MrGM interview: Black Lotus price cap, no Baron mount

The Black Lotus in WoW Forever has a maximum price, and the Deathcharger’s Reins, Baron Rivendare’s mount, are not for sale at the Black Market at launch. Both announcements come from the interview MrGM held with two of the game’s designers, and the second one corrects our own article from September.

The 30-minute 46-second video has been online since November 6, 2026, the day after the game opened, with Kris Zierhut, principal game designer, and Josh Greenfield, senior game designer. MrGM announced it in a post on X. The subtitles are automatic and do not say who is speaking: we write “the team”, with the timestamp of each passage.

A cautious Black Market, built to drain gold out of the game

At 11:47, MrGM asks why the Black Market (an auction house where the game puts rare items up for sale to the highest bidder) exists in WoW Forever. The answer is economic: “players are essentially walking printing presses of printing money”. Without somewhere to spend that gold, inflation (a steady rise in prices) sets in. So the team wants to stock it with “some really cool items” that players will pay a lot for.

The start is deliberately timid: “to launch, we wanted to be really conservative about what you could buy”. There are a few mounts and a few pets, but mostly dungeon set pieces. The example given: a player has killed Gandling fifteen times, his hat never drops, so he buys it at the Black Market. These pieces are used to finish the Lord Valthalak quest, which grants a Legacy point (our article on Legacy points explains the system) and gear specific to each specialization.

Topic	What the team says	Timestamp
Role	Take gold out of the game to slow inflation	11:47
At launch	Cautious selection: few mounts and pets, mostly dungeon set pieces	12:10
Use	The dungeon pieces are used to finish the Lord Valthalak quest (a Legacy point, gear)	12:27
Price	No amount is mentioned in the video	Whole interview

Black Lotus capped, Baron’s mount missing at launch

A second vendor offers rare resources for gold, including the Black Lotus. It answers a problem seen “repeatedly in Classic era”: the price of a component skyrockets, and the only remedy was to make more of it appear. From now on, the team says at 12:56, “here’s the price ceiling. It will never go above this price”. The two NPCs are a reference to Madam Goya, the Black Market vendor in Pandaria, in the modern game.

At 13:36, the Baron’s mount comes up. It was in the beta but has disappeared from the selection: “you need to go grind that”. The team adds: “that doesn’t mean it might not be there at some point in the future, but it’s not there right now”.

What this corrects on our side. Our article of September 26 showed these reins up for auction at the beta Black Market, at 3,000 gold. That was accurate for the beta, not for launch. We had also noted the Black Lotus at 50 gold at the beta vendor: the video gives no price, so we do not know whether that amount still holds. And in our September article we wrote that this price looked “less like a strict ceiling than a benchmark”; the team, for its part, clearly talks about a ceiling.

Flying, rated arenas, shared tagging: three flat “no”s

Flying first, brought up about the empty zones of the original game, which the artists filled in so that you can “fly over all of it”: “we’re not going to put flying mounts in this game. Not going to happen”. Then: “never say never. That’s kind of a never”.

Modern feature	Team position	Timestamp
Flying mounts	Ruled out, “kind of a never”	7:12 and 24:46
Rated arenas	Ranked among the “clear lines in the sand”	24:49
Shared mob tagging	Ruled out “very early on”: it goes against the game’s principles	24:54

Shared mob tagging would let every player who touches a monster get the quest or loot credit from it. The team weighs it against its “pillars”: social experiences to protect, a world that stays the main character, the journey before the destination, an accessible and familiar game. Each addition is compared with all five at once, not with just one.

Questie: give enough information that you do not have to install it

Questie is an addon (a module that adds features to the interface) that shows on the map where to go for each quest. The team knows many players install it: “a very high percentage of our players install Questie or an add-on like it”. Rather than refuse all help, it wanted to give enough in game that nobody feels obliged to install it (23:40).

The complaint about the addon: “Questie has a tendency to go a little bit overboard”. The modern game’s 3D quest arrows were left out on purpose, because they felt “out of place” in a game with less verticality. This is not a promise to replace the addon: our selection of leveling addons is still valid.

Gilneas, boats, PTR: what MrGM learned about what comes next

Gilneas is the Cataclysm version, dropped block by block into the original world. The artists had to blend the textures and create small pockets of terrain to connect it. The team surrounded it with a no man’s land: “we plan to do a lot of different things with it once we get there”. For now, you can glimpse it from the Auberdine boat.

Topic	What the team says	Timestamp
Launch boats	Replaced by portals: another service sharing the server load ran out of CPU. A fix is in the works	1:47
Gilneas	Cataclysm version copied in blocks of terrain, surrounded by an empty zone. A visit is planned for later	8:55
New boats	One route for the Alliance between Auberdine and Southshore, another to Tanaris	10:41
PTR	Probably one, for stability. No raids on it	21:56
Raid launch	Global. The December 9 date is put forward by MrGM, not confirmed by the team	14:17

The new sea routes have a social purpose: getting the Alliance to Southshore sooner, so that night elves and humans play together and face the Horde. The route to Tanaris gives the Horde a more natural progression; the automatic subtitles do not let us identify its departure point. On the PTR (public test realm), the team answers: “short answer, yes there will probably be one”. It would be used to test stability and integration, and some quests would be hidden there.

MrGM also polled the channel’s subscribers about display: about 12,000 votes, a fifty-fifty split between old and new character models (28:01). This is a poll of that community, not a Blizzard measurement. On raids, our article on Crix’s interview already gathers the team’s first answers.