It's time to start thinking about the 450 and 500 mounts achievements

[Queen of Hamsters]

Seems a lot of people are not aware that the real mount count comes from Achievements/Statistics/Character/Gear, NOT the mount journal.

[Unlimited Power]

They should put it in for 600 mounts... I am at 558 and I have zero of the PVP Title/RBG/Season mounts.

558 when you check the gear tab in character statistics or 558 when checking the mount tab?

I'd actually kind of like a recolour of the Prestigious Bloodforged Courser mount rewarded at honor level 500 (astute collectors will have noticed it has a currently unique skin).

Reaching honor level 500 is such a ridiculous grind that it's unlikely very many WoW players will ever achieve it, and it's a rather cool model in my opinion, so it's a bit of a shame to waste it like that.

[Queen of Hamsters]

To me 5 million (which I even had in Legion) meant: Two years of not paying my sub - so this mount would be 240 Euros in real money. No way.

Actually, the 5 million mount is 600 euro in real money if going by token price and how many one would need to buy it...

And yeah, tbf I actually preferred the red Hearthstone stallion to what we got since it actually flies, but their reaction to people being angry with a recolor amounted to them switching it for another recolor, so...

I'm sincerely doubtful that they'll make the milestone of 500 unique mounts special.

[Lolites]

i think brutosaur recolor (without vendor and auctioneer ofc) would be good idea for 500 mounts, but i dont think it will happen

[Azerate]

i think brutosaur recolor (without vendor and auctioneer ofc) would be good idea for 500 mounts, but i dont think it will happen

Even if it would happen, no way it would include the auctioneer, and I don't think OP was actually suggesting that at all. I think it's clear that aspect of the Brutosaur will remain unique to that one from BfA.

[Lolites]

Even if it would happen, no way it would include the auctioneer, and I don't think OP was actually suggesting that at all. I think it's clear that aspect of the Brutosaur will remain unique to that one from BfA.

yeah totally, but thats why it actualy COULD happen, as "that" brutosaur would still be unique
although i still doubt it, we will get some shitty frog or dragon recolor most likely, something we already have in dozen or so colors

[Coconut]

Blizz is constantly adding recolors to old prestigious mounts and I've made my peace with that, still, I'd prefer it not to happen.

I bought every single in-game gold mount from BfA too, because I never considered purchasing Brutosaur before they announced discontinuation. I had like 1mil in January and made it to 5 in just a couple months. Surely you can do it too, there's plenty of time until prepatch anyway.

Sadly, how much gold you can make very much depends on what server you play on, what alts set up you have and how much time you can dedicate to it. While I am glad for you that you could do it, it's not going to be as easy (or as hard) for everyone else. For example, I play casually in terms of difficulty, mostly outdoors content especially early in a patch, so I only recently managed to get my curve and the Mad World achi, and I only have one geared DPS char.

If you had Ny'alotha heroic on farm, for example, you could potentially make some good gold from BoEs (less likely now that you can buy corruptions). If you had gear and a team, you could sell 15+ carries, which I cannot. Even simple profession farming will go better on a populated server (I was having trouble selling potions and Zynathids even earlier in the patch). On top of that, a great chunk of content doesn't provide any residual gold like it used to in Legion, so if I focus on normal current patch gamplay (e.g. farming mounts from rares, raising the new reps and farming the Mechagon and Nazjatar meta achis) I get chump change.

But this isn't really relevant. I don't really understand or sympathize with this desire to be as special as possible. Personally, I would never begrudge others being able to get stuff that I already have. A while ago you were speaking about community spirit on the Soundless thread. What kind of community spirit is wanting to deny other collectors even a recolor with no special functionality of your exclusive mount?

Ultimately, the game gains nothing from this continued string of discontinued vanity items. If a new or returning player sees you sporting something cool in town, they might say "Nice, I want to get that!", and become more invested in the game or in that particular aspect of it, or they might think "This is nice, but it's too hard for me. Maybe some other time", and develop some genuine respect for you and perhaps a long term goal for themselves. It can be something you can help them with if you are friends, because you know how it's done. But if that thing they admire is no longer obtainable, that brings no added value to anything other than your ego. They can't gauge how hard it is to get because they can't try it for themselves, so they have no framework in which to respect you, nor can you offer anything to them by having it. It will only spread envy, disappointment and spite to others. Only toxicity.

I have a friend who purposely denied himself some FOMO tower items, and then the mounts from the BFA pre-patch. This only steeled his resolve to not play BFA at all, and possibly quit WoW altogether. Blizzard uses FOMO to entice people to do certain pieces of content each expansion, and owning all these things builds up to a sunken cost, a long term investment into your account, but it can also backfire. It can also be a "sunken loss" that pushes people away. Old players like my friend, but especially new ones. Why would a new player pick up WoW now, when there are so many cool things that are unattainable for them? It would be better for them to pick a newer game, where they can some day be the grizzled veterans, while WoW slowly decays around the same people that collect the same level of special stuff every expansion, to the point that they will never be able to show all the exclusive stuff they have at once.

If it was my choice, nothing would be discontinued. At all. I think people have been duped into valuing exclusivity, and I honestly believe this is one of the ailments that are eating away at the game. Stuff like at least adding recolors, allowing mythic mounts to become farmable 4-5 years after they were introduced, etc., is the middle ground that should please both sides of the argument.

Whatever, but really IMHO the truth is in the middle. You have a handful of very special mounts and it looks like they remain that way...and then you also have a different levels of recolors and sources to get them.

