Blizzard Wants to Lock You In with a Flying Rat

A different sort of Room 101.

With Tuesday’s post about the Visions of N’Zoth update for Battle for Azeroth, there was a short bit of discussion as to what else Blizz might do to keep people subscribed between now and the launch of the Shadowlands expansion.  I suggested that they might do another “free mount with a six month subscription” offer.

So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when less that 48 hours later Blizzard announced a “free mount with a six month subscription” offer.

Welcome Squeakers

The deal itself is the same as the usual 6 month subscription deal, which averages out to $12.99 a month in the US, saving you a bit over the usual $14.99 when you pay by the month.  You just get a free mount, which is a $25 value, because that is what Blizzard charges for mounts and the fans have established that they will pay that much.

Now with free rat

I don’t think you can get Squeakers on his own, but why would you want to?  And certainly Blizz wants to keep you on the books until the 9.0 patch and the warm up to Shadowlands.  And this will no doubt play well in Asia where the lunar new year is approaching, and with it the year of the rat.

The mount and subscription deal is a limited time offer.  You have until February 23rd to take advantage of this deal.  If you bought it on the  last day that would get you into August on your subscription, when I suspect we will see the Shadowlands expansion launch.

Of course, the mount does not apply to WoW Classic, where I have been spending my time, so I am not particularly interested.  I already have enough mounts in WoW retail and, due to the last six month deal mis-firing, I am still subscribed out until June anyway.

A WoW Mount Every Six Months Now?

A new pattern seems to be emerging.  Blizzard has hit on a new idea to keep people subscribed.  And it only requires the art department to churn out a couple new mounts a year.

Back at the end of September last year Blizz announced that if you opted in for a six month term on your subscription, you would get the Dreadwake mount.

Last week, just about nine months down the line from the last offer, Blizzard announced that if you again opted in for a six month subscription you would get the Sylverian Dreamer mount.

Another mount if you’ll just subscribe

Fortunately, if you are already on a recurring six month subscription plan you get the mount for basically carrying on with it.  I went to check the details to see if they were requiring you to commit to an additional six months on top of what you already had lined up.  The 9 month gap made me suspicious that they wanted to get people committed deep into 2020.

But no, if you already have a six month recurring plan setup, you’re covered… though, I did notice that the account management UI will let you buy in another six months of subscription time in advance.  So maybe Blizz is playing the confusion card a bit.

For the rest of us who subscribe in shorter increments, we have to press the button for a six month buy to get the mount.

If you’re somebody who has to have all the mounts, you’ll probably go for it.  Blizz sells mounts like this for $25 in its shop.  In fact, you can buy this exact mount in the shop for $25, if you don’t care to commit.  But there is lots to do in Azeroth for the rest of the year.  The Rise of Azshara update is just out and in under two months WoW Classic will go live.  If you want the mount you might as well subscribe rather than pay for it straight up.  Blizzard wins either way, so you should opt for the best deal for you.

I’ve fallen off the mount collecting idea myself.  Unlike battle pets, where having a deep bench is a requirement to do things like the Celestial Tournament or the pet battle dungeons, you can only ride one mount at a time.  And when I can fly, my main still uses the Silver Covenant Hippogryph which he earned in the Argent Tournament back during Wrath of the Lich King.

No Trove of Mounts for You Today!

I have not been playing as much Rift Prime this month as I might have.  Other things have been taking up my game time like the fun in the north in EVE Online.

Still, being the completionist nut that I am, I have been logging in just about every day to collect my daily reward, mostly because on the 21st day you get a mount.  This morning was day 21… I missed a day somewhere… so I logged on to get my mount.  Damn straight!

The last box is the best box

I clicked on the claim button and… nothing happened.  Which was odd, because there is usually something that comes up in the chat window and the ability to claim goes away.  So I clicked it again and still nothing.  On the third click I noticed that an error was coming up in small red text above the rewards window indicating that my inventory was full.

Trying not to notice the alignment…

Well, dopey me, my bags were full, no wonder I couldn’t collected the mount.

Only my bags were not full.  There was ample space in my bags.  So I started tinkering around with inventory, selling a couple of items to see if maybe a little more space would help.  I checked my bank, which also had free space, just in case that somehow counted.  I looked at the mounts tab to see if there was some restriction there.  I dismounted from my own mount, just in case there was some flag that wouldn’t let you collect a mount if you were mounted.  Stranger things have happened.

But nothing helped.  Meanwhile the game, as it is wont to do, was continuing the remind me that I had a daily reward to collect, blinking a button and putting a special little icon up on the mini-map.

Yes, I know…

So I went to Google to see if this was a known issue, but there was nothing related.  So I headed to the forums.  At the top of the bug reports section I found somebody saying that they were having the same issue.  There is always a moment of relief that it isn’t just me having a problem.  A response to the report was given, consisting of a link to a post in the Rift Prime Vigil General Discussion forum.  There I found that the ability to claim the trove of mounts had been turned off.

DAILY CALENDAR: TROVE OF MOUNTS IS TEMPORARILY DISABLED

The Daily Calendar reward “Trove of Mounts” has a bad loot table and has been temporarily disabled.

The Trove will be fixed and unlocked in the next patch. No CS ticket is needed.

The box was giving out duplicate mounts (something it should NOT do) or no mounts at all. Any player that managed to collect their Trove in the hour it was available will be given a replacement Trove of Mounts after the patch goes out. Again, no CS ticket is needed.

