Earning potential



Earning potential (or EP) is the potential rate of a player earning a valuable drop from someone else on a PvP or Bounty world.

A player's current earned potential on a free-to-play world shrinks by 3.5x when hopping to a pay-to-play world. The opposite applies when hopping from a pay-to-play to a free-to-play world.

Building Earned potential
Earned potential can be obtained by standing away from a safe zone in a Bounty world or PvP world, at a rate of 25% per 30 minutes in a hotzone, and 10% per 30 minutes in a coolzone, when risking at least 25,000 coins in Free-to-play or 75,000 coins in pay-to-play. Note that this doesn't necessarily have to be all at once, you can hop in and out of the safezone without the 30 minute timer resetting. Only full minutes (60 seconds) will be counted towards the 30 minute timer though. Items kept on death do not count towards the risk.

A good tactic is to use a BH+1 world, holding a single treasure trail item (high value, low keep precedence) and a single thrown weapon in auto retaliate, F2P may be able to do this using a trimmed mage piece and the exact runes for a single spell cast, on autocast. The idea is that until attacked, the expensive item is at risk, and then by auto retaliate, the player discards the item of lower value but higher keep precedence. However, occasionally players may end up farcasting you(ancient magicks involving ice spells) and you may end up being too far away to retaliate, causing the more expensive item to be lost anyway. Using this method, a player only has to check the screen every 5 minutes or so to keep from being logged out.

Some good locations for freeloading in PvP worlds are: Lletya, Ape Atoll and Crash Island, Kharazi Jungle, Meiyerditch, the Poison Waste, Dragontooth Island, and the Land of Snow.

Raising your 'Earned Potential' anywhere outside a 'hot zone' will be capped by a 40% limit in cool zones, and 100% in hot zones. It is possible to have more than 100% EP, by having at least 29 EP on a pay-to-play world, then hopping to a F2P world, where it is multiplied by 3.5.

A growingly popular way to gain EP is to put items risking 76K or higher into a familiar such as a Spirit Terrorbird and when about to die, dismiss it. This way when you come back your items will be back on the ground where you left them. However it is hard to dismiss a familiar while in combat, because the dialog is interrupted. This cannot be done anymore though.

Losing Earned Potential
Having a high Earned Potential is extremely helpful for receiving Ancient artefacts that were released in the 16 June 2009 update. Artefacts can be sold to Mandrith in Edgeville bank or Nastroth in Lumbridge castle courtyard for up to 5 million coins.

If you kill someone that has enough risk and you have enough risk, then your earning potential will drop because you killed some one. If you kill someone that doesn't have the requirements, the drops are not as good and you don't lose earning potential.

If you teleport away from a battle, excluding the Ring of life, you'll lose 1/5 of your current EP. This was probably implemented to stop players from teleporting all the time without a catch.

Using fun weapons like easter carrot or casting "strike" spells will also make your EP drop.

a usefull place to earn ep is in the knights fortress because when u go behind the door you can see people coming across the bridge and if its a clan you have time to telaport out. be warned that people will hop out of your world than back in to kill you if you are not carefull.

Trivia

 * The PvP worlds and the Bounty worlds have had increased amount of players standing/afk-ing while having a risk to increase their Earning potential. It is very popular to do this in Falador since it is one of the four possible respawn points.
 * Since Jagex introduced a percentage display showing Earned Potential more and more PvP worlds/Bounty worlds are becoming full.