***NOTE - BOOK IS FINISHED SO DON'T BOTHER Poison Miisteltoeing ME***
05:16:32 - 01/06/25 You received a Book : Ignorance Is Bliss and a Lottery Voucher for being a subscriber
Ooft. Wonder what this is? My first thought after receiving my first donator reward after 26 days in the game...
Luckily that question remained restricted to a few faction mates and reading forum posts - some very helpful, others not so. I resisted the urge to start the book immediately and gathered as much info as possible.
So when SHOULD you start IIB??? When you've opened a certain number of gyms? When you have $5 billion saved? During a faction training month? I'll leave that for you to debate, but for me it was a case of as soon as I could get the resources together to sustain as high a daily energy budget as realistically possible. That meant restricting my stat gains/happy jumps until I felt ready to start the book.
03/07/25 You start reading the book Ignorance is Bliss. Total Battle Stats 28k
A rocky start - overdosing on Xanax in the build up, but with a free max happy jump booked in thanks to extremely generous faction mates meant I only had 400 energy stacked to get me going. This was the first of 3 ODs during the month...
So what was the plan? 3 Xanax, a reset, whatever energy drinks I could afford every day, and the occasional FHC. I joined a faction with hugely useful benefits like 48h booster cooldown, +50% energy drink bonus, -30% addiction. Also, reducing energy use of absolutely ev erything except training training training. I wasn't religious about this but I ignored missions for the month, and had only minimal participation in Ranked Wars.
I also joined a friend's new Music Store, which got it's 3rd star just after I started the book. This meant during the month I progressed through 7 new gyms nearly but not quite getting to the first heavy gym.
Here's what it cost:
2 Poison Mistletoe. $142000000
85 Xanax (consumed)
98 Xanax (insurance)
-58 Xanax (Insurance pd)
125 Total Xanax $103750000
6 Ecstasy. $222000
12 E-dvds. $58416000
8 FHCs. $104000000
930 points. $29760000
Rehab. $5250000
100 Cans Goose Juice. $34700000
106 Cans Damp Valley. $79500000
56 Cans Crocozade $70000000
21 Cans Taurine Elite. $83600000
Total Cost $710 498 000
That's a lot of spondulies for a noob, but like I said I had extremely helpful friends without whom I wouldn't have been able to do this anything like as effectively - donating Xanax, poison Mistletoe & e-dvds. Insurance was a net loss for me, but I feel I was lucky during the month.
So come on, what were the gains???
So like I mentioned, at the start of the book I'd ground my way to a mighty 28k total battle stats. Here's the graph of my progress...
After 31 days, 3 ODs 3 Ranked wars & over $700 million worth of resources, I reached 2.7 million Total Battle Stats.
I'm pretty delighted with that - for sure it could have been better, or a whole lot worse.
What were the main challenges? Well, keeping a lid on the process for a start. An unexpected challenge was the difficulty of helpful traders wondering WTF a noob was doing wasting their money buying e-cans. Also keeping shtum with the majority of my faction felt bad, but I realised the wisdom of that when a bad egg left the faction under a cloud. So the advice in the forums to keep it quiet when reading IIB is good advice, and I managed not to get my happy raided or trolled. I've hugely stunted my economic development during the month, but that'll recover.
So there you have it. I'm sure you'll all have ideas on how you'd do it differently, so leave a comment. Hopefully my experience will help others who are as ridiculously lucky to find this book as I was.