Our apologies – I know many of you were very much looking forward to your next mount

So the ability to claim was… well, it wasn’t really turned off.  I guess making the test for inventory space always return that it was full was the most expedient way to disable the feature, but it is a bit of a pisser to spend 30 minutes screwing around trying to figure out the issue, when the problem is that I might not get a mount, or maybe a dupe.

Anyway, we’ll see if they can fix this before the month is out.  But the UI keeps reminding me that I have a reward to collect.

The Race to a Mount on Trakanon

While WoW Legion is clearly in my future, there is still some time to get there, and with my Daybreak All Access still active for a bit I thought I would look into that whole mount thing on the new Race to Trakanon server they put up last week.  All I had to do was get to level 10, right?

Just 10 levels, how hard could it be?

I have never been that big on mounts in EverQuest II for some reason.  I have 150+ mounts in WoW… I know this because I got the achievement for hitting 150 a few mounts back… but in EQII I might have… maybe six… maybe ten on the outside… different mounts spread across all of my characters.

It isn’t that there aren’t plenty of mounts in EQII, it is more a matter of them being pretty damn ugly.  There are a lot of really ugly mounts in the game.

There is something not right with that ice wolf

And when they aren’t just plain ugly, they are generally just horrible things I wouldn’t be caught dead riding.

Rage inducing mount…

There is just something about the aesthetics and design of mounts in EQII that rubs me the wrong way.  I actively collect mounts in almost every MMORPG.  I have a fair number in LOTRO and a bunch sitting around in Rift should I ever return, but in EQII I stick to the most plain, most horse-like looking horse I can find and generally go no further.

Plain mounts for me and my friends

But this Race to Trakanon mount didn’t look too bad in the pictures and, better still, once you earned it you would get it for all of your characters.  That is another thing I am a bit mixed on with mounts.  I have grown used to having access to all my mounts account-wide in WoW (aside from certain exceptions) so earning/buying a mount for only a single character feels a bit off for me.

So off I went.

The first thing I had to do was delete a character, as I was out of character slots.  That wasn’t too hard, as I had rolled up a bunch of characters for the Stormhold server.  I wasn’t sure what I wanted to play on the server, but if you made a character in the first couple of weeks you got a free bag, and bag space is always a thing on new characters, so I rolled up every potential character I might play just to get the bags.  I still had some level 2, never really played options, so deleting them wasn’t a big deal.

Slots freed, it was time to make a new character.

It has been a while since I created a new character in EQII and they now have a big, shiny server type selection option. highlighting the various flavors on offer.  My target was the event server.

Free players… keep left

From there, I had to figure out what would suit me best in my goal to just get to level 10.

I went with a human berserker.  Human, because why not… no size issues, no oddness in looks… and berserker because that is just my go-to class for EQII.  They wear plate armor and hit things hard until they die.  All very simple.

As it so happened, the human they handed me looked vaguely like Boris Johnson, or maybe his son, so I didn’t change any of the appearance options, I just chose the name “Boris” and ran with it.  I chose the Qeynos side of the world and off I went to the Isle of Refuge, where I played for about 20 minutes, then logged off.

This turned out to be a wise move, at least when viewed through the prism of my achieving the simple goal of getting to level 10.  I didn’t come back until the next day, after which I had accrued enough rest experience to last through to my goal.  That meant I would level up twice as fast as I would have had I just tried to plow through after character creation.

I did the run through the Isle of Refuge, though the current version of it seems a bit… off.  I see things or mobs and I wonder where some old quest or another has gone off to since the old days.  I might have missed a quest starter drop or two along the way, or my memory might simply be faulty.  It has been a long time since the Frostfang Sea replace the Isle of Refuge.

Running through that got me to level 7, at which point I spoke to the captain of the ship that brought me there and was teleported off to the Frostfang Sea to continue along my way.

I probably should have just opted for that earlier if efficiency was my goal.  I think the Frostfang Sea starter area is better organized and moves you along more quickly for the most part, though it does have more than its share running back and forth for each new quest.

I crossed over the water on the raft to the first quest hub on the mainland.

Roll stock footage of Frostfang Sea raft

I ran through the quests there and moved along to the second quest hub where, only a few quests in, I hit the magic moment a level 10 was mine.

Level 10 yet again

That gave me the reward I was looking for.

Here is your mount!

The Sunbrite Clothwork Pegasus was mine.  I just had to figure out how to get it.

Usually items that show up like that as a reward drop into your inventory.  I looked there, but did not see it.  So I thought perhaps it might already appear in my mount options, but it wasn’t there either.  In thinking about it for a moment, I decided that, in order to be available to all characters, including those made down the road, the mount probably had to be accessible via the /claim option, and sure enough there it was.

Pegasus found, I was able to claim it for Boris who was able to join the other level 10+ characters in the zone riding around on their new mount.

Boris on the new mount

For me, this might be one of the better looking “goofy” mounts that Daybreak has added to the game.  As I said above, there is a lot of ugly going there on in my opinion.  I rode it around for a bit, spreading its wings for a glide now and again.

New mount, wings spread

I am not sure it will replace the plain horse for an every day mount, though I say that as somebody who, after playing the game off and on since launch, still doesn’t have a character high enough level to use a flying mount yet.  For ground travel it seems a bit much.  Maybe some day I will actually fly and have a use for a mount with wings.

Anyway, I have it around should that day come, and it wasn’t all that hard to obtain.  Others have been after it as well:

• Inventory Full
• ECTmmo.com
• GamingSF

Of course, now there is the WoW 7.0 patch to focus on, plus the big space move that is coming up, so this could be my last moment in Norrath for a while.