Nordenwatch's Guide: Rags to Riches

[Nordenwatch]

I'd like to preface this post with the link to the thread explaining what happened to me: http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=144520

A lot of people have been asking me how I made the platinum that I did and I thought it would be prudent to post a guide on the forums, give something back to the community.

I started out with essentially nothing, a human necromancer with no knowledge of everquest at all and a few pieces of flayed skin, and at the time that I decided to liquidate I had 4 million platinum and 6~ million in gear.

This is how I did it:

Step 1: Roll a low budget farming character.

You can go several routes here. I went necromancer and it turned out to be a great idea because necromancers help you learn the game painlessly. Feign death allows you to fuck around without dying much. However, enchanters are also very cheap to gear and are much more powerful than necros in the long run. The key here is that you need a class that does NOT depend on gear, since you have nothing.

Step 2: Level up to 49 as fast as you can.

The lower level camps don't give you ANY money comparatively to the higher camps. Just level up to 50 and don't worry about the money you earn on the way there. You can easily earn a few hundred plat to clothe yourself and get spells through the leveling process.

Step 3: Seafuries

Seafuries are awful experience but this is where you can start to efficiently get reliable capital. I did seafuries from 46~ ish to 54 personally and made a lot of plat doing it. Seafuries are much better than most camps you can do at that level. Most camps around 50's will give item drops that are valued around 6k tops, and VERY rarely.

Step 4:: EC Tunnel

This is the part that many people dislike, but its a part that has to be done. To make money in this game you have to sink a significant amount of time in the market, learning prices and trends, knowing when the market is full of buyers and when the market is full of sellers. I took the capital that I made from seafuries and spent time buying and selling, picking up big ticket items for cheap from desperate sellers and waiting for desperate buyers.

To make money in this game, the greatest asset for you is the laziness of others. People have platinum and they're lazy as hell. They're a much easier target for your efforts than waiting for rare spawns to spawn with their rare drop. I did a lot of work trying to figure out services that people would pay for purely because they would be too lazy to do it themselves. For example: Essence Emeralds. they are necessary for necromancers for rezzes, which is often a key resource in raids. EEs are always being consumed one way or another and someone has to supply it. By doing the work of finding someone to sell you sacrifices and turning them into emeralds, you can turn a profit. Another example: Howling Stones keys MQ. I used to sell these for 2.5k each and the quest really takes no time at all to do. The fangs of Xalgoz are always rotting, and the prods were selling for like 400 when I was doing it. Another great example of this is Rogue Epic MQs. I sold about 15 of these things, they're relatively easy to complete and were valued at 50k apiece!

I listed the EC tunnel as step 4, but this is a step that you really need to be doing from this point on at all times. When you get items from the camps I'll list in the later steps, you need to be able to know the prices and sell them accordingly.

Step 5: Use the capital earned from the tunnel / seafuries to fund a high - end camping class and get it to 60 (if you were like me and had a human necro at this stage...)

The most of the end game money, to be farmed efficiently, requires a combination of a few specific roles. You must create a character that fits one of these roles. In my opinion, the most efficient way to farm platinum in this game is in a duo configuration. If you opted to go with enchanter / shaman instead of necromancer, this is where you are happy because you don't have to make another character. I used my money to equip a monk. The monk filled the role of the tank. With my RL friend who played a shaman, we could duo any money camp at the time. Torpor, malo, slow, and tash stick made it so we could duo the fungi king, sebilis crypt, ixiblat fer, for high end drops that would sell for monsterous amounts of platinum. Tunics being sold for 90k meant that every tunic dropped, me and my friend would get 45k. This adds up very quickly. Now with recent changes, the fungi king camp cannot be duo-ed, but it CAN be trio-ed! Two monks and a sham is how I did it. Try to figure out how!

Step 6: Use your character to farm the shit out of high end camps

At this point it is really helpful to have a guild of like minded players, who would be down to duo camps for a few hours and can rotate out to keep your camp going, etc. The A-Team was a great example. With them I camped a lot of these camps and made a lot of my platinum. There are a few camps that give you the most money. I will list them now in no particular order:
1. Crypt in sebilis. With a duo configuration of a lot of different classes, you can easily camp the whole crypt which has some very decent drops, including the hierophant's cloak and the jaundiced bone bracer. With a third member (rogue), you can even camp the emperor who can drop 60 spells like torpor which are great money.
2. King in sebilis. Trio configuration, tunics are still incredibly valuable and even splitting three ways its probably the best farmable money in the game.
3. HS south wing. South wing has the most valuable drops in the whole dungeon. Fingerbone hoop highlighting it.
4. Drusella in HS. Drusella drops the NoS and spawns every X amount of time. If you do the research and found out when she died and when she'll respawn, you can wait with a friend and take her out for easy money!
5. Ixiblat fer. Drops Cloak of Flames and high leveled spells. Can be easily duo-ed as long as sham kites and slows. The quest line to get him to spawn is fairly easy and is well rewarding since you can now spawn the next mob on the list, and are a step into the Cleric epic quest which can be MQ-ed for money!
6. Ragefire. This cannot be duo-ed by most players since it requires some pretty serious gear (donals BP) but you can easily do it with a small group of people and this dragon can drop TWO cloak of flames, red scales, dragon bag, gauntlets of firey might, and the heart of the dragon itself which is guaranteed which can be MQ-ed for a decent amount of money.

Do this until you have roughly 500k~ in the bank. This should take a while, but this is the fastest route to do so. Obviously the whole time you should be playing the EC market.

