I was referring to buying actual mounts in the Cash Shop.
My belief is: If it isn't EARNED in the game...it shouldn't be in the game. I know you support a Cosmetic Cash Shop. I think it's a mistake. There are better, and more player friendly ways to implement monetization. Buy to Play+Sub is the easiest way to prevent botting, gold sellers, multi-boxing and cancel-culture kids invading your game. Cash Shops that sell ONLY role-play items like clothes, outfits and emotes and NOTHING connected to gameplay are acceptable IF there isn't a sub.
Cosmetics used to be something good players obtained through hard work and hard fun...not their wallet. Cosmetics used to MEAN something in a game. Cosmetics used to drive players to group up and explore content. The better an item looked...the more powerful it was, the more people PLAYED the game to obtain the item. IN-GAME Cosmetics DRIVE player numbers and player longevity.
Well, I don't agree on the part where preventing botters, etc. with a subscription model works. We know many subscription-based games, where the botters and toxic people are present.
I do agree that back in the days "the better the item looked, the stronger it was", now in most games, the items are intentionally made to not look good in order to buy cosmetics with real-life money. From what I can see, we are going on the path "the better the item looks, the stronger it is". In other words, you will start with a "wooden sword" and look very scruffy, by advancing through the levels you will start to look better and better.
We prefer the game to be free for everyone to play, rather than making them pay to play, not all people can set aside a subscription fee every month. But they can play freely without having to buy cosmetics from the shop. Of course, the cosmetics from the shop will be looking amazing, but that doesn't mean that the items in the game will look awful, you will have a massive variety of items in the game for you to farm, same goes for the mounts.