Volley/Drop/Transfer gold explained

This is my first guide to volley, drop and gold transfer, so bare with me. Let’s start with some key definitions:
Volley: partnering with another player to buy a third player repeatedly for a profit.
Drop: removing an ally from your list, to free gold at a loss.
Keeper: the player that will keep the volleyed player.
Sender: same as keeper but will drop ally after volley.
Receiver: the player that will benefit of the generated profit.
Noob: the volleyed player that will spam WC for more volley because clueless of what just happened.
Every time you buy an ally his/her cost increases 5%, we will call that the “markup”.
Every time someone hires an ally away from you, you’ll make a 1.5809% profit, we’ll call that, you guessed it, the “profit”.
Every time you drop an ally you loose 40,100009% the “loss”.

Let’s illustrate with some examples, and explain from them:

The “Markup” and the “Loss”
Buy an ally @ 79,142,361, then go to your “allies” the new ally cost is 83,099,479, which is indeed 79,142,361x1.05.
Now, drop that same ally and you are refunded 47,406,267, you incurred a 31,736,094 loss, which is 79,142,361x0.4100009.

The “Volley” and the “Profit”
Let’s say you want to transfer gold from your main to your ALT. Your main is then the sender and your alt the receiver.
The receiver buy an ally @ 79,142,361 as averred above new cost becomes 83,099,479.
The sender buys that same ally @ 83,099,479 and cost increases to 87,254,452.
The receiver gets a notification “You made 80,393,523 gold”, which is 79,142,361x1.015809, thus a 1.58% profit.
When the receiver buys back the ally, it’s then the sender’s turn to make a profit, in this example it is “you made 84,413,199”, which is 83,099,479x1.015809 again a 1.58% profit.
Sender and receiver keep repeating that process making a profit at each sell. Since the markup (%) is much higher than the profit (%), the ally will quickly become unaffordable. In order for the receiver to profit of the newly pocketed gold, the sender must keep the ally.

The “Transfer” of gold
This is the most interesting segment of this guide, as it will show you what to do to lower the losses. We already know those 3 parameters:
Profit = 1,58809%
Markup = 5%
Loss = 41.00009%
Those percentages are applicable at any given time you hire, sell or drop an ally, at the exception of an effective volley. Yes, with an effective volley, you can reduce your loss as low as 8.5%.
First, you start with an ally at a very low price let’s say one @15,068,128 (the receiver always buys first). You make sure nobody else is on the volley but your main and your ALT. If you volley this ally 50 times and the sender keeps here is what you get:
Sender does the last purchase @ 1,797,258,762 and keeps an ally now valued @1,887,121,700
Receiver makes a profit of 303,287,520
Sender makes a profit of 288,618,383
If the sender decides to drop the ally, the sender will incur a 756,735,972 loss from that given drop. However, since the volley generated a profit of 288,618,383 the loss is in fact just 24.81% instead of the 41%. And since you own both accounts, and the aggregate profit is 591,905,903 that brings the loss to 164,830,069, which is now just a 8.73%.
With a volley over 78 times the loss gets under 8.5%, after that it’s just negligible.

I have put together an excel spreadsheet showing all the amounts and percentage for each type of scenarios for up to 100 volleys, and I’ll edit this thread with a link to it as soon as I take the time to host it online. I believe I captured the core of this mechanic and explained as simply as I could; hopefully, this tutorial is helpful and benefits you.

I’ll do more testing, and update this thread if needed.

N.B. Dropping an ally is optional; the alternative would be to volley high enough to have a good amount of gold transferred, and low enough he/she will be hired from you easily. I might do another thread: how to pick an ally to volley.

 

I used the terms "sender" and "receiver" as I imagine people would understand and associate the idea of transferring gold to wiring money from a bank account to another. The “sender” is the one sending the funds, and the “receiver” is the one receiving the funds. I think it makes sense.