A Suggestion to Make (Some) BoP Mounts Tradeable

About a year and a half ago I made some suggestions for concepts in Runescape that WoW could borrow and ultimately adapt into something similar. While there were a few other things at the time that I was considering adding to the list such as the Dungeoneering skill that I believed was worth writing a separate article about, there was one I could've added to the list but didn't because I thought people might get the wrong idea. Specifically, I wanted to make more items tradeable in WoW to make gold a more useful currency, which Runescape does with nearly everything in their game including most gear. However, since a lot of WoW's gear is bound to the player, especially from endgame content such as raids, even mentioning Runescape's system oriented towards having many items to trade might lead to opposition even if I specifically mention gear would not be tradeable in a traditional sense.

I ultimately left the suggestion on the back-burner in favor of seeing how the Legion expansion and the WoW Token would change the value of gold in the game. However, while gold has become very valuable to have it serves as more of a method to provide greater external value, such as the fact that buying game time with gold saves real life money, rather than anything within the game itself. While that in itself is great for the usefulness of gold, I think more could be done for gold to increase its usefulness within the game itself. That is why in this article I am suggesting a feature to trade some soulbound mounts with other players that should help to increase the value of gold for internal trading. In the process of doing so I also want to add a gold sink to the game and augment an existing feature to increase its use, ultimately providing more beneficial facets to this suggestion.

The Suggestion

When I initially brainstormed the suggestion it had a broader scope and involved a suggestion to trade soulbound cosmetics. Therefore, I had to determine what cosmetics should be tradeable since some are rather exclusive and a mark of achievement while the method for trading others at all could be difficult to implement. I used images such as this as a reference for what I think would be good to allow to be tradeable. Based on these references, I determined the best place to start was to allow the sale of soulbound mount learning items that are obtained as a drop except from raid bosses in current content. Furthermore, players would have to have had the mount learned already to sell it.

I then determined that while it could be easy to just allow mounts to be posted on the Auction House, I not only wanted to add some lore flavor to the process but also attempt to reduce a probable oversaturation of the sale of such mounts. This led to me considering an upgrade to the Black Market Auction House, which due to its shady natures could potentially allow players to sell goods that are normally bound to them for a price.

Specifically, I think it would be great to allow players to post a single auction of their own on the BMAH which would consist of a soulbound mount item that they already have in their collection. It can be posted and found like on the Auction House but if it sells, the BMAH takes a 50% cut of the sale. These restrictions not only prevent players from selling a huge amount of mounts at once but also encourages them to think carefully about what mount to sell and for what price to ensure a sale while providing a decent amount of profit in return.

The Purpose

As I mentioned in the introduction, tying the sale of soulbound mounts to the Black Market Auction House is meant to fulfill more purpose than opening a trade for previously untradeable goods while providing a mental challenge for players. The most distinct benefit is that the BMAH taking a 50% cut of sales can turn the feature into a massive gold sink as players trade mounts with each other. This in my opinion would make it a better gold sink than the BMAH in its current state since items that players are willing to bid huge amounts of gold on only show up so often. As a bonus, players may find themselves using the original feature of the BMAH since they will be encouraged to visit it more often.

The BMAH cut itself, while deep, still leaves enough profit to make the farming of some mounts worthwhile. In particular, I think it might encourage players to run through old raids more often since in addition to the potential profit from vendorable gear drops and tradeable pet drops that mostly help with Raiding With Leashes achievements, players can loot additional copies of rare mounts they may already have to sell. It'll also encourage players to do other old content such as the soon-to-be-outdated Paragon Reputation feature for Legion factions.

Final Statements

This concludes my rather brief suggestion on a feature that would create a trade for soulbound mounts. While it's rather simple to the point of requiring only a few paragraphs of explanation, I think there's room to expand on this feature so that someday it'll be possible to sell appearances. In fact, I originally intended to add an option for players to sell appearances if they owned the piece of gear that provided the appearance but thought it might be too difficult to implement the feature since it's not quite as simple as trading a soulbound item itself. Instead, I chose to discard that part of the suggestion, leaving me with a rather underwhelming piece that I took way too long to publish. Happy holidays in any case, I guess.