Can't farm 100 000 mementoes? Unlucky with CorpseEater? Here is a questline for a similar drone. Alliance gets a bee, Horde is shafted. Horde has a nicer chopper. Arthas has his very unique mount. Yogg has a unique mount but now engineers can also build a flying robot head. And so on, and so on.

It is definitely not "special shit" and nothing else. Let some stuff be rarer than others.

Plenty of things are rare, and for as long as the game keeps getting expansions and patches there will always be something that is on the bleeding edge. The drone has an easy to get recolor, but most vicious mounts, for example, do not. The Nazjatar crab takes a lot of dedication to get, even though it's not that hard. Most people will never get it because they can't be arsed. The Mechacycle is similar. Yeah, there is a recolor, but have fun camping a rare spawn with a 0.5% drop rate and a daily loot lockout! You want a spider? Do you have 2 million gold to spare? Sure, maybe in another 4-6 years that will be cheap, but they'll add half a dozen new gold sinks by then. Invincible and Mimiron's Head are easy to farm now, but modern raiders sport mounts from Mythic Nighthold and Antorus, from Mythic Jaina and N'zoth. I barely caught up to the ones from WoD myself...

And even if I didn't have a problem with the removal of vanity rewards in general, the Brutosaur is a particularly shake case.

You see, on principle I'm not really mad with Blizzard's decisions in this matter. I do agree that the rampant inflation had to be stopped, and I agree with their attempt to sponge some gold from the people who have a lot of it. I also see how everyone running around with a portable AH might be a problem (although that should have been plainly obvious the moment they thought of introducing it in game - the yak didn't become super accessible since yesterday - and they never mentioned any problems with the Remote AH or allowing us to have one in our Garrison).

But you have to agree that the way in which this was handled was extremely shitty, especially towards casual collectors.

It's not just that they waited until they turned off most gold-making faucets to announce this, preventing people from farming early in the expansion, which is traditionally the best time for casuals to make gold from gathering, farming and auctioning off various drops. It's that they introduced a plethora of other gold sinks prior to the announcement: a 500,000 albino direhorn, 1,000,000 worth of frogs, a 417,000 bloody rep mount, and another ~ 240.000 in an assortment of other rep mounts (doubled if you did them on both Horde and Alliance, which I did). It is primarily collectors that would spend gold on these, especially the first three. People like me, who plan to get everything anyway. It's hard to argue that someone who throws 500K on a direhorn recolor wouldn't also plan to get the Brutosaur at some point.

And those were just the raw gold ones. Add to that mounts with an opportunity cost, that could be bought or sold on the AH. There were 4 world drop BoE mounts that could be sold for 300,000 - 350,000 early in the expansion, but have since dropped to ~ 50,000. People who got them early, either by buying them or farming and learning them themselves, effectively lost gold for the privilege. Personally, I like hunting for my mounts, so I farmed and learned the ones I have. Same thing for the Alliance bee (which I also spent time farming, on my alt) and the Nazjatar Blood Serpent.

Three mounts were also removed from the store in 8.1. While this wasn't my case, some players might have felt incentivized to spent gold on tokens in order to buy them. Ditto for the 3 new store mounts that came in 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2, two (or three?) of which came with 6 months subscriptions (while that would technically make the mounts free if you were gonna play anyway, it would have made people who play sporadically subscribe for longer than they might have otherwise), as well as the Blizzcon 2019 virtual ticket and various store items and game time people might have bought with gold during this period.

Finally, there was the opportunity cost of time spent in the game. Like I said above, there was little residual gold to be made from farming achievements in Mechagon (at least on my server). And in my case, since I had no reason at that time to worry about short term gold, I actually focused on Mechagon before Nazjatar, missing out the most lucrative time for Zinathids. Ditto for farming mounts and mogs on several chars in warfronts. Doing islands very early in the expansion brought some gold, but wasn't the most efficient way to do it, especially if you kept some or all of the transmogs (doing islands early turned out to be wasted time in general, they shouldn't have taken so long to fix them). Focusing on an alt on the opposite faction in order to see both sides of the story, which was made pretty appealing this expansion (and again, collectors were affected in particular, since rep mounts are not shared anymore, and it appears that they both count towards the achievement), also wouldn't help very much with making gold (although admittedly you can try to transfer part of the gold with pets or friends helping you with the AH).

Any and all of these things involve decisions that influenced how much gold we had left by the time they finally announced us about the Brutosaur, and it all adds up to a A LOT of gold. Had Blizzard told us from the beginning of the expansion, it would have been easy for people to prioritize their gold and their time towards that goal. Had they told us since beta, some of us would have been able to hold off on the spider and lightframe as well. No gold sink mount was ever removed from its vendor before, so we had no way of anticipating this. I do not regret my decision to be more chill about farming and to play the way I wanted to after the burn-out of Legion. I think I made a healthy and reasonable choice given the circumstances at the time, and if this means I can't get the Brutosaur anymore, I think it is entirely on Blizzard. I also don't think it's reasonable to expect people to make half a gold cap in a year (on top of other FOMO content) during a full on deflation campaign, regardless of how easy it might be for some.

I repeat, the parallel with the yak would have been more than obvious the very second they came up with the idea of an AH mount, so they had no good reason to delay telling us. The only reason to do that would have been a cynical one, to allow people to spend as much gold/time/money as they would on other stuff, and then apply pressure on them to spend even more... Either that or callousness, both of which are very, very shitty, I hope you agree.

In conclusion, this is hardly comparable with the traditional skill-based exclusive rewards which people have come to expect in every expansion. It was an ass-pull of a decision that already has the bad optics of screwing people over, and that was heavily contested when announced by all but a few opportunistic snowflakes eager to rub more of their haves in front of the have-nots. Accepting this IMHO callous decision like an adult while also asking Blizzard to add a recolor for those who can't afford the mount or like the brutosaur but aren't interested in the portable AH is more than fair. The wannabe snowflakes can accept the recolor as well, they still get something somewhat exclusive and us poor collectors don't get screwed over completely, it is literally the definition of a compromise. Otherwise I don't see why they should win by crying and I shouldn't.

