So there are some competing theories about why trade goods being so expensive in Anniversary. Black Lotus being the most widely discussed one, but there are plenty of other trade goods which are unusually expensive as well.
Some claim that the issue is bots. While I hate bots and really wish Blizzard double the efforts to fight them, I don’t think they play any significant role in the current pricing situation. I’m pretty sure that Blizzard bans majority of bots eventually. So the only reasonable way for bot to deal with trade goods is to sell them as soon as possible and then sell gold. If the bot stockpiles trade goods, it greatly increases the chance that those goods will be lost after ban. So, if anything, bots actually contribute to reducing the price by increasing the supply.
While some players inevitably play the market by stockpiling trade goods on some days and releasing on other days and even manipulating the market to some extent, revent events clearly show that they are not the main reason of the big price as well. When Blizzard announced few days ago some vague measures about Black Lotus, its price crashed from 350g to 150g. It’s obviuos that anyone who stockpiles lots of Lotuses, will sell now. But Lotus price is 200g now and slowly rising, clearly reflecting the fact that it’s market force that drives the price.
So my opinion is pretty simple. Black Lotus price is dictated by the supply and demand. Simple as that. Other factors affect the price, but not that much.
The demand - I don’t have any data about it, compared to 2019 Classic. I played few pug raids recently on few characters including BWL and nobody used flasks except very few people. We completed raids succesfully. Despite everyone saying that everyone flasks, I feel like this is not true and probably the opposite happens: probably there are less people flasking compared to 2019. Price is hard to afford. Only tanks and caster DPS truly benefit from flasks right now, rest of the raid does not really need flasks even for parses. And raids are easy enough, so flasking is not required.
And about supply - it’s being told multiple times. Anniversary hosts much more players per layer. Everyone who quested saw that - competition over quest mobs sometimes is insane. The same thing happens with ores and herbs, the competition is insane. And dynamic layers further exaggregate that issue. In 2019 you could play at night on empty layer and gather whole zone of herbs, they’d respawn by the time you made a circle. In 2025, night does not differ that much from day, layers are busy at every hour.
Revamped layers are the main reason of dramatically reduced supply and this reflects on the dramatically increased price of everything.
Another example is enchanting materials. Those are not affected by layers, those are farmed in the instances. And their prices are quite reasonable, nothing outrageous.
As for how to fix it—well, that’s up to Blizzard, of course. However, I’d suggest a few changes which should be relatively easy to implement (because let’s face it, Anniversary is not the main focus of the game development right now and huge changes will not happen there):
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Only allow layer compacting on Wednesdays (or another specific day). Alternatively, Blizzard could perform weekly server restarts to reset layers. For the other six days, the number of layers should only be increased if necessary, and never reduced.
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Remove the switch layer delay for level 60 characters. Allow them to switch freely so that they can distribute themselves more evenly across layers.
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Increase the respawn rate of herbs and ores to match the increased layer capacity compared to 2019. This shouldn’t just apply to Black Lotus but to everything. If there are 10 times as many people per layer now, the respawn rate should be increased by 10 times as well.
These measures would help fix the economy.