra treasure pulls back from players I loaned the TEs to.

I could see where having 6 CoA and ghosting a bunch of slots could turn a small profit, but according to the spreadsheet that would be still Only $132.94 for the con assuming average distribution.

Also as I have ran my numbers across the time I have been playing I find if you don’t count the outliers that a treasure pull is basically worth $3

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Matthew Hayward wrote:

Brad Mortensen wrote: I said before: you cannot include travel, lodging, or con badges in your “costs.” Those are “sunk costs,” whether you choose to farm or not. Farming is something you can do while at a Con. Nobody, least of all me, said anyone could make a living by going to GenCon specifically to farm.

If you don't like this way of calculating things I'm sure you can produce your own method and share it with us.

The question I am trying to answer here is: "Can one make money running TD, if they treat it like a business or job."

To answer that question it is necessary to consider all relevant costs - including the costs above you designate as 'sunk costs.'


I am a bit curious about what you think about farming now. Based on your past statements I had thought you believed that:

a. Farming is a bad thing, to be avoided.
b. Farming is either on the rise now, or will rise in the future with more TEs.
c. Farming, whatever its particulars, involves buying tickets in TD one wouldn't have bought otherwise in order to make profit (actual, real profit as if one were running a business or working a job).

What do you mean when you say farming?

Farming = “playing for profit.” Buying tickets and playing because the material rewards exceed to cost.

If I’m at Origins, and I have an hour or two to kill, and I decide to spend $348 on tickets and ghost five because I can expect a more than $100 profit (with both Nuggets) then that’s farming

And if I do it with premeditation, I shut out six newbies who just wanted to play for fun.

I’m thinking of farming as a part-time job. Your analysis is treating it like a full-time job. And I only think it’s bad as it affects other players who just want to play for fun, not profit.

It sounds like the answer to your scenario is to just ban or put a low cap on loot for ghost players. It's a lot harder for someone to come up with multiple groups of people who aren't interested in True Dungeon but willing to waste hours of their valuable convention time just to get loot for the farmer.

Mike Steele wrote: It sounds like the answer to your scenario is to just ban or put a low cap on loot for ghost players. It's a lot harder for someone to come up with multiple groups of people who aren't interested in True Dungeon but willing to waste hours of their valuable convention time just to get loot for the farmer.

Why do they have to be not interested in TD? I can guarantee you if you offer free tickets for True Dungeon at the 'cost' of all the loot you can get lots of interest for Gen Con. You likely could get a fair amount for Origins. I don't know about GHC. I know nothing about South Pax.

jedibcg wrote:

Mike Steele wrote: It sounds like the answer to your scenario is to just ban or put a low cap on loot for ghost players. It's a lot harder for someone to come up with multiple groups of people who aren't interested in True Dungeon but willing to waste hours of their valuable convention time just to get loot for the farmer.

Why do they have to be not interested in TD? I can guarantee you if you offer free tickets for True Dungeon at the 'cost' of all the loot you can get lots of interest for Gen Con. You likely could get a fair amount for Origins. I don't know about GHC. I know nothing about South Pax.

I don't see any problem at all with someone doing exactly that. You would be introducing lots of people to True Dungeon, some of whom might become token and ticket buyers. That's very different to me than empty ghost players taking slots away from actual people.

Mike Steele wrote: It sounds like the answer to your scenario is to just ban or put a low cap on loot for ghost players.

That’s just a bandaid. So no, that’s not the answer.

Gamers game. It’s what we do. Any rule you make to try to prevent profiteering will have a loophole or workaround, or it will punish innocent players. It’s a variation of Goedel’s Theorem.

The only way to eliminate the symptom is to eliminate the cause: just ensure that max loot is never permitted to rise to the point where running is profitable. Anything short of that and we’ll be tweaking rules every year.

Just because you wouldn’t run to make a profit of a mere $5/10/50 an hour doesn’t mean other people won’t. And maybe they’d only do it one run, but 20 people taking an extra 10 or 20... that is a lot of tickets.

I once asked you what you thought the absolute cap on loot should be. I asked if you would concede that 1000 TC was too many and would break the game. You said “no.” I’m curious if that’s still your position, because if it is, there’s no point in talking any further about this.

Brad Mortensen wrote:

Mike Steele wrote: It sounds like the answer to your scenario is to just ban or put a low cap on loot for ghost players.

That’s just a bandaid. So no, that’s not the answer.

Gamers game. It’s what we do. Any rule you make to try to prevent profiteering will have a loophole or workaround, or it will punish innocent players. It’s a variation of Goedel’s Theorem.

The only way to eliminate the symptom is to eliminate the cause: just ensure that max loot is never permitted to rise to the point where running is profitable. Anything short of that and we’ll be tweaking rules every year.

Just because you wouldn’t run to make a profit of a mere $5/10/50 an hour doesn’t mean other people won’t. And maybe they’d only do it one run, but 20 people taking an extra 10 or 20... that is a lot of tickets.

I once asked you what you thought the absolute cap on loot should be. I asked if you would concede that 1000 TC was too many and would break the game. You said “no.” I’m curious if that’s still your position, because if it is, there’s no point in talking any further about this.

I'd be all for doing a hard cap on loot for ghosts right now - that would permanently solve the problem you state of ghost players taking the spots of new players.

Regarding 1000 TCs, I don't recall the context of that talk. If they were all commons, it wouldn't break anything. Even all rares/uncommons/commons would only result in significantly more trade items in transmute recipes. I agree, if we had 1000 TCs today with the current treasure mix, there would be a lot of negative consequences.

It's been mentioned several times recently that if we were at max TCs in the 30's, that would be a serious issue. I'm not sure that's true, depending on how long we take to get there. Right now we're at 21 max, and we're only going up 1 TC per year. If we stayed at that pace, and got to 36 TC's 16 years from now (there's no increase next year, and then 1 per year for 15 years), I'm not sure at all that would be a problem, considering ticket prices are likely to be a lot higher in 15 years. Maybe it would actually be healthy for TD to have a gradual increase in the max, to help offset gradually higher ticket prices.