One of the best parts of those difficulties was that markets emerged from within the player base to provide conveniences around them.

Necromancers could summon a player's corpse if they were within some distance, like 500 meters. So Necros would camp out near famously tricky areas, and offer to pull corpses for 10 platinum pieces ("10pp") a pop.

Enchanters and Druids were the only classes with a teleport spell, so likewise they'd charge a small fee to teleport players across the continents, like from Qeynos to Freeport. Sometimes a chanter would spend an hour or three grinding out teleport runs like an Uber driver (we didn't know that analogy - uber wouldn't exist for another 10 years!) to make some extra cash.

And there was no auction house at all. The de facto auction location was a big cave in the desert outside Freeport. Players would all meet there and post in the general chat, hawking their goods:

    someguy: WTS Swarmcaller LEGENDARY bow for ranger 1k
    coolwizard: WTB pally helmet
    lesscoolpriest: WTS leather pelts 5g each

As a kid, I'd spend time in the that zone just trying to swap and find good deals, buying low and selling high, just because I found that lots of fun. I never really was great at that - there were always a few legendary big-deal traders who had tons of capital and thus tons of good equipment.

Fun times. I miss that sort of emergent magic.