Was about to post that.. horses cost 42k and each mob drops 1 gold. So either grind 42,000 mobs or pay 20$ and get it for free! 60$+15$ sub fee+20$ special edition to get the entire game. Even if the game is amazing i wouldnt pay that much just to play the actual game.
You'll have 42k gold quite fast if you're saving specifically for a mount, the items that drop are ~15/25 gold a pop to begin with, not to mention you find plenty of various set items that can be sold for good profit even at level 10~20.
Items like Racial Lore Traits typically sell for 2,000 gold each. Stacks of refined crafting resources also sell for much higher in Zone chat than if you were to sell them to merchants. NPC vendors will buy stacks of 100 resources for 100-200 gold, while buyers on Zone chat will typically pay 1,000+ gold.
You can also unlock skills that double or triple the amount of items you receive from crafting abilities. Not to mention you can sell the prerequisite items for each individual profession, you'll find them no matter what when travelling the world anyway.
The effort required to make gold is very varied and very balanced.
I wouldnt be surprised if they added pay2win content soon, pay 15$ for this legendary super sword which is 1.5x better than anything else in the game.
I also hugely doubt this game will be pay2win or I would be seriously disappointed in
Matt Firor, I hope he continues to stay true to his DAoC design, it might become F2P because the investors likes $$$, personally I would prefer it with a subscription where everything is then available through the game, instead of having 50% of the in-game items only being accessible with a purchase, not to mention that F2P games always attract a hardcore and serious amount of cheaters and cheat-makers, though that's quite the harder operation in an MMO system than a normal FPS game. However hopefully it'll be a cosmetics/ingame-money model like Kafein says.
ESO have the whole DAoC crowd going for it now too, if you read the old DAoC forums it seems they're all flocking to ESO lately, while quickly losing interest in Camelot Unchained by Mark Jacobs (another DAoC remnant), which before ESO was what everyone (of the old DAoC players) were waiting for despite the very lackluster showing so far. My personal interest in CU is completely gone, ESO has all the DAoC essentials for PVP, and CU is defending their anime looking vikings...