Furthermore, if I have to bear the consequences of spending my time and my gold on other things instead of focusing on the Brutosaur first, the wannabe snowflakes can bear the consequences of buying the Brutosaur immediately after the announcement instead of waiting until the last stages of the 9.0 pre-patch to see whether or not a recolor or non-AH version will be added in Shadowlands. If anything, we had more reason to assume a gold sink mount wouldn't be removed from the vendor than they have right now to believe no other version of this mount (or, in fact, no other AH mount with a different model) will ever be added to the game. No exclusivity was promised, and the reason given for the removal was the wide availability of the AH functionality, not the appeal of the model. In fact, this very mount will still be technically obtainable, just much harder to get. So the "exclusive" argument is particularly feeble and opportunistic in this situation, even if I was willing to accept it in other cases. I promise you 500 mounts will be pretty rare for a good while to come - only 2.4% are at 400 right now, when 500+ are attainable in game and one can push to 550+ with discontinued stuff and cash.

[Coconut]

On the other hand ppl can now spin this into an evil scheme to get ppl to spend hundreds of Euros so they can sell tokens and get that mount before it is gone.

As much as I grumble about it, I highly doubt that is true... There are few whales willing to pay that much for a single mount, so overall I doubt they'll be making more from raw brutosaur tokens than they would from simply releasing a regular store mount - more likely significantly less.

The more probable goal is simply to funnel gold out of the economy, maybe to give high end raiders a carrot in order to incentivize them to sell Curve carries to other paying customers. To be perfectly honest, though, I guess I wouldn't be entirely surprised if they were thinking about Shadowlands' economy and they genuinely had an "Oh shit!" moment about everyone running around on an AH mount in the near future... I would totally face palm because it should have been plain as day, and I'd still call it a shitty ass excuse and expect them to own up somehow for my lack of brutosaurs, but I wouldn't be entirely surprised. They blundered more important stuff, and I say this with all affection towards the overall game.

[Sentynel]

WTB Giraffe mount.

[Lorgran]

As someone who spent ~ 1.500.000 - 2.000.000 gold on other collectibles prior to them announcing that the Brutosaur was being removed (as well as previously buying all Legion gold sinks) because nowhere in my wildest dreams would I have been able to anticipate that, didn't farm much gold early in BFA because was already burned out from farming 36 tower weapons in Legion, and won't be getting the Brutosaur because I play on a low pop RP server cluster with a crappy market (trust me, I tried several methods since the announcement) and simply don't have enough time to dedicate to raw farming, having to accept this in spite of maining troll, loving troll stuff and wanting a Brutosaur mount since the Blizzcon trailer, you will take that snowflake opinion back or we will become blood enemies.

I was almost in the same boat. I assumed BfA would bring even more gold into the fold (It's increased every expansion ever, why should it stop now?) so I was basicaly broke going into BfA. Didn't play much after L120 and just started playing again in September-ish of 2019. I had 900k on my account when they announced the removal mid-november. I play on a dead RP server too. When I did my first m+ as dps, I got in the top100 on raider.io :P
I play about 2-4 hours every day on average (and includes mythic+ etc), and so far I am right above 4 mill, and most likely on track to make it well in time for Shadowlands.

I have not done any profession farming, almost no AH flipping (I'm just not good at that stuff, tbh, I'd have more money if I didn't try).
Money still ticks in, almost 17k average every day. It wasn't impossible to earn that money if you started when they announced it, now it's most likely too late.

[Coconut]

I doubt that. As you said...there are so many 300k gold mounts out there that you can all buy to bolster your numbers ...they really add up before you spend 5 million.. So that is 1 prestigeous mount vs 10+ to collect for your next achievement.

But how many ppl really have or will have 5 million. So no..even if I take "everyone" not literal....I doubt more than 1% have it now...and in the best of times 10% would have it in 4 years. (numbers totally pulled out of my ass ofc)

Actually, I was checking https://www.worldofwargraphs.com/global-stats/mounts and they are showing 1.4% for the Brutosaur. Data is apparently from 8.2 because 8.3 mounts seem to be missing (most likely before they announced the removal). Surprisingly, the most common frog is at 1.6% and the others at 0.8% and 0.5%. The data on wowhead (which should be skewed towards high end players and collectors) is showing the bruto at 4% and the frogs at 2-3%. The 417K Resistor is at 1.2% on graphs and 3% on wowhead.

While I'm pretty sure there's a lot of overlap here, with collectors/rich ppl owning multiple mounts, it seems that slightly more players own the Brutosaur than the other, cheaper gold sinks, even though they have fairly unique models. Wowhead also has the Bloodfang Widow at 3%, while graphs has it at 1.9% (lower overall, but higher compared to the others). So the overall trend is that the brutosaur is more common...

- - - Updated - - -

I was almost in the same boat. I assumed BfA would bring even more gold into the fold (It's increased every expansion ever, why should it stop now?) so I was basicaly broke going into BfA. Didn't play much after L120 and just started playing again in September-ish of 2019. I had 900k on my account when they announced the removal mid-november. I play on a dead RP server too. When I did my first m+ as dps, I got in the top100 on raider.io :P
I play about 2-4 hours every day on average (and includes mythic+ etc), and so far I am right above 4 mill, and most likely on track to make it well in time for Shadowlands.

