Where did all the platinum come from?

[kgallowaypa]

I had a discussion with a friend yesterday about where the p99 blue and red economy came from when the server first launched. The server firsts who rushed to 50 then 60 and got geared out of course had access to the top item camps in Classic and Kunark and later Velious..but the items wouldn't be worth much to sellers until buyers had enough plat to meet demands. According to the p99 wiki, item prices in general have been rising since the server's launch but was it always 10pp per stack of bone chips, if you get my drift?

My buddy mentioned a glitch/exploit regarding a banker in rivervale back in 1999 live..if you gave him something like 50 gold and hit "change" he would give you back 50 plat and so on and so forth. This was apparently a thing in live until it was patched out and I am not sure if this was even a thing on project 1999. Did everyone just farm vendorable plat such as seafuries for months on end to amass hundreds of thousands of platinum and then control the market from this emulation's inception on both servers?

I do recall at one time in 2015 there was a glitch with the necromancer guards in West Cabilis that [unnamed guild] exploited to generate a ton of platinum but this was reversed by the server staff here.

Perhaps a long time player can shed some light on how people had over 1 million PP in the bank around 2010-2011 on project 1999. (Not regarding item duping/RMT because the platinum has to be there in the first place for there to be an economy of buyers and sellers.)

[Ravager]

Seafuries were better at the time and people were averaging about 1k per hour there. Do that for 1000 hours and you have 1 million plat. But that's just one person. Consider the whole population of the server getting vendorable plat in the form of gargoyle eyes, gems, fine steel weapons and even just coin drop from giants over the course of a summer and it's not hard to see how millions of plat come into the economy and stays there with no significant plat sinks in the game.

[Dolalin]

I'd have to stop and think about best money per hour in raw plat. I know Seb NG is gonna get you 1k/hr on a bad day, more if you can pull the disco bugs too. I see chanters soloing it all the time.

At that rate you're gonna have hundreds of thousands of platinum on the server inside of a month, just from that one camp. I'm sure there are others.

[Ravager]

The more interesting question is how many millions of plat worth of copper, silver and gold have been destroyed over the years? Or left to rot?

[Freakish]

There's lots of little plat generators as you level up just from having bag space to carry to vendor. Fine steel, high quality ore, gems, bronze armor all add up. Add in zonewide random loot like truesteel which is 350p off kaesora mobs, 'bad' drops off named vendoring decently, it all adds up.

[trite]

Seafuries were better at the time and people were averaging about 1k per hour there. Do that for 1000 hours and you have 1 million plat. But that's just one person. Consider the whole population of the server getting vendorable plat in the form of gargoyle eyes, gems, fine steel weapons and even just coin drop from giants over the course of a summer and it's not hard to see how millions of plat come into the economy and stays there with no significant plat sinks in the game.

Raid guild recharging items is a decent plat sink. They spend dozens of K recharging their members each week and that plat goes poof, ask an awakened officer to estimate how many millions of platinum they have taken out of circulation sometime....

[kgallowaypa]

Here is a snippet of the server pop on a Saturday roughly 7 years ago from today on project1999.org at the time - https://web.archive.org/web/20100404023510/http://project1999.org/ So with about 511 active, I wonder how many were in EC on mules bartering goods around..maybe a population of 300 active players at the servers inception? I assume maybe a handful were very hard-core and took live spots and allakhazam notes before the wiki was substantial enough to just farm out stuff and amass the plat.

Seafuries were better at the time and people were averaging about 1k per hour there. Do that for 1000 hours and you have 1 million plat. But that's just one person. Consider the whole population of the server getting vendorable plat in the form of gargoyle eyes, gems, fine steel weapons and even just coin drop from giants over the course of a summer and it's not hard to see how millions of plat come into the economy and stays there with no significant plat sinks in the game.

Assume a full time employee could play about 20 hours a week between 6pm -11pm and a few hours on the weekend, that would net around 25 hours a week strictly farming. I am pretty sure that persons brain would be melted if he/she needed to do seafuries for ~ 40 weeks to break that 1 million plat barrier.

