Yes, but I’m not trying to win at anything and find it silly people are paying beyond their sub fee to have content cleared for them
I do not agree
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Yeah actually i can yap arround and tell you about lord and saver jesus christ and he tells me that p2w could be a as looong and intens answer as i wont it too be and discripe a ton of stuff going into my final saying that at last for PvP its only part time p2w, because you could buy a guy too play with you but you are still the weak link and if another guy plays your char you are banned
No
Love your mog by the way
But back to business!
Please define two things for me:
How do you “Win” WoW?
Name the currency/gear/skill/etc that is only available via the Blizzard shop that gives you an advantage no one have who don’t bought that said currency/gear/skill/etc that is only available via the Blizzard shop
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Sorry to be one of them people but i disagree. Although i see your point, I dont see any advantage of paying for a character boost except saving some time. Also the boost you are referring to is a illegitimate boost.
So as a hypothetical. If i pay my friend to complete a a game for me does that make that game P2W?
Blizzard offer legitimate character boosts but even then you arent mythic plus or raid ready.
If the blizzard store offered a service of gettin your mythic rating for money or curved then i would agree. But seeing as you are referring to paying other players to boost your toons and not blizzard itself I disagree
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No
/binaryanswer
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There is a difference between gold created and gold exchanged.
The gold you make by looting monsters, vendoring items and completing quests is gold created. The gold you make through the AH is gold exchanged towards you. For this gold to exist, someone first needs to create it ingame. Also, if it was easy then a significant amount of players would be doing that, which means that you’d have a lot more competition which would bring your earnings down. If you had 10x more players flipping things over, you’d have 1/10th of your current earnings.
Then you also have to consider that something being easy doesn’t mean people will want to go the extra length to do it. Completing the current raid tier on Normal is easy (or at least the consensus of forumers is so), yet probably less than 10% of active players manage that within any given season (someone can check this through raider_io or something?). Having 65 alts all at level 70 is also easy, it just takes time, yet less than 1 in 100000 players have managed to do that. Playing the AH so that you can make large amounts of gold without risk is also “easy” as you say it… as long as you have learned the ropes from years of experiencing failures and losses and you want to go the extra length of setting up addons and trackers to automate a significant part of the job.
And to be somewhat cynical in the end, a token costs 20€ and right now would give me 400k-ish gold. So for a fraction of my daily 8-hour work schedule I can get 400k (which means that 100k is a quarter of that fraction) without risk and without having to do research. But if every player went out to buy gold through selling tokens, their value would plummet and everyone’s gold income would be reduced, exactly because of competition!
I want to go on a different tangent:
Let’s suppose that a game sells explicit player power on its shop, power that is unavailable without buying it for real cash and which would numerically put a player above other players on a scale.
PlayerA buys that, so they paid to become more powerful than any other player.
PlayerA joins other players in group content and still ends up being the worst in performance, plus the game rng denied any rewards.
PlayerA enters PvP activities and ended up last with no rewards.
What did PlayerA win? They paid yet they did not win!
Therefore the game which sold player power was NOT P2W, since it cannot guarantee winning!
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Depends where you draw the line. Blizzard does not offer you power in their shop, only cosmetics.
Their boost is just shortcuts the leveling and lives you with a really low ilvl score that can be easilly replaced with items from ah.
You can make an argument that you can buy token which turns into other players gold, but that amount is really insignificant. Sure, you can buy items from ah, but most of them that are affordable really low ilvl. You can buy boosts, but that does not guarantee you any items and you have to spend more gold (and thus more real money) to make it count, to a point where you spend way too much real money, and I think most people just don’t do that. So yeah, if your only income are the tokens and you buy a bunch of them, and turn the gold out of them to boosting services, then yes you can call it P2W, if the “win” for you is getting better items, or a tmog, or a mount.
I think if you buy PVP boosts from it, you still have to put effort into it, and if you are a bad player, you can spend gold how much you want you always going to get stucked at low elo. So in this case it is not a P2W. I think the same applies to higher mythic+.
I believe large majority of time the gold does not make any difference so it is not P2W in my eyes.
