Doing all the farm, RNG rolls, raids, PVP, etc, just to have an unusual mount, was a huge part of vanilla gameplay. If mounts for real-money appear, they will definitely be different from the standard horses/rams. And that will break the feeling of having a unique, non-standard mount. Mounts on Classic have prestigious meaning, don’t turn them into collection.
Example:
You want to show off that you are rich. You have two expensive dresses, but most people in your town don’t have a single one. If you wear one, you’ll definitely stand out.
Now, imagine that the price drops 100 times. You have 200 of such dresses, others have 3-4. Can you still stand out, by wearing one of that 200 dresses? No, because everyone has them.
RAF? Royal Air Force? Please educate me for being an uneducated pleb. - Or maybe I shouldn’t be here at 7am.
The method of incentivizing people to play the game less in order to gain more always rubs me the wrong way since it devalues those that put the effort into the game itself rather than other things. This is not to say that you shouldn’t go outside, its that the people who choose to not go outside should feel like their input actually has value.
The thing is that there will always be an expensive dress. If one drops in price, a new expensive dress that I can wear to show off how rich I am comes along.
The same goes for mounts. The most impressive stand out mounts are the ones that are hard to get, not the ones you pay real money or RAF for.
Though this is Classic, so none of that should be there anyway. RAF rewards are given to you for BfA and Blizzard already noted that rewards aren’t going to be shared between BfA and Classic.
People aren’t jealous of my Swift Razzashi Raptor because they’re impressed at seeing a Raptor. They’re jealous because it’s rare, and very expensive if you didn’t get it before ZG was revamped.
In Vanilla it’d be even more impressive since ZG wasn’t soloable like it was in WotLK when I got both ZG mounts.
Some people will notice it, as I’ve gotten comments about various mounts of mine.
Though if you want to go down the road of “Nobody will notice or be impressed” well then your argument about wanting to show off doesn’t matter because as you claim: Nobody will notice or care.
It’d be like wearing that expensive dress and being in a crowd where 99% of the people wont even see me. It doesn’t really matter if I have 2 or 200 of them, I’m not going to get noticed.
Honestly, Raptors still aren’t super common among the Alliance available mounts.
My Swift Zulian Tiger would probably get lost in the mix, but it would in Vanilla too because it’s just a reskinned Night Elf mount. I assume the same thing happens to the Raptor on the Horde.
Which a lot of the so called “unique” mounts in Vanilla are just that: re-skinned versions of racial mounts.
There’s only a small handful of exceptions like the black AQ mount, which is exceedingly rare even to this day in BfA.
You forgot to mention the auction house NPC on the lower deck that you can use to access the Live game’s auction house server. That way you can sell all your rare patterns and items that aren’t available anymore.
The list of things that will break or ruin Classic gets longer every day. Who knew this version and its players were so fragile? Just to update the list…
Sharding
Right-click reporting
Loot trading
Water
Bug fixes
Streamers
Population caps
Retail players
Twinks
Character services
LFG
Addons
and now RAF and store mounts.