I'll preface this with saying I'm not a ftp player and I have all mounts myself bar warclaw but only due to lack of interest in wvw. And this is probably beating a dead centaur but... After talking to others in map after watching a ftp player get to an event too late because people with PoF got to it on mounts and flattened it in about 5 seconds I realised I had seen this happen umpteen times before when going back to core game maps and would like to put forward a suggestion of a core game mount. Because tbh I feel sorry for them.Hear me out before you grab pitchforks and light torches. Not giving ftp players anything fancy, you get what you pay for, but imo anyone so hard up for cash they can't afford full game shouldn't be put at such disadvantage as a punishment for being broke. Because the scales of fairness in old maps aren't just tipped in the favor of PoF players they're broken. Plus a taste of what a full PoF mount would be like is just great incentive to save up and buy expansion by way of "free samples". (Dolyaks were mentioned and are reasonable since we've already see Norn riding dolyaks on the loading screen of Hoelbrak since day one.) We say to people just trait and rune up for perma swiftness like the days before mounts but when trying to give this advice you find they have chars that are not great profs to do this with or they already invested what little gold they already had into another rune set and remember not all profs can do so with traits/signets or are capable of it until high level to unlock 6 rune stat bonus so it's not a viable solution for a lot of them who already filled their 2 char slots with slow run prof characters at mid level. IMO a basic mount for ftp and core game heroic edition players wouldn't even need any special mount movement abilities, just a speed boost to rival a slow PoF mount. As I said you get what you pay for but PoF mounts in core maps have made it pay to win when it comes to dynamic events, and GW2 promised not to be pay to win.The balance can be repaired with no harm to Arenanet's business model, so why hasn't it?If it was we wouldn't see so may players sad they can't get to events for their dailies. And lets face it, it's pretty sad when a player has to be disappointed something as mundane as the daily seems hard and not for want of effort. Post edit since it came up in comments: Another viable option would be rent a mount like as was discussed regarding wvw, maybe a couple of silver for an hour of having a mount just so the ftp players could get round to things like the daily events quicker but still limits access to things like mounts for the majority of game play.
