When was the decision to remove this mount in SL made?
When were you planning to share the removal of this mount with the players (if ever)?
What other things are being removed that you haven’t told us about yet?
The fact that this needed to be datamined and then given a Blue response after the fact is scummy in and of itself. So much for increasing communication between the devs and the players. Stealth changes like this need to stop. This is not a minor change. There is already a lack of trust for the dev team. This just makes things worse.
Changes like this genuinely make me question whether or not you guys are sabotaging your own game, as crazy as that may sound. This whole situation does nothing but upset the players. You need players to stick around, not be driven away.
I remember when they made the update to level requirements for mounts and moved the bar from level 40 to level 20, and level 60 to level 40. In addition to that, they dramatically reduced the price of the mounts in-game. It went from 1,000 gold to 100 gold for an epic mount, and I was so flabbergasted because I spent so much time and energy to earn my epic mount the first time, and suddenly everyone had it.
I’m all for inclusivity, but if they plan to do a level-squish and then an economic overhaul (speculative) in Shadowlands, then I can imagine a reduction of the cost of this mount would invoke the ire of all the people who worked hard to save up the original 5-million gold cost for it. If it were me, I would rather see it removed from the game before it took a price-reduction due to game-changes. It would devalue the effort originally put into acquiring it.
That said, this decision only really makes sense to me if the reason behind it is, in-fact, due to economy changes coming in Shadowlands as well.
A lot of us have wanted it, but were content to farm gold over time. We thought we could because no other gold sink has been removed. Now that it’s going away, if we want it we either have to farm faster/play the AH, or buy tokens (which is the only reason blizzard would remove a gold sink).
I feel like this is one of those decisions where it would reflect well on Blizzard if the context and decision-making process was shared with the player base.
Otherwise, players will feel like this is just another one of those things from Blizzard that screams “Buy tokens” or “Time-played” or some such, which might be wrong, but it sure looks right.
Maybe they’re anticipating something causing people’s gold stocks to soar in SL that we don’t know about, and don’t want to devalue it for those who paid 5 mil for it now?
You know like… those of us who spent a month farming primal fires to buy epic flight in BC.
One has to wonder if Blizzard has this system where they ask all players what would be the stupidest move we could make for the game and they just select one every few weeks just to cause the game further decline.
I mean, I get it, scare people to spend gold so they are freed up to buy gold… it’s a $ play.
But that said, WoW isn’t in a state that it can take many more blows.
I assumed one of the purposes of it being so expensive was to be a long-term project for players who aren’t rolling in gold. Something that would give players a long-term goal to work toward when patch content gets thin.
Then explain why they removed the AH functionality from the app when this mount came out.
And the yak was actually prestigious in MoP, I was there. And it’s unique model helped a lot. Not as much the mammoth, I was there as well. There were a few more here and there, yet it was a ton of gold back then. The Brutosaur was more of the same, a new mount, with an exclusive model as the yak, with a ridiculous high price for the economy of the time, and with two utility passengers.
Just say “Look, we don’t want auction houses all over the place. We’ve reached the point where one character can carry an entire mobile city around with them and we still want you to visit the cities so we’re making this mount exceedingly rare when BFA ends.” I get that; I can understand that even if I don’t agree with it entirely.
But they don’t do that and now our paranoid player base believes that a video game company is trying to steal money from the mentally ill.
I’m possibly one of the most blizzard “defensive” posters and even i have a problem with this. If they didn’t want AHs out in the world they should have never made the mount. There is only one reason they would remove it.
And yet, you didn’t say a word about the Mammoth remaining in Dalaran, or the Yak still being purchasable in Kun Lai. Anyone arguing the Brutosaur ISN’T the BfA equivalent of those mounts is arguing in 100% bad faith.
Moreover, Blizzard not only has given no explanation whatsoever for why this is happening (not even a cursory one), they weren’t planning on telling anyone AT ALL. It was deduced by data mining.
Beyond that, people may brush it off all they want, but the amount of people who are sick to damn death of the removal of content in a game we pay a subscription for (and $50 every two years) is increasing by the day.
If your significant other decides to have a divorce and takes time to reason and explain you why, then there is no problem in it (besides the fact you are getting divorced, but focus). On the other hand, if your SO simply locks you out of your house and does not botter telling you the reason , then there is a huge problem.
The lack of communication from Blizzard in this matter is astounding. We only found out that it is going to be removed because someone datamined it.
Also, let’s go back to the Mists cloak drama. It wasn’t communicated til WAY later in the expansion that the Legendary Quest line was going away completely. Not that you couldn’t get the cloak anymore, you couldn’t even see the story.
This remains a horrible decision, but at the beginning of Warlords, they made a point to be upfront about the quest line going away. STILL a horrible decision, but one that was communicated. No one was told this would happen at the beginning of BfA. Anyone with any sense of the history of the game would have been correct in assuming it was the Mammoth/Yak, which are mounts people often buy 1 or 2 expansions later. MANY players do a pay price for these mounts. They wait 2 or 3 years longer than they people who get them when they are current. But even that isn’t enough for the sociopaths who believe no one should have anything but the most generic crap if they aren’t on the bleeding edge of content at all times. Disgusting.
That would be a comically awful defense of this particular decision. I’d love to see them try it.
Developers: You guys aren’t visiting cities enough, so we’re taking out the mobile auction houses.
Players: Or you could just put portals back in? We can visit more cities with portals.
Developers: No, it’s definitely the auction houses that are the problem. Not the inequity of resources in some cities that make some cities more attractive than others. Not the lack of portals or transmog or void storage or specialty vendors in the unattractive cities. Not the fact that we blew two cities up this expansion and that might make players want to be less attached to cities in general. No, our spreadsheets say the dinos that 3% of you own are definitely the problem.
