And thus concludes another round of our high-quality roundtable.
It puzzles me that people take the word “win” so literally here. It is a shorthand, a figurative term used to critique various types of games, including MMOs. It describes the ability to gain advantages or achieve in-game goals through real-life monetary means. It’s not about a final victory, but about the advantages and shortcuts that money can buy. It’s about how paying money helps “smooth out” or “skip” parts of the process entirely. In games like WoW, we each set our own win condition.
Do people take the saying “money helps you win in life” literally too? So the one who wins is first on the podium? What does he win? Does he beat life? Or is he able to do pretty much whatever he wants and thus has a huge advantage over those who do not? And we are just, for the sake of brevity, calling it “winning”?
Sure, but what it also is in a game like WoW (a game without a literal ‘win state’), is subjective. So people will never agree what the term actually means. What is winning for one player can be completely meaningless to another.
And? The point is that they’re buying some of that which they need to defeat the challenges the game presents them. And in their case it’s character power.
You can’t just say that you’re not going to fare better against bosses with better gear because the game also relies on interrupts and mechanics.
You absolutely are. Gear matters.
When people who excel at interrupts and have great understanding of mechanics still go out and buy character power, then character power is something that gives you a better opportunity to defeat the challenges that the game presents you – otherwise the best guilds in the world wouldn’t go out and buy it!
Somebody insinuated that the ability to interrupt and understand mechanics is all that really matters, which is demonstrably false.
But it’s not. That’s specifically the criticism that many top guilds have put forth: That it’s not just about skill. You need a lot of preparation, a lot of gold, and a lot of money to afford to min/max a whole roster to be competitive for the race. Echo and Limit spends hundreds of millions of gold to buy all kinds of small character power gains to be as powerful as possible. They wouldn’t do that if it didn’t give them a competitive advantage. But it does. And that’s why other guilds struggle to compete, because it’s not just about skill, it’s also about character power.
No.
And I’m just going to quote myself from a few days ago:
What you’re doing is to continually obsess over the meaning of that word “win”. Forget about it. It’s a descriptive word to imply any of the above. It’s an umbrella term.
It puzzles me how people do not care about the definition of the words they use. But anyway all those pictures of cars Jito linked made me very smile so I am going to step on a plane and buy some air.
I guess i need to google that saying since it does not exist in my language.
The word winning sounds like you win something. So yeah i do take it as a serious word. Maybe in english it is not meaning winning? Maybe P2W does not mean you win? I don’t know. To me it does.
Also i have played clearly real P2W games. So i just have a problem seeing WoW on that level. It certainly is not comparable.
Yes it is. When i pay now 50k euro, i still will not get RWF. The first thing you need is skill. Adter that you need to prepare with the tiniest option to get an advantage.
I am pretty sure that if you pay Echo and Limit and other top guilds enough money (10 million each?), then they will absolutely ensure that you are part of the group that gets the winning kill.
Everything in WoW can be bought if you are willing to pay enough for it.
They both can not even assure to themselves they win the race on full power. They can not just carry a noob around to it. That is why they try to get the tiniest advantage in preparation. When that preparation was not needed they wouldn’t do it.
Ok the mental gymnastics going on on this topic from the “wow is P2W” crowd.
You are doing nothing other then watering down what P2W meant. Degrading it down to a buzzword meaning little to nothing.
I havent read much of the 1k-ish posts since my last input on this topic but im willing to bet not one has answerd my main question
Token or no token, the result is the same. Any MMO that has the ability to sell items will fall into your “P2W” hole and from that you have deminnished its meaning. /end thread.