I have not done any profession farming, almost no AH flipping (I'm just not good at that stuff, tbh, I'd have more money if I didn't try).
Money still ticks in, almost 17k average every day. It wasn't impossible to earn that money if you started when they announced it, now it's most likely too late.

Once again, happy you made your gold, but I didn't have sufficient time for farming on top of the regular content I've been doing since the announcement (finishing Mechagon which took a while because of a few stubborn drops, farming the mount rares from Vale and Uldum and Soundless - which I have since acquired, to my relief - and running visions for the mail muncher and eventually the meta). None of these things provided much or any residual gold, whereas farming paragon rep or Argus rares in Legion also supplied me with a steady income from follower equipment and quest/supplies gold.

Sure, you can argue it was my choice to focus on regular content instead of farming gold for 2-3 hours per day, and I stand by it. I play the game to enjoy myself, not to toil. Until now I was able to get every gold sink mount consistently within every expansion without having to do that. Everything I said still applies, I could have easily had it had they announced it earlier, and they had no good reason not to. Whether or not it was technically possible to do it if I really dedicated myself to it is irrelevant, it was still going to be 400 hours /played at a minimum, possibly 1,000, dedicated to this alone, without overlap with current content mount farming, as calculated based how much I was able to make at that time through various methods I tested, and that was way too much for me within one year for a single mount, especially since it was some unplanned bullshit.

[gutnbrg]

if i was horde and ally got a gilnean stage coach i would be pissed, that vulpera wagon is lacking in comparison

[Lorgran]

Once again, happy you made your gold, but I didn't have sufficient time for farming on top of the regular content I've been doing since the announcement (finishing Mechagon which took a while because of a few stubborn drops, farming the mount rares from Vale and Uldum and Soundless - which I have since acquired, to my relief - and running visions for the mail muncher and eventually the meta). None of these things provided much or any residual gold, whereas farming paragon rep or Argus rares in Legion also supplied me with a steady income from follower equipment and quest/supplies gold.

Sure, you can argue it was my choice to focus on regular content instead of farming gold for 2-3 hours per day, and I stand by it. I play the game to enjoy myself, not to toil. Until now I was able to get every gold sink mount consistently within every expansion without having to do that. Everything I said still applies, I could have easily had it had they announced it earlier, and they had no good reason not to. Whether or not it was technically possible to do it if I really dedicated myself to it is irrelevant, it was still going to be 400 hours /played at a minimum, possibly 1,000, dedicated to this alone, without overlap with current content mount farming, as calculated based how much I was able to make at that time through various methods I tested, and that was way too much for me within one year for a single mount, especially since it was some unplanned bullshit.

I have Meta from Nazjatar and Mechagon. Got almost everything that drops from those zones. I do 4 pet battle dungeons every week atm. I've done a garrison invasion every week. I do some old raids to farm transmogs (though, this also gives an ok good gold income). I cap 6 characters on islands every week. Currently I am doing old zone quests (North/South Barrens, Feralas, TN etc). I can't really count a lot of these as great gold income, or even farming. I also do 2 visions every week (and got the Mad World Feat 1st April 2020). I also do a couple of mythic+ every week. I even did a bunch of BGs during BG week and pet battles in pet battle week.

With the exeption of capping 6 chars for islands every week since 8.3 and I do the 8.3 assaults on those 6 characters, the rest I only do on one of them, and I just checked, I have 76 days /played since I capped that character back in 2018.

So I'm doing the same things as you, I don't really farm or put a lot of time (relative!) into gathering gold, yet my gold value has gone up over 3 mill the last 7 months. To be honest, it sounds like you're spending the gold as you get it and then forget about it.
There really isn't anything impressive about things above either, this is just a random player doing random stuff, yet still getting the AH mount.

[Azerate]

Man, you must really have some very strong feelings about this to have written so much

Sadly, how much gold you can make very much depends on what server you play on, what alts set up you have and how much time you can dedicate to it. While I am glad for you that you could do it, it's not going to be as easy (or as hard) for everyone else. For example, I play casually in terms of difficulty, mostly outdoors content especially early in a patch, so I only recently managed to get my curve and the Mad World achi, and I only have one geared DPS char.

If you had Ny'alotha heroic on farm, for example, you could potentially make some good gold from BoEs (less likely now that you can buy corruptions). If you had gear and a team, you could sell 15+ carries, which I cannot. Even simple profession farming will go better on a populated server (I was having trouble selling potions and Zynathids even earlier in the patch). On top of that, a great chunk of content doesn't provide any residual gold like it used to in Legion, so if I focus on normal current patch gamplay (e.g. farming mounts from rares, raising the new reps and farming the Mechagon and Nazjatar meta achis) I get chump change.

Yeah I did raid HC Ny'alotha regularly, with even some entry level mythic bosses. Sold a couple BoEs but not for very much, because my realm is a low pop realm too. I probably got like 300k-400k in total from raid boes. Believe it or not, I probably made far more from a 2x4 Uldum mount/trash farm (even without getting the mount), and that's certainly something pretty much anyone can do without progress in PvE. But agreed, like you said, it doesn't really matter how you or I make money. What matters though is that you can certainly earn 5 mill gold in 1,5 - 2 years, or whatever the time window was when they announced that Brutosaur will be removed.

I don't really understand or sympathize with this desire to be as special as possible. Personally, I would never begrudge others being able to get stuff that I already have. A while ago you were speaking about community spirit on the Soundless thread. What kind of community spirit is wanting to deny other collectors even a recolor with no special functionality of your exclusive mount?

