Or typing to your friend “Man I really would love to come to your normal run and try to get the mount but Blizzard would ban me for boosting”.
Also the ban bot will have field day with LFR XD. And if it’s an actual person reviewing them… I will put it like this, if it were me the pay check would have to make Bobby Kotick feel humble.
How many tokens do I need to buy cutting edge, keystone master and gladiator?
Do they sell in bundles? Can I full Afk?
Asking for a friend of course.
I’m going to refer back to my original formula for the sake of explanation:
Let’s say the goal is to clear Molten Core.
The first player to try and do so is Timmy who’s 8 years old and who is just trying WoW for the first time at his friend’s house.
Timmy doesn’t have any skill.
Therefore Timmy has to compensate by increasing his investment of time and effort in order to clear Molten Core.
So it ends up taking 6 hours for Timmy.
The next player to try and clear Molten Core is Rogerbrown from Echo. He has played WoW for a lifetime and is a very competent player.
Rogerbrown has a lot of skill.
Therefore Rogerbrown can rely on his skill go get through Molten Core quickly, thus not requiring him to spend a lot of time or effort.
So it ends up taking 20 minutes for Rogerbrown.
Does this make sense?
Everything we do in WoW is a bi-product of time & effort & skill.
We each have these in different quantities.
Some of us have a lot of hours to spend, but then we’re perhaps lazy and semi-afk most of the time.
Others are very skilled players, but perhaps have busy jobs so they don’t have a lot of time for WoW.
Others still put a lot of effort into WoW, but because they’re not very skilled at the game they just die a lot and end up spending a lot of time running back to their corpse.
Everything in WoW is a function of time & effort & skill. And those factors can be adjusted by the players themselves (by spending more time on WoW, or reading guides to get more skilled, or wiping 100 times to finally get a kill), or they can be adjusted by Blizzard (nerfing a boss so it doesn’t require as much skill to kill, or lowering experience needed to level so it doesn’t require as much time).
Does this all make sense? Because it should. It’s game design 101.
Okay…
So where does the credit card factor in here?
Well the credit card allows you to circumvent, minimize, or entirely eliminate some or all of these:
Time
Effort
Skill
So where a regular player has to put these 3 factors forth in the various quantities they’re able to – in order to do anything in WoW – then the credit card allows you to avoid that partially or entirely.
You don’t have enough time for progression raiding so you can kill Heroic Fyrakk? Credit card!
You don’t want to put in all the effort needed to farm materials to level your professions? Credit card!
You struggle to complete all the Dungeons on Mythic +10 to get the portals because of a lack of skill? Credit card!
Makes sense?
So in the previous example with Player A and Player B the following was assumed:
Player A and Player B both spend 10 hours. The same time.
Player A has more skill than Player B.
Player B uses his credit card.
And then the question is: Who among Player A and Player B is going to get more done in WoW in those 10 hours?
Player A has more skill but Player B has a credit card.
And the reality is just that no matter how much skill Player A has, the credit card that Player B has will compensate for his lack of it. And not only will it compensate, it will trumph it, because no matter how much skill Player A has, he still can’t get to Heroic Fyrakk faster than the time it takes to buy a boost. And no matter how much skill Player A has, he still can’t level a new character faster than the time it takes to buy a level boost.
Everything in WoW requires time & effort & skill.
But if you have a credit card, then nothing does.
CE is around 5 mil, idk how much they charge for a full sweep of +5s and glads. Safe to say somewhere around 7-10 mil. WoW token is around 400k atm sooo 18-25 tokens.
Paye to progress still not paye to win and with the present economic climate i doubt very much people are lashing out on tokens because what you have failed understand how they work :-
While the real money price of Token is fixed, the in-game gold price (how much are Tokens selling for) changes dynamically according to supply and demand. You can not choose how much do you want to sell it for - it is automatically determined by Blizzard’s internal algorithm.
Fewer people buy it for real money / more people want to give their gold for it = less supply/more demand = Token’s gold price rises.
More people buy it for real money / fewer people want to give their gold for it = more supply/less demand = Token’s gold price falls
so atm people buying gold is less then it has been for a long while.
