As a fresh player on an era server is there any hope I could even participate in end game without resorting to “illegal” activities?
I want to raid in era but one look at the AH and I the prices are insane. I could get my epic mount before I could get raid consumes for MC.
How do people even sustain this way of gameplay?
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Lemme guess? You play on the Firemaw cluster?
GDKP and goldbuying is happening all the time there and prices are insane. You can try the PvE servers, although not as busy as the PvP cluster, it is free for GDKP and prices are a bit friendlier.
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I haven’t started playing yet. Just pondering for the time being.
I made some toons to check prices and see how lively cities are and from what I’ve seen there isn’t really a “safe haven”.
Unfortunate cause I was hoping for some WPvP but I’d take anything over gold buying, how is it terms of playerbase tho? Is it active or borderline dead with 5 guilds tops barely gathering 40 people?
Well if the auction house is overpriced, might i suggest selling things on the auction house?
You exclusively want to make gold by vendoring things you kind of sound like a botter not trying to catch heat dumping prices of everything to trash.
Fact is servers been live for 5 years and people have been generating gold all this time and anyone can farm these things… Problem is if some prices are inflated and others are not, imagine farming at 2019 levels for Lionheart Helmet at 6k gold when it used to be like 700. Also that way you never ever in your life buy an item from GDKP without RMT.
Also one benefit of inflation is buying epic mount, respecs anything from a vendor becomes absolutely trivial.
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Alliance is very active with many guilds and pug runs. Horde is less populated but not dead. There are rading guilds, although I don’t know if they fall into your borderline definition 
Hmm might give it a try then, hopefully I’ll find my spot there.
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Sustain yourself. Make more than one character, level them & their professions. Self-fund your raiding.
I don’t pay anything for any raid consumes.
p.s. The AH on Alliance PvE cluster is reasonable.
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Welcome to late end capitalism where there is no or not enough goldsinks on “fixed” era servers.
If we would have one era like TBC/Wrath the same thing will occur too. Players will just keep amassing gold and nothing to throw at so yea.
Reason is inflation because of bots. They were running for about 8 months and farming 100+gph per 1 tab almost without bans. Now most of them banned but thousands of gold made by bots is still in economy, maybe it will be stablizied in future but now we have what we have.
No, 99% of gold on era was generated in 1 last year only by bots. In March of prev year (when era wasn’t so popular and before bots infestation) prices were 5-10 times lower then now.
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U can just do MC gbid without consumables and start making money.
That’s the Firemaw way 
The Auction House is dead, hard to sell anything on ERA right now.
And meanwhile, everything indeed is overpriced.
148g for a stack of 5 mana pots ? sure buddy.
The GDKPers coupled with the bots that weren’t dealt with created a huge inflation in the first place, and SOD was the final blow that destroyed the economy for good.
Now ERA is left with a hyper inflation, and a low pop which result in everything being so pricey.
ERA was doing really well last summer, they had to ruin everything.
Blizzard 
Don’t start it, because it is not going to worth the time you invested.
Let me explain in detail. First of all, you need to level up from 0 to 60 and it will take huge amount of time. It is around 12 days of /played time to reach from 0 to 60 and it makes around 288 hours of grinding in an empty world. You won’t be able to find people for questing or dungeon runs.
On leveling part of the game, only solutions seems as buying boost service if you can find someone who is selling it. I say this because even boosters don’t care and play anymore.
In addition, boost prices were high when i checked last time, like 100g for 5x stockades, 200g for 5x SM, 1k gold for 5x maraudon, 1k gold for 5x zg / stratholme. If you choose to be boosted, you have to spend around 20k gold to reach 60 level, and it will still take you around 6 to 8 days of /played time.
Some people can claim that it is an MMORpg and you need to make friends to be successfull etc, but it is not 2004, people have no time to waste around killing mobs, and so this is unlikely.
After done with leveling, you can find groups easily for ZG20, AQ20 and some end game dungeons like Stratholme Living and UBRS. However, after you geared up in those, you need to find MC / BWL / AQ40 groups and this is the moment where struggle starts.