Again, my personal opinion doesn't really matter because Blizzard has a set course of action decided, and they won't change it, because not enough people care about that in whichever direction. I never said I want to deny anyone anything. If it were up to me I would not discontinue the Brutosaur and just left it there on a vendor forever. I just said I'd prefer not to have other mounts with the same model - and I believe that should be the case for all high profile mounts. Again it is not, and there's a possibility that we will see more Brutosaurs.

Ultimately, the game gains nothing from this continued string of discontinued vanity items. If a new or returning player sees you sporting something cool in town, they might say "Nice, I want to get that!", and become more invested in the game or in that particular aspect of it, or they might think "This is nice, but it's too hard for me. Maybe some other time", and develop some genuine respect for you and perhaps a long term goal for themselves. It can be something you can help them with if you are friends, because you know how it's done. But if that thing they admire is no longer obtainable, that brings no added value to anything other than your ego. They can't gauge how hard it is to get because they can't try it for themselves, so they have no framework in which to respect you, nor can you offer anything to them by having it. It will only spread envy, disappointment and spite to others. Only toxicity.

I have a friend who purposely denied himself some FOMO tower items, and then the mounts from the BFA pre-patch. This only steeled his resolve to not play BFA at all, and possibly quit WoW altogether. Blizzard uses FOMO to entice people to do certain pieces of content each expansion, and owning all these things builds up to a sunken cost, a long term investment into your account, but it can also backfire. It can also be a "sunken loss" that pushes people away. Old players like my friend, but especially new ones. Why would a new player pick up WoW now, when there are so many cool things that are unattainable for them? It would be better for them to pick a newer game, where they can some day be the grizzled veterans, while WoW slowly decays around the same people that collect the same level of special stuff every expansion, to the point that they will never be able to show all the exclusive stuff they have at once.

If it was my choice, nothing would be discontinued. At all. I think people have been duped into valuing exclusivity, and I honestly believe this is one of the ailments that are eating away at the game. Stuff like at least adding recolors, allowing mythic mounts to become farmable 4-5 years after they were introduced, etc., is the middle ground that should please both sides of the argument.

Agreed, I would also prefer not to have any discontinued items in the game. However, number one: our opinion probably won't change this, and number two: I feel like this is a completely separate issue to what we were originally discussing. I don't feel like recolors are an answer to some mount being discontinued, and I feel it's unfair for you to assume that I'm advocating for things being discontinued because I don't want recolors. These are two completely separate issues. If it were up to me, there would be no 2 same mount models in the game, but again, that's obviously not how it is.

Plenty of things are rare, and for as long as the game keeps getting expansions and patches there will always be something that is on the bleeding edge. The drone has an easy to get recolor, but most vicious mounts, for example, do not. The Nazjatar crab takes a lot of dedication to get, even though it's not that hard. Most people will never get it because they can't be arsed. The Mechacycle is similar. Yeah, there is a recolor, but have fun camping a rare spawn with a 0.5% drop rate and a daily loot lockout! You want a spider? Do you have 2 million gold to spare? Sure, maybe in another 4-6 years that will be cheap, but they'll add half a dozen new gold sinks by then. Invincible and Mimiron's Head are easy to farm now, but modern raiders sport mounts from Mythic Nighthold and Antorus, from Mythic Jaina and N'zoth. I barely caught up to the ones from WoD myself...

Now we're getting into one's approach to mount farming, which I also feel is a bit irrelevant. All I can say is that as a collector I don't look at mounts like that. For me the mount is first about its method of acquistion, and secondly about looks. Like I'm not gonna sit here satisfied because I have a blue infernal for 350 mounts when I'm still lacking both infernals from Gul dan. You obviously look at it from a different perspective and that's why you value the recolors so much.

You see, on principle I'm not really mad with Blizzard's decisions in this matter. I do agree that the rampant inflation had to be stopped, and I agree with their attempt to sponge some gold from the people who have a lot of it. I also see how everyone running around with a portable AH might be a problem (although that should have been plainly obvious the moment they thought of introducing it in game - the yak didn't become super accessible since yesterday - and they never mentioned any problems with the Remote AH or allowing us to have one in our Garrison).

But you have to agree that the way in which this was handled was extremely shitty, especially towards casual collectors.

I fully agree the mount should not have been discontinued. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the shitty way of handling it. I think they just announced it and that was done. It would have been shitty if it happened 3 months before BfA's end. They gave us like 1,5 years - could have been better, but that's not that bad either.

It's not just that they waited until they turned off most gold-making faucets to announce this, preventing people from farming early in the expansion, which is traditionally the best time for casuals to make gold from gathering, farming and auctioning off various drops.

Here I have no idea what you mean. I don't think they turned off any gold making methods. Certainly not the ones I used / wanted to use. Maybe you could argue that the beginning of the expansion is better for farming, but you can also argue various other raid releases and patches make that easy too.

It's that they introduced a plethora of other gold sinks prior to the announcement: a 500,000 albino direhorn, 1,000,000 worth of frogs, a 417,000 bloody rep mount, and another ~ 240.000 in an assortment of other rep mounts (doubled if you did them on both Horde and Alliance, which I did). It is primarily collectors that would spend gold on these, especially the first three. People like me, who plan to get everything anyway. It's hard to argue that someone who throws 500K on a direhorn recolor wouldn't also plan to get the Brutosaur at some point.

And those were just the raw gold ones. Add to that mounts with an opportunity cost, that could be bought or sold on the AH. There were 4 world drop BoE mounts that could be sold for 300,000 - 350,000 early in the expansion, but have since dropped to ~ 50,000. People who got them early, either by buying them or farming and learning them themselves, effectively lost gold for the privilege. Personally, I like hunting for my mounts, so I farmed and learned the ones I have. Same thing for the Alliance bee (which I also spent time farming, on my alt) and the Nazjatar Blood Serpent.

