IPs rotate between ladder and non-ladder. If that's news to you, then awesome!
Because everything else below this line is just story time.
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Tired of keeping this under my hat.
This is gonna be lengthy, so I'll put a TL;DR at the bottom, maybe, I dunno. Most of you probably aren't going to care anyway.
It used to be possible to sell cheap NL sojs to spawn ladder clones. That's because Ladder and NL shared the same IPs. However, in June 2017, Blizzard separated Ladder and NL. They are now hosted on separate IPs. You will not find a Ladder game and a NL game on the same IP at the same time.
This increased the difficulty of spawning early Ladder clones (and the price of anni). So players started prepping each Ladder IP. In the last week of each season, when Ladder sojs are cheapest, nearly every Ladder IP gets loaded up with 40-70 Ladder sojs. Then when Ladder resets, each IP only needs a handful of expensive early sojs to walk.
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IPs rotate. They rotate back and forth between Ladder and NL. Just as an example, IP 104 was Ladder near beginning of this season, then spent a few days as a NL IP, and then rotated back to Ladder and got walked. Some of the big players in the anni market know IPs rotate but I feel like most of you are unaware because... well... it's never mentioned here in this forum, lol.
Why does this matter?
I stumbled across IP rotation a couple years ago.
I immediately thought:
1) If I can keep a close eye on the IP and see when they rotate, then maybe I can find a pattern to how/when they rotate.
2) If I can find a pattern to how they rotate, then maybe I can predict when an IP will rotate.
3) If I can predict when a specific IP will rotate, then I can load it up with cheap non-ladder sojs right before it rotates, and then pop it with Ladder sojs.
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I watched every IP closely for months. Keeping detailed tabs on both Ladder and NL servers. Making hundreds of games per day and recording the IP, time, and whether it was Ladder or NL. I talked to a handful of people who, while aware of rotation, thought I was crazy. They said rotation is totally random and not worth looking into. They were wrong. It's not totally random. It IS predictable AND profitable.
I would love to have prepped an IP with NL sojs and test the theory myself, but I didnt have enough cdkeys or fg to make it profitable for me. I needed help. I found 2 people that I thought were trustworthy enough to keep IP rotation a secret, AND crazy enough to bank-roll my idea.
Eventually I had a prediction ready for them. I didnt have all the mechanics nailed down yet but I was confident enough. I gave them a list of 4 NL IPs. I said "look, I can't yet predict that an exact IP will rotate on an exact day, but I can tell you that these 4 IPs will rotate some time in the next 10 days or so." They went with it. They prepped the 4 IP with cheap NL sojs. Within the 10 days, 2 IP rotated as predicted. A 3rd IP rotated shortly after, and the 4th IP simply disappeared. It wasn't showing up on Ladder or NL, and also wasnt listed as being off-line.
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My time spent with those 2 partners was a proof-of-concept. We parted ways shortly after. They continued to track the IPs themselves to some degree. I continued to track the IPs as well and got better at making predictions. I went on to make pretty good profit for a while, selling predictions to a handful of friends, who in-turn also made really good profit.
Even when I wasnt making/selling predictions, I was still making thousands of FG just by keeping track of IP rotation. Every time an IP would rotate from Ladder to NL NL to Ladder, I would let my friends know. They would gamble and walk it, hoping that it already had some NL sojs on it, and then tip me in FG or unid annis.
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Few preemptive answers to questions/comments that I'm expecting:
No, I will not teach you how to do this. If you want to make bank on predictions, then you can put in the hundreds of hours like I did.
No, I don't give a shit if you think I made this all up.
No, I will not name any of my partners or customers, though if any of them read this and want to come forward, then I'll confirm.
No, I am not currently for hire to make predictions. As lucrative as it was, I got burned out on staring at excel spread sheets and bot logs all the time. (If I knew how to code, then I would just write a program to gather and enter all the data. I had to record everything manually)
No, My predictions we're not always correct. I had about 80% success rate at the end, with most failures happening in the early stages.
Yes, I'm aware that I'm not the first to try this, but I'm the only person that I know of who was successful at it.
Yes, I will answer any other questions you have. Assuming any of you actually read this wall-of-text and got this far. Thanks for reading btw
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TL;DR IPs rotate between Ladder and NL all the time. It's possible to prep IPs with cheap NL sojs, all season long. There's no need to ONLY prep in the last week of Ladder.
EDIT: Typo and formatting
This post was edited by FGnewb on Jun 18 2020 04:38pm