The worst part is that the majority of players have no idea this mount is being removed from the vendor because the only place it’s been mentioned is here on the forums. Even Blizz says only a small minority of players ever come here, and many that do avoid GD like the plague.
So, not only did they try to sneak this change by, they haven’t even really come clean about it. Everyone knows about the anniversary items. Everyone knew about the mage tower and other time-limited achieves. With no official announcement, very few actually know about this scummy removal.
People have the right to spend their money on whatever they want. But companies taking advantage of that by limiting distribution of an infinite (digital) item and trying to trigger the Fear of Missing Out with “For a limited time!” advertising just turn my stomach. I hate feeling that way about the company making what has been my favorite game for over a decade.
Your money isn’t the point. The point is blizzard have never removed a gold sink before, and doing so in this manner sets a very bad precedent. It’s pretty obvious the only reason they’re doing it is for token sales.
It concerns people b/c money is what drives design decisions and some of those decisions might be bad in the eyes of some players. Look at how China is effecting the entire gaming market. Because China is such a large market, the money to be made there is huge. Blizz and other companies are self censoring their products (no blood, no anti-authoritarian messages, no LGBT, etc.) to appeal to the Chinese government. The monetary incentives drive these decisions to the detriment of the game. So yes, people’s spending habits concern me because it is hurting the quality of the games I’m playing or want to play.
P.S. Blizz has decided the short term token sales outweighs the revenue of people who may play for years (all the while paying blizz) to get that mount. That would indicate that blizz has no faith in Shadowlands being any better than BfA and that should tell you something.
Probably not your personal decision, so this isn’t at you, but:
Y’all can’t stop swinging and missing to save your lives, can you? I mean if you were baseball players you’d get into the “Hall of Shame”.
Haha.
I think this a dreadful idea. Removing things that you decide shouldn’t be available to everyone says one thing, to me. You shouldn’t add those things in the first place. Time limited challenge rewards are one thing but this is just silly. If the Brutosaur is so fundamentally problematic then it shouldn’t exist at all.
There are four other Brutosaur mount models that are unused, dark grey, blue, grey-brown, and silver. There’s also a white/gold creature model that doesn’t have a corresponding mount version.
There’s no reason why they can’t add some of those into the game, without AH access, so players can still have something to work toward. I’d also like to see some new non-passenger models, that are just the saddle, that would be even cheaper. If you want precedence, that’s how the Mammoths in WotLK were handled. The Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth cost the most for repair/vendor NPCs, the multi-passenger Mammoths cost about half and the non-passenger Mammoths cost much less.
It would be very helpful to know if Blizz is going to listen to these reasonable suggestions and make other brutosaur mounts available, so I can decide whether to keep on with my brutosaur savings plan or buy some of the other available vendor mounts.
Ok, fair point - I may have been overly presumptuous.
I still think that leaving this stuff to the data miners is a wholly incompetent move by a team that has been “working on their community engagement”.
They should do a full 180 on this one. Claim they didn’t realize it would backlash so hard, and leave long boi for us to continue to work toward. They’ve already got their token splurges done so they could pull a PR stunt to save face… maybe? Whales don’t post or read the forums, do they?
I do wonder if the game will make it past 10.0, honestly. They’ve been tying up loose ends since Legion, after all, and their “new lore” is not going well. I think they’re just out of ideas.
To be fair, if it didn’t look like they were going down the “former horde leader who commited genocide is really a good guy” route it would be received much better. A lot of people didn’t like sylvanas being center stage as it was, then they threw that in.