Empire Avenue the Sign-up Process

This post follows our previous intro to the Empire Avenue Review in 12 Chapters.

When signing up with Empire Avenue, you will be prompted to select a Group of Interest or a Market Index as well as a Ticker Name. Both can be changed later, eventually at a cost.

The EA Market Index

You have a large choice to adhere to groups of interest, but you have to restrict yourself to one only. For the sake of this exercise, I selected “Photography : Digital”.

Each of these Market Indexes has its own leader board, which allows you to monitor your progress compared to other players with similar interest.

My Experience with the Empire Avenue Market Index

Playing the game, I was progressing rather rapidly on the index, moving from the status of “Employee” to CFO and President, and then … Empire Avenue changed the rules and the index; with my relative progression I could have snapped the CEO within days, but as I said, the rules changed and about a week ago when I was President, the second seat after the CEO.  The indexing was completely messed up for half a day, which triggered heated discussions in some internal community forums (during the mess I was temporarily relegated and the index had completely changed).

EA then did a reset and came back with something which obviously prevented my dynamic growth but gave me back my President seat and a bigger distance to the CEO :-(

On other indexes it was noticed as well, that some fast movers were slowed down or relegated.

Of course EA has the right to change the rules at any time, it can however be frustrating, namely for people who perform well and ultimately blow some life into the program and keep it dynamic.

The feeling remains: CEO positions may be arbitrarily protected …  I cannot prove it. Never mind, I can always go and change my topic of interest and storm another hierarchy till … President :-).

The Ticker Name

I kept it short and sweet, “YORGO”. It’s easier to remember, also for your shareholders and easy to spell if you chat with people on the program. Others use their brand name and yet others huge long unpronounceable strings. The choice is yours, but my recommendation would be, keep it short and meaningful.

Conclusion

The sign-up procedure is smoot and easy and the program is very responsive. Unfortunately, newbies have no clue about the implications of their choices at this stage. On the other hand, a change of Index or ticker is possible later on.

I cannot get rid of the suspicion that there is some power play going on behind the scenes in as much as top positions in the index are concerned.

Let’s look at the set-up at our next chapter.