"What they don't realise is that getting things handed on a plate doesn't make them fun." I would also add that it doesn't make things feel valuable either. If you have to work really hard for something (pet, mount, raid drop, boes, to use in game examples), it's usually going to mean more to you once you get it than if you just yawn and get it handed over.

TL;DR: blizzard has yet to flesh out the "casual" parts of WoW which is a decent amount of peoples past time (definitely more than there are hard core progression raids).

OK, let me tell you the difference between working hard and inaccesable to your current play style, with mounts (my personal poison).

These are the ways to get current gen mounts.

A: A new expac comes out with reputation, daily and gold sink mounts (so after a patch us collectors have not much left to do).
B: (The most prominent way) raiding in a decent tightly knit group.
C: Mid expansion daily grind, i.e. molten front/ToC/Netherwing.
D: super lucky drops (too many to list but my least favourite being the AQ bug mount from arch).
E: Be a really good PVPer (get in the top %10 of the arena teams, or win 100
F: Spend real money

I don't mind A,C,D and can do those, hell I even bought the sparkle lion and my friend bought me the pony as a bday present.

But the real problem here is that the majority of the best art work mounts go to B. B is a group of people who play WoW to raid, me I literately play for mount collecting and alt levelling, but I have tried both B and E in that I min maxed and honed my skills to be the best raider I could, and the best arena partner I could. But even with what I would consider a lot of hard work for a hobby (I don't even spend that much time and effort on being a decent artist, and that is my hobby above gaming). And yet I didn't get CLOSE to getting a mount in raiding, nor arena. I downed the lich king before 4.0, with a casual bunch of raiders. I basically did nothing but pvp for about 2 months before I burned out, Now to some of you I do realise this isn't much. But you can't argue I spent a lot of time and effort in to both of these and the elusive mounts stayed well beyond my reach.

Now I'm not saying I didn't enjoy raiding and pvp at the time, but mount collecting is a big meta game, there are a lot of people like me who do it. Why aren't we rewarded with the very best the art team can offer in even a reskin, with a long grind? The raiders go in there to down the bosses, get better gear and mostly so they can look back and realise how well they've done. They don't go in JUST for the purpose of getting mounts. I can understand raid specific mounts but a lot of the very best mounts are used by raiders as proof of their accomplishments, whereas us mount collectors sit in org/sw and stare wistfully at them as they hover over the mailbox whilst waiting for their queue to pop or even just being AFK.

Now look at the mount collectors we get two exclusives one is boring (albino drake) and the other has a better model out there available for everyone who did the ToC 5man a lot in wrath (which was a lot of people), the red dragonhawk. Why didn't we at least get something as special as the frost wyrm or the new fire hawk mounts? I mean we jump through soooo many dailies, rare drops, grinds, to get our 100 mounts, yet still we get a half done model as our reward.




Sorry about that rant but maybe its because I'm not really a pet collector (only have about 75) and they are getting a HUGE amount of love in MoP and yet us mount collectors don't squat. (Not even account wide mounts).

Clearly you all do not know how frustrating it is to be stuck in the UGLY UGLY troll heroic helm when the rest of your set is beautiful, shining "raid" gear. I could care less that it's a tier of gear; my priority is that I look good. Aesthetics matter to me.

I may be a casual player, but honestly, why do they make some of the gear so incredibly ugly? I have been stuck in http://www.wowhead.com/item=69579#comments since about two weeks after 4.1 (I got lucky- it dropped rather quickly for me). I don't particularly like looking like a troll.

Now, I'm sure some of you might think I seem like an entitled prig, but, as a casual player, my goal is to get as much as I can out of a small amount of play time. The most valuable thing to me is being viable for at least *some* of the raiding content in the expansion- I certainly don't expect to walk into Firelands and have a breeze of a time (I'm actually terrified of the place). Imagine my surprise (and delight) when I was viable enough to join a BWD pug and http://us.battle.net/wow/en/item/59467 dropped, matching the rest of my VP set. You see where my priorities lie. ;)

My husband and I have been playing together since we started dating back in 2005. Life has changed a lot since then- marriage, college graduation, and 2 kids have altered our play style drastically. Priorities change, and I think Blizzard is smart to offer rewards to the casual players like me. Otherwise, what is the point of logging in at all?