https://web.archive.org/web/20060216185 ... item=13468
Black lotus is already over double the price it was in 2006 (actually it was cheaper than the median shown on zam on our server, but that's anecdotal, our server went from medium to full to medium again after they opened xfers so obviously we had a slight surplus of lotus) and its only going to get worse because of how it spawns (which is correct to blizzard standards but is far fewer than needed for this population).
I'm not too worried about it til AQ where there is enough content to eat flasks up but it's certainly concerning.
More people actually get to end-game on private servers than ever did in retail as well, so not only is there the base problem of too many people, there are also more people actually going for the spawns.