Throughout World of Warcraft’s history, certain mounts have gone out of the game’s rotation, becoming completely unobtainable. They immediately become status symbols among the player base, partially for their rarity and also due to the fact that if they ever come back, it’d be for a pretty high price.
One WoW player on the game’s subreddit found not one but two of those unobtainable mounts for sale on the game’s Black Market Auction House, with the Swift Zulian Tiger and the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur both available to bid on.
The Swift Zulian Tiger was removed in 2010, and the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur was taken out of the game in 2020. Both mounts have become immensely prestigious within the game’s community, and it’s a practical guarantee that whenever they wind up at the Black Market Auction House (BMAH), they’ll have a hefty price attached to them. The BMAH allows players to bid on items that are very exclusive or no longer available in the game, making it a must-understand tool that every WoW collector and completionist should be familiar with.
Both the Zulian Tiger and the Brutosaur were seen on the Black Market Auction House with price tags of 9,999,999 gold. That number is the game’s gold cap, meaning players cannot bid any higher than that amount of gold.
If you’re smart and diligent with the way you use your professions, it’s not impossible to reach 9,999,999 gold, but the serious collectors who have their finger on the pulse of the Black Market Auction House will always be first in line to bid on these items. Since you physically cannot outbid somebody who bid the gold cap, it makes the Black Market Auction House less about how much gold you have and more about who gets there to bid first.
This conundrum prompted a discussion among the WoW players in the comments of the Reddit thread, with one player suggesting that the gold cap should be increased to 100 million gold instead of its current mark of 10 million gold. “If an item gets bought for over a certain amount it should probably get put on again with the next round of items, since it’s clearly a high demand item and serves the purpose of gold sink better than anything else at the moment,” a WoW player named TheHopesedge suggested.
WoW’s Black Market Auction House was originally designed in 2012 as a way to get exorbitant amounts of gold out of the game’s economy, but in recent years, as the value of WoW’s gold has become extremely inflated, it has fallen short of that goal.