Three mounts were also removed from the store in 8.1. While this wasn't my case, some players might have felt incentivized to spent gold on tokens in order to buy them. Ditto for the 3 new store mounts that came in 8.0, 8.1 and 8.2, two (or three?) of which came with 6 months subscriptions (while that would technically make the mounts free if you were gonna play anyway, it would have made people who play sporadically subscribe for longer than they might have otherwise), as well as the Blizzcon 2019 virtual ticket and various store items and game time people might have bought with gold during this period.

We will never know if they actually planned all this in advance. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I was in the same boat and also bought all those gold mounts, including the 500k Direhorn. The fact remains, that there was (is?) plenty of time left to farm the gold needed for the Brutosaur, even with some low effort methods.

Finally, there was the opportunity cost of time spent in the game. Like I said above, there was little residual gold to be made from farming achievements in Mechagon (at least on my server). And in my case, since I had no reason at that time to worry about short term gold, I actually focused on Mechagon before Nazjatar, missing out the most lucrative time for Zinathids. Ditto for farming mounts and mogs on several chars in warfronts. Doing islands very early in the expansion brought some gold, but wasn't the most efficient way to do it, especially if you kept some or all of the transmogs (doing islands early turned out to be wasted time in general, they shouldn't have taken so long to fix them). Focusing on an alt on the opposite faction in order to see both sides of the story, which was made pretty appealing this expansion (and again, collectors were affected in particular, since rep mounts are not shared anymore, and it appears that they both count towards the achievement), also wouldn't help very much with making gold (although admittedly you can try to transfer part of the gold with pets or friends helping you with the AH).

You can't really look at game content being introduced and say "okay, that was all added just to slow down my moneymaking methods". That's either going full tinfoil hat, or just being on a bit high of a horse thinking that the whole game is actually designed to get in your way. Island Expeditions were definitely a disaster since launch, fully agreed. But again, saying or even suggesting that this was done on purpose is going a bit too far.

Had they told us since beta, some of us would have been able to hold off on the spider and lightframe as well. No gold sink mount was ever removed from its vendor before, so we had no way of anticipating this.

Well, for sure. Had we known earlier, we would have started hoarding earlier too. Maybe they didn't know themselves, or maybe they did know and withheld that information to incentivize people to purchase tokens.

In conclusion, this is hardly comparable with the traditional skill-based exclusive rewards which people have come to expect in every expansion. It was an ass-pull of a decision that already has the bad optics of screwing people over, and that was heavily contested when announced by all but a few opportunistic snowflakes eager to rub more of their haves in front of the have-nots. Accepting this IMHO callous decision like an adult while also asking Blizzard to add a recolor for those who can't afford the mount or like the brutosaur but aren't interested in the portable AH is more than fair. The wannabe snowflakes can accept the recolor as well, they still get something somewhat exclusive and us poor collectors don't get screwed over completely, it is literally the definition of a compromise. Otherwise I don't see why they should win by crying and I shouldn't.

The main way in which Brutosaur is different from the usual skill based mounts added to the game and discontinued....is that it's not skill based and can literally be farmed by anyone. It does however still require some work and commitment. Bummer I didn't read the whole post before replying to it, because I don't usually reply to people who use the term 'snowflake' unironically. Calling people snowflakes, while your 450/500 achievement thread is just a thinly veiled rant and plea for a mount recolor is pretty rich. It's not my fault that Blizzard decided to discontinue the mount, and frankly, asking for a mount recolor just because you can't be bothered to grind for it is what a real snowflake would do.

In the end, it's not the end of the world. Nothing suggested the mount will get removed, but Blizzard decided otherwise. That's the end of the story. You can grind for the mount, or not grind for it. It's your decision. There's a good couple mounts I'll never get and I'm not begging for recolors of those mounts because of that. Now I will probably eventually get those, because that's how this game works, but it certainly won't make me feel as If I owned the original one.

[sweatshopkids]

Hot dog in a bun for the 500 mount achievement.

[Andonais]

Don't think that many people care anymore mounts have lost so much value these days

[Coconut]

Could be tons of explanations....I bet ppl analysing data would have a field day with this.

Example: I decided to not buy the brutosaur mount (though I had six million gold) and rather use it on tokens, the spider and stuff like the frogs etc to bump my count towards 400 mounts. I just don't need a mobile AH, I do it the old fashion way with a bank mule and I rather show off my Nazjatar crab or Junkheap Drifter.

But that is besides the point....there really are very few ppl with enough gold from what your data shoes...which is what I expected...well...4% having the bruto is actually indeed more than I thought. (then again it is 1,4% on another site) Could ofc be that the more dedicated players log in and upload to wowhead. Hell..even I don't and I consider myself dedicated.

Like when MMO C did a survey on how much gold ppl had or what achievements ppl had completed vs some "normal" survey...this site here has the absolutely more dedicated ppl. When 25% had flying unlocked overall in Legion according to a "normal" survey...it was 50% of the MMO C ppl who had it

I don't need the AH either, I just like the mount (troll main, like I said).

I think wowhead is only counting ppl who are signed up with them, so their numbers are higher than reality, but are still relevant relative to each other. At the same time, the graphs numbers should be lower because they only counted up to 8.2 (but they should be pretty accurate when it comes to older mounts). Mmo-champ should also be heavily skewed towards people who are informed and invested in the game.

