Mount Sale Shopping Tips

Yesterday SWTOR surprised us by launching a surprise "Cartel Market Summer Mount Sale", with more than 48 pages of mounts (back) on the Cartel Market and most of them at around half price, though some have even steeper discounts. See, this is exactly what I meant when I said that they were experimenting more with different kinds of sales!

This is definitely something I welcome, because I'm not a fan of enforced scarcity for virtual items, and it's actually kind of mind-boggling how many hundreds of items the SWTOR team has created for the Cartel Market over the last decade and how many of them are not even available for purchase a lot of the time. So bringing them back and with a discount on top is definitely something I approve of. The sale runs until July 16th according to Twitter.

I feel like spending money on cosmetic items you like is one of the better ways of supporting an MMO that you enjoy, so I can only recommend that everyone takes a look at the sale section themselves to see whether there's anything there that interests you. However, I also advocate spending your hard-earned cash responsibly, so here are some tips to make the most out of this sale!

1. Avoid impulse purchases

I know sales are exciting, but seriously, there are 48 pages of mounts here. Unless you're a completionist and there's no limit on the number of Cartel Coins you're willing to spend, take a good look at everything that's available first and have a think about what you really want. That Hoverchair might look kind of nifty on the preview picture, but do you really want to be seen around the fleet on that thing? You don't want to splurge on something on page two just to be out of money when you see something that you actually would've liked much more.

2. Check that you're buying the right thing

What do I mean by that? Well, someone on Twitter pointed out for example that for some reason the Dune Sea Bantha is currently listed twice, at different prices. Obviously you don't want to buy the more expensive one! I think this is just a bug, but still something to watch out for. Likewise, while browsing I noticed that a couple of mounts seemed to have wrong images representing them - for example the Frostcrest Devourer is displayed as brown on the store image, but when you actually preview the item, it's grey and blue. I don't think there are many items affected by stuff like this, but you want to be on the safe side, so look closely. If there are multiple colour variants of a type of mount, you'll want to make sure to grab the one you like the most! This is really just an extension of point one.

3. Compare prices on the GTN

Just because something is on sale on the Cartel Market, that doesn't mean it can't still be cheaper elsewhere! Before hitting that "buy now" button, take a look at the GTN to see whether your mount of choice has any listings there as well, and if so, how much they're going for. There's no universal answer to the question of whether it's better to spend credits or CC because it'll depend on your individual situation, but as an example, there were four mounts I checked out that are going for 750 CC in the sale, and when I looked on the GTN, three of them were only 5-20 million credits there, so I opted to go down that route instead. The fourth one however was going for a hundred million, which I thought was a bit pricey, so I opted to purchase that one with CC instead, especially since I wanted it on a secondary server, where I'm not as rich in-game.

4. Check your cargo holds

Because people are doing the above, now may also be a good time to sell off any spare mounts that you might have stashed away in your Cargo hold. This may not be true for every mount, and there may be a dip in price as some people buy them off the CM specifically to re-sell on the GTN, but it's something worth looking at at least. On Leviathan, I'd been trying to sell a medium-rare mount that I got out of a free Cartel pack for many weeks now, and the moment the CM sale started, it finally sold.

5. Consider buying to re-sell yourself

If you'd like to turn some CC into credits, grabbing a couple of rare mounts while they are on discount may not be a bad idea either. Kal points out that the TF-4 Rampage and Walkhar Trickster are very rare for example. They obviously won't be as rare after this sale, but it's still something to consider, especially if you're willing to play the long game.

Anyone remember when mounts were called "vehicles" in game by the way? It's still the name of the relevant post category on this blog, because at launch we only had speeders and no animal mounts. I think the first animal mount was the tauntaun added with patch 2.3? I don't remember when they changed the actual in-game ability list to say "mounts" instead of "vehicles" though...