Another snippet from August of 2010 where the FBSS was selling on average on these boards for..$17,000 Platinum. Theres also some random guy selling *infinite* supplies of Cloak of Flames lol

https://web.archive.org/web/20100825032611/http://www.project1999.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27

[Mahoot]

Another snippet from August of 2010 where the FBSS was selling on average on these boards for..$17,000 Platinum. Theres also some random guy selling *infinite* supplies of Cloak of Flames lol

https://web.archive.org/web/20100825032611/http://www.project1999.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27

I think the seller was making a joke because there was a server rollback. He had sold one, server rolled back, so he had it again to sell (I assume the plat from the first transaction was rolled back as well). The guy selling the FBSS for 17k mentioned the same thing.

[Ravager]

Here is a snippet of the server pop on a Saturday roughly 7 years ago from today on project1999.org at the time - https://web.archive.org/web/20100404023510/http://project1999.org/ So with about 511 active, I wonder how many were in EC on mules bartering goods around..maybe a population of 300 active players at the servers inception? I assume maybe a handful were very hard-core and took live spots and allakhazam notes before the wiki was substantial enough to just farm out stuff and amass the plat.



Assume a full time employee could play about 20 hours a week between 6pm -11pm and a few hours on the weekend, that would net around 25 hours a week strictly farming. I am pretty sure that persons brain would be melted if he/she needed to do seafuries for ~ 40 weeks to break that 1 million plat barrier.

Another snippet from August of 2010 where the FBSS was selling on average on these boards for..$17,000 Platinum. Theres also some random guy selling *infinite* supplies of Cloak of Flames lol

https://web.archive.org/web/20100825032611/http://www.project1999.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=27

But it's not just one person at sea furies. 5 people at sea furies were getting around 1k per hour and those 5 didn't necessarily stay there 24/7, but they were camped quite heavily around the clock. The economy doesn't care who is holding the plat, the plat is in the economy regardless. Besides, sea furies is just one camp and an insignificant portion of the new plat being generated. I just picked that as example of how quickly 1 million plat can come into the economy.

Those 511 at prime time did not make up the full population of everyone who logged in that day. Some come, play for a bit, then go. There could be 511 people on at any given time, yet the server might have seen 5000 unique players, all generating new coin for the economy, even if it's just a few gold from selling rusty weapons, do that day in and day out and it'll add up fast.

And it only makes sense that the plat will accumulate in EC, because that's where people go to buy and sell. The first thing a noob does who scraped together 20 plat for a weapon is either go to EC to buy one, or buy it from someone else who will eventually take that 20 plat to EC with them, so they can buy an upgrade for themselves.

[skipdog]

Seafuries

[Darkatar]

Somewhat related - port stones (and I think something else too..can't remember) are currently at nonclassic prices (higher than classic) to help combat inflation as a plat sink.

[Dolalin]

Another big plat camp in classic was ore in Sol A, there are even vendors in the zone to sell it to. Not sure if it stacks up with Seafuries though.

[mefdinkins]

All those Tink Bags and Traveler's Boots!

[zanderklocke]

Seafuries

Yep.

I can't think of any other mob that would be creating more platinum, as all of the items from seafuries are sold for platinum to vendors.

[Ravager]

Forgetting about seafuries for a minute:

Assume that the population never gets higher than 275 players at any given hour of the day (I think this was generally as low as it got). When the population is low, you typically see 40-50 people in EC. That leaves 225. Now, let's be generous and say half of them are AFK for every hour of the day. That'll leave us 112 (rounding down to be conservative) active players adventuring and generating coin loot 24 hours of the day.

At the time, Hill Giants and Sand Giants were consistently dropping quite a bit of plat. Let's say 5% of the active population are farming them at any given hour, rounding down, that gives us 5 people farming hill giants 24 hours/ day. Assuming they each kill 6 of them an hour (in reality, probably more) and each giant drops 15 plat (conservative, at the time it was consistently higher), that's 5 players x 6 giants x 15 plat x 24 hours = 10800 plat/day.

Let's say another 5 people are actively farming things like fine steel at any given hour and they average 6 kills in an hour and we'll round down to 4 plat per weapon, that's 5 x 6 x 4 x 24 = 2,880 plat/day.

