Agreed. I still find the definition “amongst peers” falls short of what many mean by this. Because often (especially in the case of PvP or M+ boosting/raid boosting) you can’t access the service unless there are by definition people with superior gear to the content you’re boosted through. They may not be your peers, but I don’t really think we can label a game as “P2W” in its philosophy of using money only nets you an advantage against some players, and never against others (the boosters). Also as said it’s entirely contingent on player skill to even operate as a principle, which means for me, it can’t be p2w, because the “payment” relies on other stuff being true (that boosters exist, that they are skilled enough to boost, and willing to boost) to make the money a “golden ticket”.
My understanding of p2w games is where my money alone is all that’s required to give me an advantage without reliance on other factors. Ie I pay X and get Y benefit. Not I pay X and if and only if Z player is willing, I then get a chance at Y benefit.
Because the fact remains if Z doesn’t exist then my money cannot yield Y benefit, so it is not the game that makes WoW arguably p2w it is player behaviour that does. It is players “selling their skill” or renting it out. The skill is still required to access the gear. You just pay for the privilege of using someone else’s rather than your own.
Similar to having a leather worker make you an item rather than you grinding it yourself. Would we describe someone buying a leather leggo then as p2w? It’s the same thing isn’t it? Shortcutting an effort based process with money (that may be fuelled by RL) but at no point does your money bypass the requirements for the effort to be needed in the first place. It just wasn’t your effort.
To make it clear, let us consider a hypothetical situation where in a server all players have (say) 200ilevel and are equally skilled and capable of doing say m+5 but no higher. They are all capable of doing normal raid, but no higher. All players do these contents and get the gear.
What advantage does the player with money have in this situation? They cannot use it to secure better gear than they ordinarily can, or anyone else. Not with the way WoW works at the moment. The only moment they can start to do that is only if other players become skilled and geared enough to carry them in higher gear than their own m+5 efforts can.
It lends no objective advantage, only a relative one. It’s like a kid buying answers for a maths quiz from someone who did the test prior. It might help him net the grade for maths test he is sitting, but it doesn’t make him the smartest kid at maths in any way shape or form, and it never will, because this kid relies upon other people being better than them to pass their tests. So by definition it can never make him an objective winner. Only a relative winner. It’s a shortcut, not a victory.
Idk, I think selling ingame money is kinda pay to win especially if prices are really high and there is definitely a large time advantage if you chose to buy tokens but at the same time pretty much every multiplayer game I know has systems that let you skip the grind if you fork out real money. All the shooters have it, all the card games, all the mmos in one form or another, even single player games have it. It’s all about how narrow is the definition or how broad. If you make it broad then wow is pay to win but so is FF14, PoE, ESO and you will rob yourself of a proper way to address what the Korean mmos are doing where you literally buy power weapons, hp and currency.
Exactly. I don’t think using broad definitions is helpful, because then essentially everything is pay to win.
I look to the Korean MMOs for what I see as pay2win, where my money literally conjures power from thin air, involving no effort or skill by anyone and perhaps granting me power competitive or better with the best geared players in the game.
I’ll make clear I’m not particularly fond of boosting nor have ever used it nor ever will, but I just don’t see it as p2w. I do think In pve it’s a non issue (beyond the advertising) but In pvp I’d prefer stronger action, not because of the items the boostee gets but rather the means to do it, glads stomping in low brackets, totally defiles the spirit of the MMR system. It shouldn’t be possible in a competitive MMR system to group with with people far below you in rating whilst retaining the perks of your highest rating. The whole point is the rating (and people you fight in it) reflects a certain gear and skill level. This is messed up when gladiators in 2.1 gear roam in the 1.4 bracket.
I disagree. Meaning of a word is a different thing than using proper gramar. Which I try to use but Im aware of miatakes I can make while not knowing about them.
Good advise.
Yeah 100% agree on this one. Its very confusing.
Language and lack of clear definition is main problem in this topic. I was refering to the one I found but I belive there couls be more also “W” technicaly stands for win but in definition I was using it was about adventage so better definition would be p2a but p2w exists too deep in game world to change it imo.
What a horrible answer. Someone’s narcissism against heroic Sylvanas is completely irrelevant. You can buy MYTHIC sylvanas with gold if that will get you back on-topic.
And how is that an advantage over me? If you buy mythic sylvanas, how does that affect me in any way? You don’t pug it, no guild will recruit you because of it, there is 0 advantage, 0 win. I’m sorry, but if you can’t kill heroic boss through a tier and need to buy a boost, you don’t have an advantage, you are just pretty bad at the video game. You need all the help you can get. Now instead of crying every day about boosters and curve, try to git gud. Probably will take you the same amount of time invested as flaming on the forums.
