Blizzard locked a new World of Warcraft item behind an old World of Warcraft item, and now players are price-gouging each other to get it

pcgamer.com:

Embers of Neltharion(opens in new tab), the first big update to World of Warcraft: Dragonflight, has brought a new zone, raid, and dungeons to Blizzard's long-running MMO, and of course a whole bunch of new and interesting items—one of which requires a very old and uninteresting item to acquire.

As Starym on the Icy Veins(opens in new tab) forum (via GamesRadar(opens in new tab)) explains it, there's a Blazing Shadowflame chest located at coordinates 28.8, 47.5 of the new Zaralek Cavern zone. The problem is that the Shadowflames surrounding the chest cannot be bypassed unless you have an Onyxia Scale Cloak. And the problem with that is that the Onyxia Scale Cloak is an item from Vanilla (read: old) WoW, and not many people have kept one lying around.

That, predictably, led to a surge in demand for relevant crafting materials, and a commensurate spike in prices for said materials. «Thanks to a recently discovered secret requiring an old cloak, farmed ingredients for the cloak which includes scale of Onyxia is now going over 10,000x what it was last week,» redditor tomytronics(opens in new tab) wrote. «If you got any in the bank, sell em before the demand dies down.»

But even crafting these cloaks is a hassle, because they can only be made by Leatherworkers with 300 skill points in Classic Leatherworking. So of course unbound cloaks are also very suddenly hot items on the auction block. The prices vary wildly from server to server: Redditor adura_grounded said they list at 20,000 gold on their server «and they're selling,» while Alternative_rule_958 said they have 11 of them listed on their auction house for just 9,000 gold, and they're not moving.

As tomytronics predicted, demand (and pricing) has reportedly dropped