I’ve played games with P2W. That had PvP.
If you didn’t pay, you stood no chance against them. Because they would just straight up murder you due to the stuff they bought. You had no chance of getting ahead of them, not even getting close to them. You could play 24/7 and you still wouldn’t get close to them in terms of power.
Excuse me?
The definition is a single sentence that uses broad terms that are generally easy to understand to an audience of people who aren’t familiar with video games, i.e. people who would need to look the term up in the first place.
That’s what it is, for that’s the purpose it’s written for.
It’s not the 10 commandments. And it’s not the conclusion of a PhD thesis into the understanding of pay-to-win in gaming. It’s a commercially-written definition meant to accommodate a general understanding of video game terminology.
To quote it as gospel is ridiculous.
Okay. 
Because I (and many here) am a WoW player for decades and I do not consider buying conveniences as P2W. I do not consider you buying a mythic Fyrrak carry and paying extra for the mount as you winning, I see it as someone that spend money to play the game less. I already agreed with you, if that is someone considers as a win then sure WoW is absolutely P2W.
Also OP asked do we agree that WoW is P2W. I strongly disagree (and many others by the looks of it).
It’s the definition accepted by the broadest audience in the world, compared to yours, accepted by only you.
You are excused.
No it’s not. It’s the definition made by a company. That company doesn’t hold the de facto true definition. That’s absurd to suggest.
Here’s Cambridge’s definition of lion:
a large wild animal of the cat family with yellowish-brown fur that lives in Africa and southern Asia
LION | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
And Merrian-Webster:
a large heavily built social cat (Panthera leo ) of open or rocky areas chiefly of sub-Saharan Africa though once widely distributed throughout Africa and southern Asia that has a tawny body with a tufted tail and a shaggy blackish or dark brown mane in the male
Lion Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster
And Oxford’s Advanced Learners Dictionary for good measure:
a large, powerful animal of the cat family that hunts in groups and lives in parts of Africa and southern Asia. Lions have yellow-brown fur and the male has a mane (= long, thick hair round its neck).
So who got lion right? 
(I’m going to bed now)
In order to prove that something is true its enough to show 1 example.
Imagine there are 2 players od equal skill competing who will get 3k rio on a fresh characters, but one has access to mythic raid boosts and boe on AH etc by buying tokens, and the other doesnt have it. Pretty obvious a person with gold will win. Is it even a question?
This is enough to prove wow has some form of p2w. For some people its painful to admit because p2w is associated with something bad in community.
Not p2w
Even if you buy the gold you still have to literally play the game to get basically anything worth having.
When they start selling 550 ilvl gear or lock your action bars behind a paywall come get me. And before anyone says it, catch ups and boosts dont count, thats pay to skip.
Skipping isn’t winning, stay in school
They all describe roughly the same thing, so I don’t get the point you make when you could have done that with P2W?
(in computer games) involving or relating to the practice of paying to get weapons, abilities, etc. that give you an advantage over players who do not spend money:
Doesn’t seem to have one
Nothing here either
So… my point still stands.
Meanwhile me being bored at this night shift
“WoW is P2W Holy Preachers and philosophers” vs the rest of the player base having a cat fight 
This is getting good boys and girls! Keep it coming! 
I never noticed this is literally just the jewelcrafting black onyx tiger from MoP with some incorrectly textured wings bolted on the side.
There are games/challenges/competitions where you need to do smth faster than opponent. Doing raid faster than others (for example your friend) can also be a competition, where gold buyers wins. Whole world raid to worlds first event is based on this idea.
A lot of people play wow to achieve smth (for example curve or portals to dungeons) and then leave until next season. So for those people less play time is somewhat a win. So its a p2w.
Competing to play the least amount of WoW for the most amount of money spent on tokens? It’s a self-healing circle then.
Also what advantage does this provide? The entire point of WoW is to enjoy your time playing it is it not?
Praise be phones in beds!
I’ll make this brief, because it’s late…
My point is that a dictionary is meant as a tool to get a general understanding of a word or a term.
It is not meant as a source of extracting precise definitions for those words or terms. There are other sources you would go to for that – usually in that field of study that the word or term relates to, i.e. microbiology if you’re looking for the precise definition of a certain bacteria.
Or in the words of the dictionary itself:
a book that contains a list of words in alphabetical order and explains their meanings, or gives a word for them in another language; an electronic product giving similar information on a computer, smartphone, etc.:
DICTIONARY | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
So “explains their meanings” is probably the part to latch onto here. That’s why different dictionaries can have different explanations for the word lion and why that’s okay – because they all convey the meaning of the word lion just fine.
But that’s different from taking one dictionary’s meaning for “P2W” and then proclaiming that to be more than a mere understanding of the term – that it is in fact the definition of said term.
That’s improper use of a dictionary.
Because you wouldn’t do that with the word lion. And therefore you shouldn’t do it with the term “P2W”.
So your point doesn’t stand. It’s actually very terrible. You weren’t prepared for lion.
Now, goodnight.
said when people leave each other in the evening or before going to bed or to sleep:
GOOD NIGHT | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary
Again IF someone considers this a win, it is P2W.
The entire point of I have been making is that everyone considers “winning” as something different. You cannot flat-out say that WoW is P2W because WoW doesn’t have a win condition.
My definition for P2W is getting item/power for IRL money and not having an alternative way of acquiring said item/power. WoW does not provide that service, therefore it does not match my definition of P2W.
The other dictionaries had nothing. My point was, the Cambridge did, and is the first result when you google “What is p2w?” meaning it’s the most common understanding of the phrase.
The rest of your post is just pure waffle
The other dictionaries had nothing because their employees haven’t gotten around to it yet, if they ever intend to.
They are businesses. They live off of people clicking on their websites.
There’s likely more demand for the word “lion” than there is for the term “P2W”.
Hence why they all have lion and only one has P2W.
But the one that has P2W is obviously going to appear first on Google, because that’s how Google works.
That doesn’t mean that dictionary is de facto right. It just means that dictionary has a worker who bothered to write something for “P2W”.
It is, for some people being hyper-competitive is enjoyment in wow. Having more rio and higher raid logs is what makes them play. As soon as they reach their goals or are not able to progress further they stop. For them its a sprint, not a marathon, especially in a season game like wow.
If you say so. The term isn’t new, it’s been around for YEARS. That stamenet is speculation at best and wrong otherwise.
More waffle with no substance to the point made
Entire post is waffle and lacking in anything worthy of debating
Edit: Go to bed and sleep, internet debates with strangers aren’t worth the health sacrifice of lacking sleep, as per your “i’m going to bed” comment.
Paying real money for in game gold which can be used to obtain gear, current raid runs and extremely rare items via the black market. Not to mention legendaries in Shadowlands.
It’s without a doubt pay-to-win now and personally one of my biggest gripes with the game. It made a lot of things have less value to them knowing I could just pay money for them.
Exactly. For some people buying a boost is their win conditon for others, earning the rating is the win condition. It’s entirely subjective. The OP started this as drama-bait it feels