Ore

It is annoyingly hard to find affordible sources of metal ores. Either it's being sold as display examples of a semi-precious mineral, or you're bidding on boxcar loads of the stuff. It's almost like no one is in interested in catering to the backyard smelting hobbyist.

Also, what does it say that there are more pages devoted to gathering/smelting ore in MMPORGs than doing it in real life?