You can argue that there are real money boosts, but that can be applied to any game really, not just MMOs.
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If this is your definition, then the only P2W features WoW has are the token and the level boosts. With both them being questionable whether they are truly pay to win to begin with, because I am not using any of them, and I don’t feel like anyone using them has a direct advantage over me.
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He’s right tho. It could be so much work worse
no. at all. but im lucky. i dont give a crap about high end chunk of the game.
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No. I dont agree. Everything that can be bought in the game for real money can be bought with gold.
If anything its Pay 2 Skip a long grind making gold.
I could spend Millions on wow and i still wouldnt win the game.
As far as i am aware no one has actually won World of Warcraft.
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Yes and no. I think the whole “you can buy gold to buy boosts” is not intended and is a player issue, not a game issue. I would consider it fully p2w if it had it’s own currency shop with boosts like XP, potions, epic gear. The reality is people will find a way to get themselves boosted and “win” regardless of whether the game allows it or not. Just because Blizz is now supplying tokens doesn’t stop the fact people used to buy gold with real money from sellers and do it that way.
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Yes.
And it will continue to be while they sell the WoW token and boosts.
People have a very hard time accepting this. Especially seeing as, without Blizzard explicitly allowing you to do this kind of cheating, the community will.
But it is p2w all the same. Nothing short of redefinition of the word can change that. It matches perfectly.
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For me, the term “pay-to-win” is a shorthand used to critique aspects of game design that favour or invite RL financial investment over actual gameplay skills and dedication to gain some sort of an advantage in the game. And because WoW is supposedly an RPG, the advantages thus gained matter.
So, yes, it is P2W.
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I don’t feel like wow is P2W
For me definition of p2w is that real money gives some opportunities to move the character strength over the cap, become better than a player that is not investing
Also p2w is not about achievements from my view, its about gameplay and character strength
So you cant become better in the end, you’ll be just like the rest regular playerbase
Buying boost feels like a help for losers, not like you got some advanced tech with real money
Ofc you can do it, but you’ll never win this game with a perception that you’re as good as players who got gear-stuff-achievements on their own
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More than pay2win is pay2skip.
Everyone has different goal/ambitions in game.
Some people choose to invest 2+ months in mythic raid to progress and get CE, while others prefer to invest 100+ € in tokens for a carry.
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Judging it as I would judge beating a single player game, when you beat the endgame content on any difficulty, so quite easily actually.
I don’t believe in the whole ‘you havn’t beaten the game if you didn’t play on the hardest setting’ stick so thats not a factor for me and you can still go for harder settings after you’ve beaten the game, but to me, thats after you’ve already ‘won’.
Collection gathering I consider a post-game activity, so also after you’ve beaten the game. To take assassins creed 2 as an example: You beat the game after you beat the Borgia pope, regardless of how many feathers you collected for your brother, regardless if the game is on easy or hard.
The only real difference with wow being an mmo is that it is ‘constantly’ worked on, but I just change my mindset to a per patch basis.
So you have beaten wow, atleast until the next content patch comes out, when you’ve beaten the endgame content of the patch, irregardless of how you got there.
So through farming and gearing yourself, or buying tokens and using the gold to buy boosts.
Mind you that I don’t consider getting the gold yourself without buying a token and using the gold to buy a boost as pay2win, because the gold was obtained conventionally, without someone pulling out their credit card.
I would also argue that if the token didn’t exist, boosts would be cheaper since less people would have the gold to sustain current prices
Gold, which is not only available at the blizzard shop sure, but the shop does offer it to you in amounts you are unlikely to get by farming conventionally in the same time it takes to buy and sell a token, personally, I find the arguement of, the game isn’t pay2win because they don’t use a paid currency system like its some gatcha a really bad one that doesn’t do Blizzard any service. If anything I would feel like it would make them look even worse if this was an arguement they themselves would give.
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and other prefer to invest 100 euros in mogs or mounts
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If we define that “P2W” is “going far into M+/Raids/PvP”, Then it is P2W up until a certain point as you can’t progress beyond that point.