Step 7: Use your 500k to buy and sell HIGH END ITEMS

When I was doing this account trading was still legal, so I played a lot into that as well. The high end items also have enormous margins in reselling due to their tremendous value, so this earns you a lot of money very quickly. The rich do indeed get richer. When you have the capital to snag up a cheap CoF for sale and resell it for a quick 15k profit, EC becomes the best camp of them all. At the peak of my efficiency of earning platnium, I would be camping king, and in between spawns (23~ minutes to kill between king spawns) I would switch characters to my EC mule to auction my wares, and also switch to run around completing steps on my rogue for the rogue epic for MQ. Rare items in EC should be watched out for especially. Rare dragon / god drops on sale can often be sold for elevated prices simply due to the fact that they are rare and hard to come by. Donals BP, most GOOD trak BPs, VS legs, etc. Anything pre-nerf is always amazing obviously, a lesson learned through that magical prenerf fungus staff.

The reason for the 500k is that I reason this is the minimum amount of capital to be able to play the market. It allows you to buy essentially any item in market and have enough plat to buy more if the need arises. If you try to do this with lower amounts of platinum, it wont be nearly as efficient.

Do this until you have a million platinum.

Step 8 Buy 2x Puppet Strings

Why? Look at my thread that I used for a few months to sell hammers: http://www.project1999.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=83622

Pages and pages of people who bought my hammers. 5k a hammer. The strings charge costs like 86 pp, its an incredible markup and a great investment. Even if the prices do drop, there will ALWAYS be people who need hammers and are too lazy to grind the faction. Over time you will make your money back and more. 2x Strings should cost you about 500k, so this will leave you with 500k to repeat Step 7 and make more money!

Step 9 Get Lucky

After you reach the point where you can buy anything that comes up on the market, you essentially just need to be in the right place at the right time to progress at any elevated rate. You can always camp king / crypt and play the market and make platinum, but I did not make 10 million doing ONLY that. Anyone in on the tunic scene will tell you that the A-Team did A LOT of king, but to get to 10 million I would have had to duo 200 tunics at 100k value... I got extremely lucky and did business with the right people (stabbyjoe love you man). That prenerf fungus staff alone was 1/3rd of my entire market value.

Thanks for the many years of fun. Also for the record during the years I played, I graduated from university and got into law school. EQ did not ruin my life!

[Lune]

Originally Posted by Nordenwatch [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

give something back to the community.

p good except for this line

Ultimately, you wiped your ass with the community for personal gain. I had many interactions with you over the years and I always thought you were a pretty decent guy. Now you're just going to be remembered as an RMTing scumbag.

If you really wanted to give something back to the community, you wouldn't condone your own behavior. You wouldn't embrace RMT as an acceptable 'out' under any circumstance. You'd apologize, and you'd replace the weasel words and destructive attitude in your posts with remorse or indifference.

Originally Posted by Nordenwatch [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Harm the project? You used me to catch a bunch of cheaters, if anything I'm a hero.

Originally Posted by Nordenwatch [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

why the fuck would I just throw money down the toilet?

Originally Posted by Nordenwatch [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't expect the community to understand my decisions

It's quite easy. You're a greedy, self-centered, duplicitous prick and you will make an exceptional attorney. You cared more about making a couple bucks than the integrity of the server or the efforts of the staff. You helped them catch cheaters, and then you became one yourself? Wow, thanks!

Thanks for the guide; anyone dedicated or savvy enough to actually follow it already knows all the steps.

[jaybone]

It's hard to turn down 10 grand on a elf simulator u imagine.

[Sarajo]

Lune said it all, except for: thanks for using this process to raise prices and make p99 less fun for people because it was in your own best interest to resell things at a higher price, because that just meant more demand for your RMT side business. One more note, and I cant even say "thanks" jokingly this time: not everyone has the time or pocket group to farm the things they want/need. Not to mention, quite often farming something was impossible because it was permanently camped by RMT monopolizers. Enough with the threads looking for pity/sympathy/acceptance/vindication/forgiveness/friendship already.
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[pharmakos]

hey since i bought a hammer from you and you sold the plat, do you think i could borrow $10? =p

[evan1612]

Cool thread until I realized RMT :/

[pharmakos]

^ is your warrior's surname Alavaris?

[evan1612]

Originally Posted by pharmakos [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

^ is your warrior's surname Alavaris?

Stumpp, I was going for an Ogre-ish name. What's Alavaris from?

[pharmakos]

i spelled it wrong apparently, but: http://www.erowid.org/archive/sonora...oad/almost.htm







back on topic tho

Nordenwatch has a bunch of good advice, but i don't think anyone's gonna get rich selling OT Hammers anymore.... too many people have copied his idea. and since you have to sell 100 of them to even recoup initial expenses...

[innocent51]

I understand RTM as a "I have invested a lot of time in a game and its not anymore fun so I'm turning a bit of this time into money". It is breaking the rules, its bad but it has a logic.
I also somehow get the buyer psychology. They don't like everything in the game, just a part of it so they ask others and spend real money to do this part for them. I would advice not to play the game because there are nowdays a tons of other options that are less tome consuming or hard or punishing. But its still slightly understandable.


Farming and trading in order to make real money on the other hand seems completely stupid. There are so much more ways to make money that are more efficient, more entertaining and (or?) less illegal. RMTers, are not just scamming the server and breaking rules, they are also pretty idiotic.