I think what the numbers show is that on average relatively few people are interested in buying gold sink mounts with no other functionality, even when they have cool models like the frogs (even the 70k faction flying mounts are pretty rare, at 5% on wowhead, just 1% more than brutosaur). Hard to tell now how many people bought the bruto for the AH and how many got it because it was getting removed, but if we're looking at older mounts comparing functionality vs unique looks at more or less the same price, 53% of wowhead profiles have the Grand Expedition Yak and only 15% have the alliance treadblade. Even if you double that assuming Horde mains wouldn't buy it, it's still 53 to 30.

I also found an older thread about people who have more than 1 million gold which should be pretty interesting. Haven't had the chance to read it all yet, might do so tomorrow.

With the exeption of capping 6 chars for islands every week since 8.3 and I do the 8.3 assaults on those 6 characters, the rest I only do on one of them, and I just checked, I have 76 days /played since I capped that character back in 2018.

There you go, I only have 36 days /played at 120 on my main, and I didn't take that many breaks, maybe a couple of months overall (and a chunk of that time was spent camping Sha, Oondasta, Arachnoid Harvester and other rares, where I'm basically tabbed out working or doing stuff around the house). If you're saying most of your max level play time was done since September 2019, that means you're averaging almost 7 hours/day on your main alone, not 2-4 overall. With islands and assaults on 5 other chars (sometimes I was even skipping them on my main, lol xD), it adds up to a nice seven out of seven full time job. Now, I'm not judging, but you certainly can't tell me I'm not doing enough with my time.

And by the way, you listed a lot of the things you do, but you didn't say how exactly you get those 17k/day within such "little" time (although if you dedicate 3 hours per day to it, I already know you can even do it with raw farming).

[Lei]

snip

Excellent post, thank you for taking the time to write it.

[Coconut]

Man, you must really have some very strong feelings about this to have written so much

Well, I do like this model and I want one, what can I say. Don't much care about the other bullshit orbiting around it.

Yeah I did raid HC Ny'alotha regularly, with even some entry level mythic bosses. Sold a couple BoEs but not for very much, because my realm is a low pop realm too. I probably got like 300k-400k in total from raid boes. Believe it or not, I probably made far more from a 2x4 Uldum mount/trash farm (even without getting the mount), and that's certainly something pretty much anyone can do without progress in PvE. But agreed, like you said, it doesn't really matter how you or I make money. What matters though is that you can certainly earn 5 mill gold in 1,5 - 2 years, or whatever the time window was when they announced that Brutosaur will be removed.

They announced it in late November 2019 (November 20sth) and it's likely going away with the prepatch, not the release, so it will be a year at most, depending on release date. According to my initial calculations, farming the gold was going to take at least 400 hours, 1,000 at worst. As I replied to another player, I currently have ~ 870 hours /played on my main at level 120. Counting my alts, I may have 1,400, but a big chunk of that was spent camping rares and world bosses while doing other stuff, so not really active play.

Having to reassign between 40% and ALL of my play time to farming gold for a whole year on short notice in order to get this mount is not what I consider reasonable. Even 15-20% wouldn't be reasonable.

Again, my personal opinion doesn't really matter because Blizzard has a set course of action decided, and they won't change it, because not enough people care about that in whichever direction. I never said I want to deny anyone anything. If it were up to me I would not discontinue the Brutosaur and just left it there on a vendor forever. I just said I'd prefer not to have other mounts with the same model - and I believe that should be the case for all high profile mounts. Again it is not, and there's a possibility that we will see more Brutosaurs.

Agreed about leaving it on the vendor, strongly disagree about mounts - high profile or otherwise - being restricted to a singer color. Regardless of the current discussion, if a recolor of that model exists, especially when you can encounter it out in the world, it is a waste and a shame not to make it available to players. The world feels more immersive when you can mount the same type of creature as the guy across the mailbox and not look exactly the same. It's also nice to have options based on your own preferences instead of being restricted to the color a random developer liked best.

In some specific cases, sure, I can agree with you. Jaina's mythic mount for example is a water elemental with an iconic color palette. You can't have a lot of variation on that concept without making it look weird, so it should probably stay unique. Ditto for the Felsteel Annihilator and the Lightforged Warframe, they have a certain flavor in lore, there's probably no point in making a red annihilator or a pink warframe just for the fuck of it. I can also agree when the variations are small (with some exceptions). If you have a grey boar, you probably don't need a slightly darker grey boar. A brown boar, white boar and red boar, however, are fine and offer valuable customization options, just like a brown brutosaur would, since the creatures do populate the game after all.

Agreed, I would also prefer not to have any discontinued items in the game. However, number one: our opinion probably won't change this, and number two: I feel like this is a completely separate issue to what we were originally discussing. I don't feel like recolors are an answer to some mount being discontinued, and I feel it's unfair for you to assume that I'm advocating for things being discontinued because I don't want recolors. These are two completely separate issues. If it were up to me, there would be no 2 same mount models in the game, but again, that's obviously not how it is.

Personally, I would rather have a recolor than no mount at all, but like I said before, as a player focused on cosmetics and collecting, most of the time I do find a lot of value in recolors. In fact, there are many cases in which I think it is bloody stupid we don't have access to recolor, such as rylaks and grinning reavers. Particularly when said recolor is heavily featured in game as a flight path (white rylak in front of my garrison), mount of choice for a faction you interact with (yellow reavers for laughing skull) or has significant presence out in the world.

Now we're getting into one's approach to mount farming, which I also feel is a bit irrelevant. All I can say is that as a collector I don't look at mounts like that. For me the mount is first about its method of acquistion, and secondly about looks. Like I'm not gonna sit here satisfied because I have a blue infernal for 350 mounts when I'm still lacking both infernals from Gul dan. You obviously look at it from a different perspective and that's why you value the recolors so much.

