Before the economy update, it was way too easy to get gold and that is why we have such ridiculously high prices on the server - because it was the norm, everyone sold stuff for stupid high prices. Whilst we had a high gold rate, items on vendors were never increased from the retail prices making things even worse. The economy update was made to try and remedy that. Less gold around and people should start dropping their prices. Items that were rare and commanded high prices couldn't even be put on the auction house because it has a limit on max-price so something had to be done. Many many players even reached the gold cap of their inventory and warehouse :/ I update a few prices nearly every update since that economy update, slowly putting prices back down as promised now that gold is less plentiful than back then.
Those high-class enhancement cards are expensive because they were a cashshop item that sold for tears before and are not necessary to successfully enhance your items - they are a luxury item, not something needed by levelling players at all. Anyway, they will be put back to being sold for tears in the next update because I do agree that 2.5m is too much for a card but it was part of the economy update we have some months back to try and get rid of some of the gold stored up on the server. As Spunny says, they also drop from many dungeons - not that hard to get at all really.
CQ quests are meant to be hard/time-consuming and are not for everyone. There is plenty of other armor around that is much easier to obtain and almost as good. Even Circus gear is good if you use the whole set for the all stat bonus and actually card/enhance it properly and it's really easy to get. It drops like flies around turds and you can probably get a full set of it within a week or so of daily runs if you're lucky and if you just can't be arsed to do the dungeon, buy it from other players, it's not even expensive. btw CQ will be sold on nsDB when the next update is live so donators can just buy it if they cba doing the quests.
In my opinion, this game has never been better for new players. Several of the recent updates were focussed on new players, making life easier for them, but people can't just expect to get in the game and have everything right away and be up there with players that have been here for years - it's an mmo. It takes time and effort to get up there. We might just be a private server so people expect something different but we have been running since before global and plenty after it. I don't run this like the average private server - give everyone everything in a day kinda thing.
We need some kind of ranked battlefield system where players get scored by their items/titles or whatever to make it a bit fairer but it's no easy task
Do you think a new level 85 starter armor set that can be purchased with Mighty Trophies would help new players? It's something I have been considering since we have always had a full set of armors, accessories and weapons for level 75. Maybe something similar to the rock sets that drop on the high level maps or even the ToA Hard armor sets but without the set bonuses. It might be good for players that prefer to get right into battlefields instead of farming quests and dungeons for something to get started with.