I am not saying anything about QoL or retail or anything beyond the human condition. Will people farm the gold for cosmetics? At what point do they refuse to spend that gold.
IMO, the old cost was changed due to people seeing additional mounts as cost prohibitive.
Which means it’s not a gold sink. The change turns mount collecting into a subsequent sink after the initial epic mount and training costs
That’s a fair point and what i figure as much from early on but i figured i’d pitch the idea since it’s a static game, there are a decent amount of cosmetics in the game by tailoring alone iirc.
To be honest, the idea of gold sinks wasn’t a necessary concept till at least late TBC or early Wrath. It may be a bit more of an issue in Classic with AH grinders, but those guys are never really in it for the money, they’re in it for the counter.
I don’t see gold sinks as being a big concern simply because the average player won’t have gold, and never expected themselves to have to buy BiS off the AH. Its an issue in Retail where you can make 10,000G just from levelling 110 to 120, but the same isn’t true in Vanilla where you have plenty of “gold paper cuts”.
Respecs get progressively higher.
Buying all your skills.
Constant repair costs. (The prices haven’t changed, but back then 1G mattered.)
It was on my server. I didnt have epic riding until TBC and i didnt have much trouble with people beating me to mines or mobs. Without dailies its going to take a long time for inflation to become a problem since the only way to create new wealth is vendoring drops and looting coin. Everything else is just moving that wealth around and losing it to the AH cut, respec costs, repair costs, flight path costs, mailbox costs (30 copper aint much but it adds up), naxx attunement, buying reagents & crafting materials, training costs, etc. Its death by a thousand cuts, a bunch of small sinks that are barely noticeable but effective
I have no idea when you started or when your server rolled out - but I can assure you 100% it was not a “minority” of level 60s that had their epic mount.
As I have stated with many other things that changed over the course of Vanilla, either on would be in keeping with Vanilla.
I simply believe that the older, further from “retail” version that requires a more substantial effort for additional mounts should be used.
Remember that older version existed in vanilla FAR longer than the closer to retail, more convenient, “give me the reward for less effort” version and was carried into 1.12.
While I had my Swift Frostsaber around mid 2006, it was definitely not more than 50% of 60s who had them. Many of us used to keep the 60% mount in our bags too so that we can match speeds during PVP on the initial AV start, or to move as a group through zones.