Welcome to Gaia! ::

Hermit Cats are relatively inexpensive because:
1. They only glow one at a time
(ONCE I saw two glowing)
2. Some fish drop them during booty grab.
The price went up some when Gaia nerfed some more fish not to drop them.

Since you posted in this guild I am assuming by 'good fish to buy' you mean for booty grab.

If you have the gold the short answer is dolphins. Next would be watermeats.

I am assuming you are not posted in very many threads. Both of these fish pay out well on booty grab and are long enough lived to give you time to seek invites before they die. Dolphins are one of the fish that all glow at one time which of course helps the gold generated from booty grab.

If you do not have enough gold and want to start smaller I recommend Dark Knight fish. They live for 20 weeks and cost a lot less than a dolphin (Current LMP 53k vs 250k). They don't pay out as well of course but they do pay out well enough you can start getting some invites and tank exposure. I track my tank gold and my dark knights were on course for paying for themselves plus some profit. I did not finish that test because I switched in mid-stream to dolphins during the great fish sale. However based on the numbers I had up to then I am confident they were going to turn a profit and allow me to purchase more / better fish.

I would either stockpile them in inventory or put them in your tank and freeze them until you are ready to do a full tank of them at once. If you do not have the exposure so lots of people see and play your glows you will not make any money off your fish no matter what they are. If you only have 1 or 4 dolphins in your tank you won't get many invites and those fish will be aging while you wait to buy more.

When I moved to a full tank fo Dark knight fish I started getting a moderate amount of invites but I still had to hunt them down. When I went to a full dolphin tank the invites started seeking me out.

I am currently in about 150 booty grab threads and my gold earnings seem to have plateaued. I think they peaked at around 125 threads or a bit less.

Once you already have really good tank exposure then you could probably make some other fish pay for themselves like maybe Lawnsharks, Airsharks, Stone Coatls etc. These fish pay out pretty well for the booty grab player but they have a much shorter life span and most of them cost more in MP than a dolphin. In other words, if you buy them early on you won't have enough time to get the exposure and generate enough gold to pay back what they cost you.

There are whole help threads on this topic but some general things you want to consider when buying fish for a booty grab tank are
Fish cost, life span, gold payout of fish, type of gold payout (lag), how many fish glow at one time. I prefer pure tanks because in my opinion they pay out better because it is easier to see 'patterns' in the gold dropping. (and yeah, I know there are some great mix combos.)

If you plan on a mix tank then you need to pay attention to what tank conditions the fish like so they can co-exist. Simple example - if 10 of your fish like a HOT tank and 7 like a COLD tank then someone is going to be unhappy and die sooner.

Fish popularity is also a little bit of a factor in invites but in general if your fish poop out tons of gold serious BG threads will invite you. Currently there are a lot of booty grab threads like mine that either invite dolphin only or have dolphins only on the first several pages. Below is a link to my thread if you want to experiment with playing different types of tanks. The first several pages are full dolphin tanks followed by dolphin / meat mix tanks and meat tanks. Then later are other mixed (and some pure) tanks. Probably every tank I invited to that thread can pay for itself with enough exposure but like I said above some of the combinations probably would NOT pay for themselves if the tank was not already in a lot of threads when the fish were dropped in. And yes, I know there are other really great BG threads out there besides mine. Mine is just one I know and have the link handy. Good luck with your choices. smile

Dancing Dolphins Raining Gold

Fancy seeing you here. xD I must say I frequent your thread David. Its my favorite to booty grab in. ^^ Plus I just grabbed your booty and bumped your thread. :]

Basically just read what he had said. I find that weird too but it makes sense when you think about it in the way David said.