That's slightly less than 10% of the low active population trying to farm for plat (no seafuries) and we're at 13,680 plat per day. We'll very conservatively add about 1 plat per person per hour for the rest of the active population and come up with 2,448 for the other 102 over 24 hours, bringing us up to 16,048 plat per day. 1,000,000/16048 = 62.31 days.

So with our conservative math on a low population server, before introducing seafuries, and presuming over half of the population is afk or otherwise not producing and only 1 in 10 people are making an effort to farm plat, there will be a million plat in the economy in 2 months of server uptime.

[KEWLGET]

seafuries have been permacamped on this server for like 7 years straight

[Rygar]

All this math getting me excited

[coldslaw]

All this math getting me excited

Came for whining, almost left disappointed. Stayed for the speculative math porn.

[kgallowaypa]

Forgetting about seafuries for a minute:

Assume that the population never gets higher than 275 players at any given hour of the day (I think this was generally as low as it got). When the population is low, you typically see 40-50 people in EC. That leaves 225. Now, let's be generous and say half of them are AFK for every hour of the day. That'll leave us 112 (rounding down to be conservative) active players adventuring and generating coin loot 24 hours of the day.

At the time, Hill Giants and Sand Giants were consistently dropping quite a bit of plat. Let's say 5% of the active population are farming them at any given hour, rounding down, that gives us 5 people farming hill giants 24 hours/ day. Assuming they each kill 6 of them an hour (in reality, probably more) and each giant drops 15 plat (conservative, at the time it was consistently higher), that's 5 players x 6 giants x 15 plat x 24 hours = 10800 plat/day.

Let's say another 5 people are actively farming things like fine steel at any given hour and they average 6 kills in an hour and we'll round down to 4 plat per weapon, that's 5 x 6 x 4 x 24 = 2,880 plat/day.

That's slightly less than 10% of the low active population trying to farm for plat (no seafuries) and we're at 13,680 plat per day. We'll very conservatively add about 1 plat per person per hour for the rest of the active population and come up with 2,448 for the other 102 over 24 hours, bringing us up to 16,048 plat per day. 1,000,000/16048 = 62.31 days.

So with our conservative math on a low population server, before introducing seafuries, and presuming over half of the population is afk or otherwise not producing and only 1 in 10 people are making an effort to farm plat, there will be a million plat in the economy in 2 months of server uptime.

Great post, thanks for illustrating it on how this economy got started on albeit a conservative timeline. probably a crapshoot but I wonder if we could find out how much PP has been dropped by all mobs since 2009..wondering if we have approached a billion plus plat seen by mob drops, not item value.

[jolanar]

50+ you'd have to try not to make like 2 to 300 plat per hour just playing the game as you normally would. Now like others have said, multiply that by every player over 7 years and that's just the bare minimum.

[loramin]

I wonder if we could find out how much PP has been dropped by all mobs since 2009

This would be very difficult if not impossible, because P99 has not been the same game since 2009. The early versions of this server had very significant differences from now, and some of those differences definitely affected how much plat/gems dropped.

[shuklak]

Years ago there was a suspected bug that introduced millions of plat. I kind of took it at face value because some people got banned and it was talked about quite openly.

In any game there are bugs, and in every game there are bugs. But those people (that dont get banned) don't actually tell people about it...

[zanderklocke]

Seeing platlord's spreadsheets was probably one of the most jaw dropping moments on these forums. It was like 32 million liquid platinum and like 10-20 of every rare item on his mule somewhere. Something like 15 manastones and a few prenerf fungi staves.

[Tankdan]

vendor sold gems from Sebilis+seafuries+karnors, etc, prob make up half the plat here.

[skarlorn]

Gems

[Vidar]

WHat did that recent thread say. Someone accidentally put 500,000,000 plat in trade window? thats a lot of play for one person/guild to have.

[Swish]

If you have the items you want and have more plat than you'd ever spend on gearing alts, its time to put down the tunnel and go outside.

[Darkatar]

If you have the items you want and have more plat than you'd ever spend on gearing alts, its time to put down the tunnel and go outside.

Nobody likes a quitter, just twink harder.