But it was literally the same back then, maybe back then you wouldn't even get single claim
Actually you are not far from wrong or right. There was far easier ways to make a shit tonne of peds back then, loads of players basically exploited the lack of infrastructure in the game etc and also the bugs to earn shit tonne of peds.
Like for me, I used to be a trader and there was no Market Value in game as such. So to find values of items you had to use unofficial Project Entropia forum which was not even managed by MA. So what I did is I started by swaeting, then doing some hunting of easy low level mobs, built some peds up, then just bought some cheap stuff, and resold them, and just kept repeating that many times until I kept doubling and doubling, until I had about 500peds, then I just moved on to some more rarer items etc, then just kept buying and selling them for a lot more than what I payed for them, as most people in game back then had no clue about eh Unofficial forum for the game. So they had no idea the value of items they had.
So this alone just made it so easy to make SUCH a huge amount of money, which I did. I wont say the final amount of ped I got my ped card to after I sold all my items I had left, but it was 5 figures lol.
I then just cashed it out. Which at that time taken over 6 months for them to process the withdraw and they requested soo many ID documents it was such an headache for me as I was pretty young, I did have the ID they needed though luckily.
But then I decided to not play after that for many years so the game can get better and improve so I could return with a new account later down the line, which is when I made this account in 2010 lol
Also for the Old timers to remember. The fun bits I really miss was UNDERWATER Mining and Swimming. I LOVED it it was very hard and disorientating though and hard to control while under water and mine at the same time, and the boms dropping was soo buggy too, they would bug out a lot and not even show any result etc lol.
Then there was the Auctioneer and Engineer Bugs where when you get close to them in Hangars which back then, looked very very different and basic etc as it was not using CryEngine 2 then either. Was you was able to basically move the Auctioneer out of the Hangars by pushing it slowly and slowly hahaha, people used to move them into the middle of mobs all the time for the LOL's It was so much fun and soo funny. MA had to shut down the servers soo often to reset them. They eventually did a patch to make them STICK into place and could not be moved or pushed lol. But it did take them a few months lol. They was really slow and always have been slow at updates etc etc. It looks like they are always gonna be slow too.