My little Pony...apocalypse pony?

So by now I'm sure everyone has had a chance to see a Celestial Steed in action. Chances are if you have been to Dalaran in the past day or two you've seen the floating city littered with the pretty star horses, to the chagrin of many slippery slope WoW players.
A cursory glance at the WoW forums confirms what most everyone thought the moment the mount sales went online...Warcraft players are upset.
Blizzard doesn't appear to be phased however. Blizzard's PR man Ryan Arbogast stated to gaming blog Kotaku that quote

"After we launched the Pet Store, we received many requests to offer mounts as well. We created the Celestial Steed as a result of those requests, and the response from the community — including all of the players here at Blizzard — has been very positive."

 Some would argue however that the addition of in game mounts for real world currency was a far cry from what the player base wanted. The forums are filled with angry doomsayer posts claiming that this is Blizzard's first step into offering tangible in game benefits for real world money.

To understand the argument one has to examine just what you're getting for your twenty-five hard earned dollars when purchasing the Celestial Steed. You will have mailed to your character in game and every character you ever create on that world of warcraft account an in game item that allows you to add the Celestial Steed to your mount list. The steed it's self scales with the level of riding skill you have, meaning from as early as level 20 up to level 80 your new shiny star pony will be at your side. When in Outland and Northrend your Celestial Steed will act as a flying mount, moving only as fast as your riding training allows. While in the old world of Azeroth your Celestial Steed will act as a normal or ground mount, again depending on the level of your training. It might not seem like muh but when you take into account that this will make the Steed your defacto mount choice for any alts you create, thus removing the need to EVER buy a mount again you can start to understand players complaints.

Some would argue that the mount is simply a cosmetic addition but you can't deny the gold you're saving by just spending a bit of real world money. On top of that many servers are reporting players asking to trade in game gold for someone to gift the mount to their account, something quite clearly against the TOS. Whether or not this was a miss step by Blizzard has yet to be seen though. Sales have been quite impressive already, queues filling up only moments after the mount went live in the Blizzard store, so it's quite likely that we will see more mounts offered in the future.