Escort Payment amounts

[Caswallon]

Ive had this on my mind since day 1 here, escorts should have a ranged scale of payment from round about 100-700gp.

http://web.archive.org/web/199910022020 ... escort.htm

Was this not implimented to stop massive escort farming or has it simply been missed becaue no one escorts or because its a minor issue? Its accurate. My mage used to have the guild title Tugboat because he was always tugging NPCs around the place .

[Derrick]

I belive the escorts began paying substancially more when they became limited.

This is a great link, I think I can take a lot from this.

Thanks!

[Caswallon]

Im not convinced but tbh i cant really remmember other than thinking "wtf im sure i used to get 400-500gp per escort" on my first day here. I know that page was last updated way way before the escorting changes though[Last modified: 07/24/1999 11:06:36], and the part about payments is not in the added subtext, which i would assume was added on the date of last modification.

Im always digging through every page of 1999 stratics, i have a mini list on a notepad file atm, stuff im sure is not quite right and am looking for facts.

[Derrick]

My personal recollection on payments was that it depended on where, or how far they were going. I used to do a lot of escorting myself.

Any additional info that people have is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Mikel123]

Wanted to update this with some info I found.

July, 1999 http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... dfd448950b

Dundee's right, escorting is bad. While there is now a one escort
per person at a time rule, that's not enough. I get an average of 300gp
per escort.

Jan, 2000 http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... 55f0a3361a
and http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... 159a2c6521

Code: Select all

Profession	Sample	Low	High	SUM	Average
Mage	36	0*	491	 11,079 	 308 
Merchant	32	0*	465	 9,729 	 304 
Messenger	53	0*	485	 15,397 	 291 
Noble	39	110	465	 11,557 	 296 
Peasant	83	0*	500	 24,073 	 290 
Wander Healer	43	125	494	 12,610 	 293 
Overall	286	0	500	 84,444 	 295 

I have averaged the two tables of data that this person had. Apologies for formatting; you can put it into Excel to see it more clearly). It seems pretty clear that escorts pay random amounts between 100 and 500 gold (my guess knowing OSI is probably 100+1d400 gp, so really 101 to 500), regardless of type or destination, and that you are limited to one at a time. Note that the 0*'s represent buggy escorts that did not recognize being in their destination. The lowest observed value was 105 gp.

[Faust]

That sounds about right to me Mikel.

My recollection of escorts yielded around 250-500gp.

[Pirul]

Hmmm, this is not what I remember.

I remember I made a ton of gold ferrying around escorts, and I clearly remember getting upward of 500gps per. I also remember walking around a town looking for as many as I could and gating all of them from town to town picking up all that I could find at the next destination, etc. I also did this with a pouch full of runes (no runebooks) so that means it was most probably a bit before or during the era.

Unfortunately, this is all from memory and lacking any sort of evidence.

[Mikel123]

Your memory might be correct; I, too, remember hearing stories like that (for some reason, I feel like up to 700 gold was possible too). However, it's clear from the posts that those experiences were outside our era.

[Derrick]

I did a lot of escorting on at least two characters when raising magery. I don't remember it being a real money maker, but even at 100 to 500 each that's quite a bit of cash when you can have 5-10 in tow at a time.

Thanks for the data.

[Mikel123]

that's quite a bit of cash when you can have 5-10 in tow at a time.

Thanks for the data.

You can't, during our era! See my post again, and the first link.

[Batlin]

OSI's code also contains a range from 100 (0x64) to 500 (0x1F4):

Code: Select all

  object reward = requestCreateObjectAt(0x0EED, getLocation(escort));
  integer success;
  if(reward != NULL())
  {
    success = requestAddQuantity(reward, random(0x64, 0x01F4));
  }
  if(!success)
  {
    bark(this, "I fear that I lied about a reward, however. I lack any funds.");
    deleteObject(reward);
    enableBehaviors(this);
    callback(this, 0x64, 0x7A);
    return(0x01);
  }

[Faust]

Batlin wraps another one up.

[Faust]

that's quite a bit of cash when you can have 5-10 in tow at a time.

Thanks for the data.

You can't, during our era! See my post again, and the first link.

I honestly don't see how that could be possible when it wasn't patched in until early 2000.

Escort Changes

Escorting will be balanced to bring it more in line with other gold generating methods.

• You may only have one escort at a time. Townspeople requesting escort will not travel with someone who is already escorting.
• If you attempt to escort a second NPC, you will be told, “I see you already have an escort".
• You will have to wait approximately 15 minutes between each escort.
• If you attempt to escort an NPC before this time passes, the NPC will tell you, “You should rest from your last escort before we set out on this journey."
• Escorts will let you know approximately how much time you must wait before you can take another escort again.

The comment mentions the test center in the begining... so that would more than likely explain the reasoning behind the date of July 19th, 1999.

[Mikel123]

http://groups.google.com/group/rec.game ... dfd448950b

You know what? Although he doesn't explicitly say it, I think the person citing the "one escort at a time" limit is actually from SP. He talks about "other proposed changes to the shard" which would indicate SP, since no other shard had custom rules. And a bunch of people in the thread have "SP" in their sig.

So I can say pretty certainly that SP had the 1-escort-limit, but it looks like the production shards didn't.

Further reading (search for "escort limit") makes it look like SP got changed to a max of 1 at a time, every 15 minutes, in July 1999 or a little earlier. The rest of the shards look like they got this change around January 2000.

[Kaivan]

That's actually not a surprise that it was a SP change first. Many of the changes first introduced on SP during late June and July of 99 found their way onto production servers starting in early 2000.