You have this weird idea everyone has credit cards and everyone has lots of money to spend on a game this is so far from the truth but you keep on being obtuse and arguing for arguing sake.
And now to leave the thead because i really can not be bothered replying to a troll going to mute you and the thread.
But as we have discussed at length in this thread and arguably collectively concluded, then:
There is no win in WoW
You can’t win.
Win as a concept doesn’t exist in WoW.
There is nothing to win.
So what you’re left with in your sentence is:
Pay to progress
And you absolutely can do that.
But what if you don’t pay?
Well then you just progress through the normal means:
Time & effort & skill = Progress
That’s what we all do in WoW. We put time & effort & skill into playing our characters and doing the activities in the game, and then we reap the rewards of them if we are successful. That’s what WoW is.
Using your credit card simply allows you to play WoW and do all the same activities and successfully reap the rewards without putting in as much (or any) time & effort & skill.
Then, as I’ve said many times before, you can all call that whatever the hell you want. Whatever makes you sleep well at night.
Expect the gold is coming from players who farmed the gold in game. Not being generated by blizz when someone buys a token. Another player has to buy the tokens for you ti get the gold
You consider wow beaten when raid finders complete? 
And the same applies to your arguments. You can call it P2W all you want but in game a where there is no winning you are just paying to play less and subsequently paying a sub to play longer. That in my book is a loss.
Also you still haven’t actually answered how paying for your proffesions gives you an edge.
a bit stretched but sincerely you are right. never seen that in this POV.
I haven’t insisted on calling it P2W.
I think Tah said he was more comfortable with calling it pay-to-get-something.
Alaríc above seems to call it pay-to-progress.
It all works for me.
And if you want to call it “a loss” out of pity, then that’s fine as well.
I outlined my view in the beginning of the thread:
But I’m not insisting on calling it P2W. I have even said later in the discussion that I thought the term was stupid:
So I’m not here to argue semantics. Like I said, you can all call it whatever the hell you want.
What’s important for me is that this is true (which is the very first thing I said):
And I will argue the validity of that with vigor, as I have.
I call it loss out of stupidity if anything, but sure.
You were very instant on calling it that last night though, and went as far as arguing that definitions don’t matter.
Also you keep deflecting and ignoring these
You need a skilled player to sell you the boost in the first place.
You cannot buy knowledge points, which is actually what matters.
The max level boost becomes available way into an expansion. By the time you are able to buy your boost I will have an army of level 70s.
This is the only hill I’m fighting on:
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
the monetization schemes in WoW clearly undermine the gameplay integrity
And it’s the hill I will die on.
good point.
In a sub game Time is Money (goblins said so even).
So if you use time to acquire something in game then you are also using money to acquire it.
Why did you delete your post. It was true, the gameplay integrity is undermined and it’s not just the monetization schemes.
Actually the first good argument for WoW being a P2W game.
I think there is a comment early on (can’t remember by whom) that WoW is P2W because you have to pay sub to play. Or words to that effect.
normally i would love to explain my thoughts further. but unfortunately i had to answer quickly to a customer so i preferred delete the post.
I don’t mind having that discussion tbh.
If we go by what Jito says.
Gets undermined by seasons and catch up gear, hell each and every new expansion undermines the previous one. If someone has farmed S1, 2 and 3 but decides to skip S4 because it is what is, he will be behind a player who has just played S4 even for a week.
And then we have the bullions, why spend each week farming your 1 bullion when you can just wait a few weeks and get all of them in 1 run.
1 balance patch can undermine your time and effort. The bosses WF raiders kill are not the same bosses most Mythic guilds kill.
The mage tower is another example. Depending on many factors and balancing patches it’s difficulties vary. When it got re-intorduced in SL it was harder for some specs than it was in Legion (and that is not even considering the tail end of Legion when mage tower was easy mode), yet completing this harder challenge granted an objectively worse reward than its Legion counterpart.
This right here throws your P2W argument completely over board.
Why? Well, easy.
No? Doesn’t click? Geez, okay:
Credit Card player can’t buy boosts without skilled player completing the content BEFORE him, because otherwise he will have no one to pull him through the content.
When boost groups finally have reached the level where they can provide boosts, people buy boosts, and that since vanilla.