It’s not the gold that’s P2W.
It’s what the gold symbolizes.
Time, effort, and skill.
If you simply play the game, then you need those to earn any kinds of rewards. Gold, gear, pets, transmogs, titles, mounts, and so on. They’re all a bi-product of time, effort, and skill.
When you swipe your credit card to easily obtain those rewards, then you’re circumventing the obstacles that the game is designed around: Time, effort, and skill.
And that’s P2W.
It always has been.
PW2, not really. Doesn’t effect player performance, even with gear a bad player is still a bad player, sure you can pay to progress and get a brief edge over players in PVE(?) and have people do the content for you, but that defeats the point of even playing the game at that stage. But with that logic, any game with progression is P2W
Way back in the day it was always a high mark of game integrity that whoever you were in real life didn’t matter the moment you booted the game up. That 11 year old Timmy in 6th grade had the same opportunity to excel in the game as Mark the 45 year old accountant with a loaded credit card. Because real life had no influence on your performance in the game.
That’s what helped create these fantastic game communities in the old days where you did indeed have the 11 year old play on the same footing as the 45 year old, because whoever you were in real life didn’t matter.
Now that you can just swipe the credit card, a lot of that has been eroded, which is unfortunate.
That’s all irrelevant, gold is still accessible to literally everyone to make.
Come back to me when WoW starts doing VIP levels and an online store currency you typically see in F2W mobile games that are ACTUAL P2W features throwing full advantage over non-paying players.
Yeah but you should be making it in the game by excelling as a WoW player, not making it in real-life by being good at your job.
That’s the difference.
When you allow people to get rich in WoW by having a good job in real-life, then you make the game unfair to those who don’t have good jobs or who are still going to school.
Then you’ve compromised the game’s integrity, that of being a fair play environment.
This is just moving the goal post.
“WoW is not P2W because other games are worse!”
That’s a ridiculous argument.
WoW gets measured on its own merits, not by how much worse some other games are.
This is what I meant by one’s definition of P2W.
For some people P2W is only when one can acquire explicitly character power that is unavailable by any other in-game means outside of direct purchase with real cash (like the GM weapon someone mentioned). For this category of players, acquisition of anything else is not P2W, even if unavailable by any other means whatsoever.
For some people P2W is only when one can purchase character progress that blocks another from acquiring it. What I mean is that it doesn’t matter if one’s character become more powerful, it’s not P2W unless that power displaces another player from a leaderboard and denies that other player rewards.
For some people P2W is when one can simply skip in-game grind and acquire character power/progress for a fraction of the effort/time they’d have to input themselves, exactly as Jito says.
We can never agree on this because we do not agree on the definition or the “placement of the bar”.
-=EDIT=-
Every game can be P2W by the way with the last definition. Who is there to stop me from paying another human being to defeat the final boss of Elden Ring for me? Not to mention that simply agreeing to do the dishes in exchange for a pet ingame from your spouse can also be considerd P2W.
Now you are going a bit extreme.
We where talking about “things” offered by the game to progress faster through real money transaction. Not off-game “things”.
Er, how is it moving the goal posts? You’re talking about P2W which is literally what is a distinct advantage over non-paying players, which those mobile games do.
WoW does not.
You honestly sound jealous that people have gold… I honestly couldn’t give a damn how rich a player is. There’s literally nothing advantage that they have that I don’t. That’s akin to you saying it’s unfair that a solo player can’t do raids easily compared to a guild player.
If we go to the absolute depth of this question, it doesn’t matter if WoW is P2W or not. What matters is if you enjoy playing, or don’t. If you feel you don’t have good time, then just stop playing. Problem solved.
All the other semantics is just people trying to justify their point of view when confronted with different opinion. It might be fun or something to pass time with, but ultimately it is inconsequential.
It’s part of the semantics. See the following train of thought:
Again there is a secondary bar to move in the already existing first bar.
Almost everthing in our world is P2W. Welcome to the Earth!
That would be the Terms of Use.
Which of course relies on a principle of fair play and respect for the rules.
People do it anyway?
Yeah.
And then we call it cheating.
And those people are cheaters.
That’s nothing new.
P2W differs from cheating in the sense that it is allowed. And in many cases it’s even encouraged.
Why do games allow P2W? Because 
It does.
Player A just plays WoW normally for 10 hours per week.
Player B also plays WoW normally for 10 hours per week. And then he spends €60 on WoW Tokens as well.
Who has an advantage over the other?
