Ok so I cackled when I saw the price on this thing but the more I thought about it, the less shitty it is. FWIW I am not a WoW lifer or Blizzard apologist. I got talked into Classic for a year then played a month or two of each expansion since before quitting but I know the background of the story. It looks way worse from an outsider perspective.

You could buy the original auction house mount for 5 million gold back in the day. It stopped being available regularly and now it's available occasionally in the "black market auction house" and it always sells for the maximum bid.

To combat Chinese gold farmers, Blizzard started selling gold in a bit of a roundabout way. For $20, you can buy a WoW token to sell on the auction house. This token can be purchased by a player and traded for 1 month of game time. Some players dont pay a dime to play - gold is not hard to acquire.

When this new mount came out, WoW tokens were worth about 200k gold. You'd need to exchange them for 5 tokens to get this mount. 1/5 of the original price.

Now tokens are worth 330k. 1.65m golf. STILL significantly cheaper than it was originally.

Tokens will need to rise to triple in price to match the original cost which will still be a tiny fraction of what it cost a month ago.

By far the shittiest thing about this - and I think the only real reason to complain - is that the rising value of the token hurts players who pay for the subscription purely with gold as it adds a few hours to their "working" time in game. For context, watching TV and semi-afk farming will get you like 50k/hour. You can earn way, way more if you've leveled up a profession.

The other (not so bad) thing I don't like about it is that....I hate those mounts. They're HUGE and people just AFK on them blocking NPCs I want to talk to.