The only way mythic sylvanas kill would affect me if another player from my guild got a weapon from her using a boost and started outparsing me because of that. You getting whatever sylvanas cosmetic is irrelevant, it’s like buying a mount from a shop for an exorbitant amount, no advantage. If something doesn’t give you an advantage of any kind, how can it be p2w?
that is not any win … simply that is what u can do in any other game … simply u can find boosting for money in any game … and i lot of them is forbiden … also u can sell igame curency for money and that is also forbiden … and the fact is is there is on buying gold ingame where ppl selling gold for token and ppl selling token for gold … anyway u can stop some ppl from buying gold and buying boost for money … but u can destroy advantage of this ppl but giving option to everyone and earn money … simply u can ban all this ppl for buying and selling gold but following what all this ppl are doing will just make to lose more money …
real pay to win is when u are literaly buy thing for money … like world of tanks and wolrd of ships where u are u have literaly price for every ship and u cant earn that much ingame money if u are dont buying some thing for money … and there is a lot more examples … try to play this pay to win games and come back to wow than u will see difference
It’s not, just cause you can buy token, get gold, and buy gear on AH doesn’t make it pay to win, it lacks the convenience, plus, you gotta be loaded to do that, or basically be a leech on someone elses living and spend all money you got.
Doesn’t matter if you were happy. Azerite reforging was one of the best systems in BFA. I never paid more than 100g per item. It was good the system explicitly targeted power users and meta slaves. Those are the people we want to drain gold from.
I don’t understand why quality of the game systems seems to be judged by people who aren’t affected by them. There seems to be a trend here that when mythic raiders and m+ pushers suffer it’s a good system. Oh no, you are a min-maxer, you deserve the worst. Oh no you switch specs your offspec has to suck. Oh no, you want to gear up fast but that makes my lfr gear less meaningful and cheapens my experience. Oh no, you have too much fun in m+ lets cap aoe to five targets and make everything overloaded with mechanics i will never do. Oh no there is no meaningful choice in my RP fantasy, lets have covenants that lock you in a heroic dungeon grind, we can’t have m+ drop it at the end of the run. It’s like i can think of the most useless, pointless garbage blizzard introduces and there is gonna be a bunch of people who will tell he how fantastic it was. Why can’t you just respec it at an inn? Lets make m+ for people who hate m+ and raiding for people who hate raiding.
Also I don’t understand the whole “it doesn’t matter if I was happy”. It’s like keeping the players happy is not the point of a video game. What an absolutely deranged answer.
The fact that gold inflation is breaking the economy is an objective fact. Part of what makes MMOs fun is the economy of decisions. I WAS affected by the azerite system. That’s why I kept the cost of respecs low.
No matter if you like it or not, the amount of gold in circulation is breaking the game’s economy. It needs to be drained. The only way to effectively drain gold is to introduce mandatory gold sinks that target the richest players.
All good MMOs have a healthy economy of decisions - where all your decisions have a cost and you need to measure the cost versus the decision. You having to spend so much on azerite reforging is YOUR problem.
Of course it can. Hardcore and casual players have different playing patterns. So you can make the gold sink to target specific gameplay styles. A scaling gold sink instead of conduit energy will work very well. Conduit energy is not a concern for the majority of the population. So it won’t hit them. They will still pay some gold, but not too much. But the hardcore mythic raiders, the boosters, they will have to sink a ton of gold. Which would be good.
Because mythic raiders print money, obviously. That’s so clever when it doesn’t affect you. Probably eliminating boosting would kill like 50% of raiding scene in a month because of your lovely gold sinks. Boosting is so big because of gold sinks. People would not boost so much if the game wouldn’t be draining gold from them on every step. It’s a lovely economic cycle of noobs buying tokens, to buy the gold mythic raiders spent to give it back to them for boosting so they can spend it again while bots, multiboxers and other farmers fill in the gaps.
This entirely misses gold rich people that don’t need to respec. Since “hardcore mythic raiders” are the tiniest fraction of the population, what would this achieve?
In world of warcraft there are certain aspects of the game that require you to convince people to group up with you, and if you don’t do that, you will not be able to experience those parts of the game as fully as you might like.
One of the ways to convince people to group up with you is to give them gold.
Forming friendships is very nice, but some people would rather not be pressured to get involved in that kind of thing and instead do it when they choose to.
So the real problem with the game is that there is pressure on you to form groups, rather than forming them because you want to, you form them because you need to, some might argue that this is what life is about, but world of warcraft is just a game, it’s not the same as real life.
A potential solution to your problem is to remove the requirement to group up and make it possible for solo players to obtain the things they want by themselves, but make it easier if they group up with other people. That way, those that want to play with their friends can do so, and those that want to play alone can play alone too.
