I've been playing around on Atlantic with the free version on a new account just showing my kid some stuff (I'm nervous about re-activating one of my main accounts), and when I roll into a vendor mall in Malas or near the Yew Gate or wherever, and I see vendors selling lots of stuff for 175 million gold...
And I had 3 different people, when they found out I was looking at coming back for a bit, just hand me a few million in gold to help me out. Strangers. I mean, a few million gold does not go very far at all, but it was very generous, and one outfitted me with some armor and weapons, rulebooks, etc.
I was also told that if I transferred all of my rewards and old stuff over to Atlantic, I could easily be rolling in half a billion or far more in gold easily (well, translated to platinum because the bank can't go that high in gold). A whole lot of stuff from the 90s and early 2000s is worth an insane amount these days. I can remember when $10 would get you a million gold, now $10 will get you 50 million in gold.
But it makes me wonder how the hell a truly new player could get started. Atlantic is the busiest, with I think Pacific and Catskills trailing, and everybody else outside of the Japanese shards doing a lot less.
And it's quite clear that a shitload of people are playing on unofficial clients - people even joke about it in game, and I watched a few PVP events and it's clear that...I won't say they are scripting hard, but...some of them are. I could not PVP in this day and age.
They did add official support on the official shards for a 3rd-party web-based client (you still need to have an original install on your computer for the data files) - https://classicuo.org
For those wanting to play unofficial shards, Outlands is probably your best bet.