Welcome to Gaia! ::

TLDR: In the current Gaian economy you should only own a tank because you want it for personal / aesthetic reasons. You should not own them for the purpose of trying to make gold.

If your intent is to earn gold from your tank by purchasing fish on MP and then collecting profit from booty grab gold paid by players - I do not believe that is physically possible at today's market prices. I've had my fish frozen for a couple of years now so I don't have current play numbers. Possibly someone else here has a different opinion but personally I don't see how it is possible for the numbers to work out.

I used to run six full dolphin tanks.
My tanks were posted in about 400 booty grab threads and guilds. Some of those faded over time as they always do but my point is my tanks were well represented and saw a lot of maxed out games.

From experience I know that back then a dolphin would gross me a max of roughly 750k over its four month life span.
Back then a dolphin on MP would cost me an average of say about 400k.
I've purchased them for as low as 225K and in a very few instances paid about 600k.
Current pricing on MP for dolphins:
Average Buy Price: 11,963,700,000 gold

There is simply no way a dolphin will ever, EVER make anything even remotely close to that even in a well exposed tank. You would be losing nearly 12 Billion gold per dolphin (x 17 dolphins in the tank) over the four month life span.
I am not personally willing to pay out over 50 Billion gold per month (average) just so other people can play my tank.

I assume the numbers would be similar with other high trigger fish since prices on all have skyrocketed with everything else. Dolphins are just the ones I have a lot of data on.

Real numbers would probably be even worse because from what I understand the number of BG threads and players has decreased significantly. The recent increase in the cap on daily gold is almost an insult because it does not change what a player or tank owner gets PER GAME. Most players are not willing to spend umpteen hours a day playing just booty grab to try to reach the new cap. The payout has not kept up with the rest of the site.

The people running this guild have worked hard to promote booty grab and have had a lot of contests with some pretty awesome prizes and such. I applaud their efforts and I'm not trying to sound bitter or angry or anything. But they are fighting an uphill battle until if / when Gaia ever decides to make tanks and booty grab more balanced with the rest of the current Gaia economy. But if you have limited disposable income (your reference to waiting for payday) I don't want you to spend a lot of real money on fish with the expectation they will make you a lot of gold in your tank.

Ironically, you'd make far more gold per fish by purchasing them from the fish store and selling them on marketplace. I don't buy gold generators so I don't know how that compares. I do know the current 10 BILLION + gold I could get from selling one dolphin on MP would be more than the combined total of the literally hundreds of dolphins that have lived and died in my tanks.

wow David! No loss of words for you xp

Yes, if I was a "normal" person I would be spending money on movies, going to the bar, etc. That's how I explain my ridiculous Gaia cash purchases to people. xD Besides food/drinks and my cell phone I really don't spend money on anything besides Gaia. Oh and I pay $5 a month for perks on my Minecraft server. I spend my life in the virtual world. xD

I was reading that watermeats payout has been decreased as well. So less glow, and you get less from the ones that do. But I visit my tank everyday so I get 5-9 glowing usually. I'm on here a lot so they glow pretty often.

And yeah, in the first Ask The Staff they really seemed to ignore all the Aquarium questions. They finally got sick of us enough to say they'd do something. xD Now just to hope they really do. I still want to address the lag issue. When there are a few tanks on one page, my PC freezes. My PC is not even a year old and it was expensive. It's a gaming PC. But it can't handle a few tanks. I searched for the pre-ATS thread and there isn't one. I never have Monday off so that's my only hope. They might not even do it tomorrow.

Nice, thank you!! :3

Yeah, someone had asked, "What did you have for lunch?" And they actually answered. stare

I wish people wouldn't waste our time with that kind of stuff.