Well in WoW you had to do alot of grinding if you wanted your mount when you hit 40.
However in WoW you had crafting to help you.
Every proffesion had it's own cashcow that you could milk in order to get the money you need.
In AoC crafting doesn't start until you hit 40 and is at the moment bugged.

However reading the dev posts on the forums has made me confident in it's future.
They are devoted to make sure that most of the bugs will be fixed as soon as possible so that they can start adding in new content.
With in a week or 2 we will among other things get more armor to wear and the drops will be improved.