Because of inflation caused by unbanned bots and gold buyers, people in era host raids by HRing most important things. They highly reserve BoE, Matts and anything that brings them gold. They make their gold with this way, to be able to bid on their incoming GDKP runs. At the start, you are forced to group up with those people, and farm for them to be able to have a chance to roll on an item which is going to be SR ed by 3-5 other people. If you are extreamely lucky with your rolls, you can gear up easily, it is still possible but let me remind you that finding runs for BwL and AQ40 is 4-5 times harder than finding runs for 20mens or MC.
They will check your gear, they will force you to buy basic consumables and flasks, they will demand world buffs from you, and when those satisfied you will have a chance to roll an item ( assuming it drops ) with 4-5 people ( maybe more if you play mage or warrior ). Some of those raid leads HR most important items besides matts and boe as well, like trinkets from BwL or tokens from AQ40.
At this part of the progress, you need to farm weekly for consumables to enter their raids, and they will cost you around 400 - 1000g. You can try dungeon running and disenchanting, or you can host your scam raids like aq20 with HRing everything or zg20 with gold bids on Idols. So, inflation brings scam and scam brings more scam and force you into be a part of it.
If you can stand all this madness, you can progress untill BwL and aq40, and you can gear up. However, to get into naxxramass is more difficult because there are almost no SR raids for it. At this stage, you will be forced to participate in GDKP, and you will be scammed more by toxic GDKP groups on Era.
Explained in short, they will ask your budged in the start, and if the amount of gold you have is around 0 - 20k they won’t invite you to their groups, because they need more gold and having more gold means them more real life currency.
If you possess more than 20k, you might enter those runs, but if you don’t buy an item which is started to be bid from 20k you will be kicked, and you won’t get any share out of that run. Also, they will take advantage of any mistake done by you, like forgetting to bring some consumables, or putting little damage on some part of the raid. They will always be ready to scam your cut and reduce it, because those groups are consists of mostly uneducated, low income people.
In other words, Most GDKP groups in era consists of gold sellers, they host raids, they take your gold and they sell it to make real life money, and sadly blizzard don’t care. Most of those guys have millions of gold farmed so far, and each raid you join, it means you are farming gold for them.
Some people might claim, “but you can go in to guilds, make friends etc.” don’t believe in them. If you get into guild, now you are farming for their guild bank and their council.
Long story short, you won’t possess best items in this game if you don’t bring 300k to 500k gold with you and buy those items. Even if you gear up by grinding like 1-2 years, they won’t worth the effort because everyone has those items already on 5 years old server.
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As far as I know people have been botting on classic long before then and in fact as inflation goes on, botting by generating gold from vendors becomes less and less worthwhile.
High prices aren’t necessarily due to inflation, in fact selling things for low prices is typical of botters who don’t make any effort whatsoever to acquire these items. And low prices can also just be the fact of a lower demand whenever less player were playing.
You are still talking about Firemaw I see …
There are no boost runs or GDKP runs on the PvE servers.
Firemaw cluster is healing actually.
The bots are gone mostly.
Prices are going down compared to some months ago. (Economy is healing)
There are plenty of SR guilds going.
And it is easy to make gold, just farm stuff and sell it on the AH. (Everything sells just fine)
I play both Horde and Alliance, both are good populated.
It can be a bit daunting to look at the prices. But just keep selling stuff.
Typical bots in classic 2019 (for example brd rogues) was about 20gph per 1 bot, modern classic era fly strat bots are 100-150gph. And also in classic they were distributed between many servers, on era we have only 1 alive server and all bots on it.
I disagree, prices going down is only caused by botters farming and if the prices of things not everyone including botters can farm stays the same that makes the game unplayable for most people.
Bots farming raw gold in dungeons, they dont farming any consumes or something else. AT least most of bots. Only consumes that bots were farming - mana pots from DMT, so immidiently after DMT bots purged price go up (because people use mana pots and dont save them so price went up instantly), but there are still millions of raw gold farmed by them in economy so prices still high, but they will probebly go lower in some months if botters don’t find new undetected way of botting in dungeons (2 most popular places, strat and dm, fixed)
No, most of the botters are gone. That’s why Mana pots are at a insane price rn.