Player B.
Why?
Because he spends money on gold, and with that gold he can get further in the game than Player A who doesn’t have that gold to propel him forward.
That’s P2W.
Not at all.
As far as my own feelings on WoW are concerned, then it’s already a stinking garbage dumpster as far as gameplay integrity is concerned. Blizzard sold the game’s soul for an extra penny long ago, so I frankly don’t care much if they since then have proceeded to also pee on the rotten remains. It makes no difference anymore.
I have long since adopted a single-player approach to WoW and don’t really care how bot-infested the game is, how many cheaters are running around in PvP, how many credit cards are being swiped for WoW Tokens on the Online Store, or how many carries and boosts and other real-life → gold → reward transactions that happen in the game.
It’s beyond salvation anyway.
Let me correct you a little as long term player. It was not Blizz who started this, it was us players.
We brought schemes to min max gold, extort people needing or wanting something on singular servers, botting was first conceived in vanilla, selling characters or sharing accounts/paying for pros playing your char in arena.
Blizz only did what every merchant does - they jumped on the wagon with us.
PS before jumping to conclusion that they could prevent it - they tried very hard back in the days. But it was ultimately futile as, by nature of human, there is always more people desperately wanting to feel badass at all cost VS those who are actually badass. You can’t fight human nature.
In a game where is nothing to win, there can’t be a P2W either.
Everyone is playing the game for complete different goals. For some goals gold can be very usefull. But the goals are completely personal. I heared about players buying tokens for buying the AH mount of BFA (5 million gold). They do what they do. I am fine with that. As long as everyone has fun everyone wins.
What exactly do you win?
By that definition no Live Service Game can be P2W, because there’s no defined ending.
Destiny 2? Not P2W.
Lost Ark? Not P2W.
That gets silly…
Fact of the matter is that open-ended games like WoW are designed in such a way where the player defines their own goals and win conditions.
There’s a plethora of activities you can do and challenges you can pursue and accomplishments you can strive for, and it’s up to the individual player to decide which of any – or all – they want to have a go at.
Want to be a mount collector? Okay, then your goal is to collect mounts and your win condition is to have a certain amount collected that you define yourself. Pursuing that is likely your motivation when you log in and play the game.
Want to progress in raiding? Then you likely establish a goal of doing Heroic or Mythic, and winning obviously constitutes completing those difficulties successfully.
That’s how WoW works and how all MMORPGs work. There are thousands upon thousands of goals and wins to pursue. It is simply up to the player to decide which ones they want to go for.
There’s no one who logs into WoW who doesn’t have goals for their gameplay and accomplishments they strive toward, be it getting a certain transmog or Cutting Edge or whatever.
The notion of a “win” in such a binary way as Super Mario Bros. where it’s just about getting to the castle and ultimately saving the princess, that’s obviously not the design scope for an MMORPG (although there are definitely also players for whom the win condition is simply to play through the content and experience the story!), but MMORPGs still have strong designs that revolve around excelling, winning, and accomplishing things within the games. That’s their main appeal.
And Blizzard will gladly help you excel, win, and accomplish great things in WoW by selling you WoW Tokens on the Online Store!
Because why make it harder for yourself than it needs to be, amirite?
If you say so. I do not know those games.
I don’t know. It is at least far from my reality. Why have personal goals and fun in a game and then buy them and be done with it? And literally nobody around you even cares about that personal goal. Sounds to me more P2L than P2W. Those people are objectively killing their own fun.
Instant gratification.
Simple as that.
You can remove the “in a game” and the sentence would apply perfectly well to IRL and a lot of shortcuts people take in all walks of life.
I mean, Blizzard even made a trailer for it:
And then quit the game. Gone fun.
No idea how the comparison to real life is. It probably is not comparable. I prefer to just talk about the game.
And again. Why would i care about a player who buys Curves? Nobody ever cares about another players achievement. It is completely personal. You pay for fast progress. Not for winning. And also not faster progress since you are after other people who you need to boost you.
Yeah, until Blizzard lines up the next Season with a cool Mythic+ or Raid mount.
Because the next thing is always cooler than the previous thing, which is now just old and boring.
It’s a bit like fashion in that sense. I guess that’s why it’s called vanity rewards? Huh.
People in my local gym put time and effort into lifting weights, and many are pretty skilled at doing proper muscle movements in the right tempo.
And despite that, some still take steroids.
Because it gets them to their goal line faster.
The psychology is no different just because it’s a video game.