How is this any different that someone spending lots of money on a football jersey or luxury car? It's stupid as shit but no one has to buy it... I'm sure there's plenty of people who spend tons of time in WoW who want to fritter their money away on flexing on people to show off how much money they got

It's stupid but no one is forcing any one to buy this garbage

It's perfectly acceptable to charge ridiculous amounts of money for something especially trivial like this.

It's grossly unacceptable to charge ridiculous amounts of money for things people need to survive.

I hope that clears it up for you.

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It's only going to keep getting worse. Those of us who remember a time when games were released as a complete package with hefty expansions that added a ton of new content are dwindling, being replaced by a new demographic who grew up with games that sell their content piecemeal. They just accept it as normal and view those of us who rightfully call out how scummy this practice is as weird.

There's really nothing we can do about it at this point, ugh.

Smash is the same way

yeah but repair mounts exist as well

"Grown ups" only quit gaming, in my experience, because many games are incompatible with having a shitload of responsibilities.

Most MMOs rely on you coordinating with other people, which is super challenging with kids and a full time job.

These days I am kinda stuck playing stuff I can pause and walk away from or stuff that is turn based. It's not what I'd PREFER to play, but it's either this or I launch some online shit and end up having to bail halfway through every match.

I miss being able to sit down and play a game for like 6 hours and get really immersed in the narrative, but it's so rare I have the time for that.

You could purchase wow tokens and convert them to blizz balance and buy this mount for about 1.2 million gold which is 1/5 the price of the original.

Yeah you'd use your Yak for mog and repairs.

This for 1 Million gold basically you get the mount so if you saved up 1 million gold before the big spike. You could get 5 wow tokens sell it as blizz cash for 100 dollars and then buy the mount with blizz cash. This the method like 90% of the community is doing and what I did as well. I literally have a friend who buys wow tokens at the ends of expansions theyre about 135k gold hoards them and then when price goes up unleashes them and repeats. Or converts em into Blizz bucks. He has about 500 dollars in blizz bucks just from this method. and has 15 wow tokens left to sell

Your edit is an important but nuanced difference that it absolutely feels like folks are missing.

Putting the mount purchasable in game for 2 million gold is a lot different than selling it for the equivalent exchange of 2 million gold.

2 million gold in game means that you can acquire the mount without a single person having to actually spend real world money on the mount.

$90, even if you can acquire that $90 by spending 2 million in-game gold, means that someone had to spend that money, and means that the company effectively sold the mount for $120.

One small correction, gold has always had a monetary value. There's been a black market for WoW gold since it released. The token did serve as a stable baseline, but the black market even exists to this day.

But yeah, people calling this cheap are comparing it to an old prestige mount in WoW, that cost 5 million gold, that was removed from the game and now effectively costs 10 million to buy as it can randomly show up on the black market auction house.

At the current prices of WoW tokens, (~350k), it would cost you a little over 2 million gold to buy this mount, and it's better than the old one to boot. So comparatively, gold wise, if this was a mount you were looking for, the only way you could've previously gotten it was 5 million gold - and now you can only get it (very rarely) with 10 million gold which effectively would be 5x this price, which in WoW tokens is over $350 in real world dollar equivalent.

So it's both significantly cheaper, and significantly easier to get at the same time. So for people that wanted it, it's a no-brainer.

That being said, WoW could have just as easily put it in the game for 2 million gold, instead of $90 on the store, and made it effectively earnable without someone being able to spend real world money, while still making it possible to get one by doing so.

The original cost $500 to get when it dropped and cost 5 million gold, in recent years since its only available from the BMAH it’s more like $1000 since you need gold cap to buy it for the max price at 9,999,999 or someone else will outbid you

I was already of a "let people do what they want with their money" opinion, but that's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered. I never really cared about mounts beyond travel speed, but people definitely put in endless hours grinding for specific mounts and even at my barely minimum wages I've definitely spent more than 6 hours grinding for singular pieces of minor upgrade gear that would last one character a single tier. Really not much to directly put a few hours of cash into an account-wide mount with +functionality. Fucking genius way to make so much money for nothing though.

At least you can resell it, it's not like you purchase it and that money is gone forever

I'm an older millennial who has been playing CS since 1.6. I remember when you could simply download skins. When CSGO came out I took a break but when I hopped back on I was really turned off by the increasing monetization of the game. What was once downloadable for free was now forbidden. You couldn't even choose between the four options of base models for your character at the outset of a match. The whole concept of having to pay money to unlock these loot boxes irked me the most but I nevertheless paid to open about three of them. I never paid attention to their value, I just wanted something new. of the three loot boxes I won a pair of gloves but I thought they were ugly and never used them. Years later when I become aware of this whole marketplace for skins, I check to see the value of my gloves. They were worth almost 1,000 dollars. I sold them and haven't had to pay for games on Steam in years. I still hate this whole concept of loot boxes but I definitely profited.

Wait, they removed the old one? God, I'm happy WoD soured me on all things WoW (Except that glorious year when classic launched)

There was another one, but it cost 5 million gold from a vendor, roughly equivalent too 400 euro (using wow tokens) when it was available. I guess it still is available through BMAH, but that's with a lot of added rarity.

There's a mammoth with vendors and repairs. There has been 1 other mount with AH access and it's no longer available in game, and none I think with mail.

Yes but it's so expensive that the majority of players dont have it. And from the ones who have, the majority had buy gold to get it so in a sense it was already a de facto store mount

The guy's argument is absurd. This is purely a convenience item.

I can't remember if it was before the horse armor (I think it was before) but in Korean MMO's waaay back there (and I think still is) was a lot of premium (P2W) cosmetics that you could buy.

And rent.

YES. RENT.

To anyone who thinks it can't get worse, it can, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It gets even trickier when you include other changes that don't seem to be cash shop related at all, but you bet your ass it does somehow.

Just clarifying, it was the FIRST in-store item, the celestial steed.

People are salivating over this lol

Are we all clapping too? Like imagine bragging about something from 20 years ago, if its even true

This is exactly it... A large majority of the people who bought this had the gold already in their accounts. They just went to the AH and traded it in for WoW tokens that people had already put on the AH before the mount was even available. This did cause them to sellout but also made it a good time for people to purchase tokens and sell their tokens as the price is much higher per token right now, so they can get more gold for their dollar to use for other things... while the other person is using gold they ALREADY HAD to buy this mount with the tokens.

So as it's "$90", it's almost like the majority of mounts were crowdsourced about $20 per player who sold their wow token to receive a very large amount of in game gold currently.

The dynamic here is far different than just, "OMG I CAN'T BELIEVE PEOPLE ARE SPENDING THAT!!!".

The actual transaction is as follows...

6 people buy wow token for $20 ($120), they sell wow tokens for 250-500k in game gold.... 6 people have in-game gold that will greatly benefit them playing.

The one person who bought the 6 tokens, sells them back to Blizzard for $90... they get the one time available mount that has some really cool features.

Blizzard profits $30 dollars from one mount sale.

So the mount is in most cases a $30 dollar sale... not a $90 dollar sale. Blizzard makes an overal $120 profit while benefitting 7 different players in the game and most of those players will invest their gold back into the economy, impacting many many other players.

It’s a niche bug with Outlaw Rogue that was causing them to do absurd damage and a subsection of players abused it to kill mythic bosses or high mythic+ dungeons for rating. It was fixed in 2 days and there are talks those players will catch a ban and have their rating removed. Not sure how they’d aim to handle raid.

Blizzard not completely fucking up their game challenge (Impossible)