I do like my characters to have an identity, if only a visual one (I play on an RP realm but don't really RP). Having options when it comes to mounts helps a lot. Like I said before, when I choose, let's say, a raptor mount, because that's what a troll would ride, I don't want to look like every other player who uses a raptor, and here's where recolors help in adding some diversity.

Ironically, I play my mage almost exclusively in arcane spec (last time I swapped was when I did towers, really xD), so I don't use the coldflame infernal on any char, it doesn't fit any of them. Good I got the classic green one recently.

I fully agree the mount should not have been discontinued. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by the shitty way of handling it. I think they just announced it and that was done. It would have been shitty if it happened 3 months before BfA's end. They gave us like 1,5 years - could have been better, but that's not that bad either.

Here I have no idea what you mean. I don't think they turned off any gold making methods. Certainly not the ones I used / wanted to use. Maybe you could argue that the beginning of the expansion is better for farming, but you can also argue various other raid releases and patches make that easy too.

The announcement followed a drastic change in gold acquisition. In other expansions, especially WoD and Legion, a good chunk of gold would come as a side bonus from regular activities. I could go out there and farm mounts and rep and still get some gold. In BFA, they changed that as early as 8.1. There are a lot of activities and places where you simply don't earn gold. On top of that, like I said before, I consider one year to be very short notice (I gave you my play numbers so I hope you understand why), especially after doing all in their power to tempt us into spending gold in the previous year. You had a different experience and different opportunities so you were able to deal with it as it was. I respect that, but I stand by my opinion. Since I always managed to buy all gold sinks within the expansion they were added in before, I don't think my expectations were out of place.

As a side note, the "announcement" came as a CM reply in a thread opened by someone who had datamined the FoS on the 9.0.1 PTR. It's uncertain when exactly they were planning to tell us if people hadn't asked.

YWe will never know if they actually planned all this in advance. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. I was in the same boat and also bought all those gold mounts, including the 500k Direhorn. The fact remains, that there was (is?) plenty of time left to farm the gold needed for the Brutosaur, even with some low effort methods.

I keep hearing that, but the reality on my server is something else, and I can't help but think that people are grossly exaggerating, like that other poster who said they were only playing 2-4 hours per day but actually it turned out that it was 7. Not assuming any ill intent here, just a warped perspective.

You can't really look at game content being introduced and say "okay, that was all added just to slow down my moneymaking methods". That's either going full tinfoil hat, or just being on a bit high of a horse thinking that the whole game is actually designed to get in your way. Island Expeditions were definitely a disaster since launch, fully agreed. But again, saying or even suggesting that this was done on purpose is going a bit too far.

Some consideration towards what amounts to hundreds of hours required to farm that gold back, or at least towards the gold's monetary value in tokens (in my case of upwards of 200 euros) should have been shown, I don't think that is asking for too much. Certainly many players could have gotten more value for their gold had they been warned. As it was, we spent gold on something that will be devalued with inflation and missed out on something that will continue to grow in cost in the future, when the long-set expectation was that everything that was on a vendor would devalue equally and whatever we bought was a matter of choice. However you want to spin it, this was shitty.

The main way in which Brutosaur is different from the usual skill based mounts added to the game and discontinued....is that it's not skill based and can literally be farmed by anyone. It does however still require some work and commitment. Bummer I didn't read the whole post before replying to it, because I don't usually reply to people who use the term 'snowflake' unironically. Calling people snowflakes, while your 450/500 achievement thread is just a thinly veiled rant and plea for a mount recolor is pretty rich. It's not my fault that Blizzard decided to discontinue the mount, and frankly, asking for a mount recolor just because you can't be bothered to grind for it is what a real snowflake would do.

Ditto for me and people getting easily offended. xD Whoever argues that they should be super special and unique is a snowflake, period. There's no better term for it. If you don't identify with that worldview, that's great, sorry I misunderstood. Otherwise don't get offended.

In the end, it's not the end of the world. Nothing suggested the mount will get removed, but Blizzard decided otherwise. That's the end of the story. You can grind for the mount, or not grind for it. It's your decision. There's a good couple mounts I'll never get and I'm not begging for recolors of those mounts because of that. Now I will probably eventually get those, because that's how this game works, but it certainly won't make me feel as If I owned the original one.

I'm not the one saying it's the end of the world. I argued against it at that time, like many many people did. I tried to figure out a way to get it, but realized it's not feasible, not if I wanted to actually play the game like it was intended and enjoy myself, and I accepted that.

Now I made a thread about mount collecting achievements because that's my thing, I collect mounts, and naturally I'm suggesting a Brutosaur recolor as my first choice, not only because I personally want one, not only because I believe we are owed one by all laws of common decency, but because it honestly is the most appropriate choice from the entire gallery of unused mounts.

The last thing I want is having Blizzard read these suggestion and somehow decide that players are opposed to the idea of a Brutosaur recolor because a bunch of armchair contrarians come here and piss their pants about how things aren't unique and special anymore (pardon my french) just for the sake of the argument. Don't want be a snowflake? Be supportive! 500 mounts is a huge milestone, dammit!*

*I mean, if they give us some fresh models instead of a Brutosaur, all the better, provided they are of equal or greater quality and appeal... but just so you know in that case I'll be making a separate thread just about Horde and Alliance Brutosaurs! xD And also just so you know, I don't think any of the mounts revealed so far through Shadowlands datamining stands out as much as the Brutosaur. They're nice as covenant mounts, but they're missing that collection meta oomph.

Excellent post, thank you for taking the time to write it.

Thank you for reading it, let's hope for the best!

[TheWorkingTitle]

Here's what I want for 450 and 500 mounts:


450:






500: