And I still could not care less if someone paid for something or earned it. If I play with them and it’s clear their performance doesn’t reflect their achievements I simply won’t play with them again. They didn’t devalue my accomplishment.
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Well that’s certainly your prerogative.
All I would say to that, is that Blizzard are thankful to have people like you, because the attitude proliferates the use of more in-game monetization schemes.
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Is wow P2W and it has to be Binary then the answer is NO.
it is a nuanced thing you are asking about having a yes or no answer to.
And the only way to say the nuance is to say NO.
You are aware why Gold is sold by blizzard right?
Yes.
What are you trying to say?
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Yes, because Blizzard wants to make money out of players wishing to pay money for it 
Do you think it is out of a good heart desire to avoid players who wish to pay money being scammed ?
It’s not P2W in the most common sense with the online shop selling gear, or in game mounts.
But the token is a P2W element, and that’s an objective fact, there is no much circular argument. The token allow you to buy the currency that allows you to buy literally whatever you want in the game.
All the various argument that are like:
“but i don’t care about your achi”
“but i don’t care about your mount”
“but but but i don’t care cause gold is farmable in game”
And so on, are all subjective points of view that are completely fine.
But the fact that you don’t care about how another person got their glad mount, does not cancel the fact that someone swiped their credit card multiple times getting the gold DIRECTLY from Blizzard to then pay boosters until they finally got their mount.
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You are factually wrong when you claim that the gold had to be farmed.
The term Chinese Gold farmer exist because of how lucrative it was.
It also was done by hacking accounts.
Back then people also sold wow Accounts A vanilla account with tier 2 sold for 100usd per char with it.
I can confirm that these people hacked accounts to sell gold on them (my account was hacked for this specific reason before i got 2 factor authenticator
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Buying gold before got you banned tho because it was not blizzard selling it, now it does not. It’s a rather substantial change i would say.
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Being banned is something they have made less bad over the years in the past you got Perma banned for first offences.
These days it is hard to get 1 week ban.
That has nothing to do with wow being pay to win though.
Also it hardly ever got people banned according to people who did it that was even back in vanilla.
I almost forgot you got way way way more gold for the dollar by those guys then you do from blizzard.
Like I said to the other guy, then we should be able to acknowledge that there’s fair play and there’s cheating. Just as in real life you have law-abiding citizens and you have criminals.
There will always be criminals in real life and there will always be cheaters in video games.
The difference is that in the old days of WoW you had to be a cheater to buy gold. That was not allowed. You could get banned for it.
Today it is allowed to buy gold through Blizzard’s Online Store. To some degree it’s even encouraged.
That’s the difference.
Blizzard have taken a practice that was deemed cheating and legitimized it in the game.
And why was it deemed cheating in the first place?
Because it gave an unfair advantage to people with more money to spend, and because it undermined the game’s design integrity of rewards being a bi-product of time and effort (and skill).
So by legitimizing gold buying, which was previously an act of cheating, Blizzard have undermined their own game design.
That’s not praise-worthy.
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Yes and that is why this is a very nuanced topic it is not a Yes or No question.
If you have to give a yes or no then the answer needs to be No because it is so much nuance to the topic.
Here you are taking something and saying it is bad game design but you literally forget that you DO NOT EVER NEED TO BUY GOLD.
You can always farm the gold yourself.
I have done 2 tokens total ever the rest of the time i have just farmed my own gold and i am BAD at farming.
Of course, because as i said, it was an illegal practice that could lead to you being perma banned.
You could get away with it but you never knew. That’s a fundamental difference with simply buying gold from Blizzard itself.
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Correct but the reason blizzard stepped in was because of the Many MILLIONS of dollar that was spent on wow gold from these hackers and farmers every single day.
There people had jobs doing this and it is now very underground and hardly talked about even existing anymore.
Sure, but i don’t question the reason why they did it, i simply say it is a P2W element in itself.
No.
I can obtain everything I want by playing the game.
It undermines the fundamental game design of WoW as Blizzard themselves have outlined it.
In Diablo II you can trade all items. If you kill Diablo you can grab all the loot and trade it freely to anyone – even people who have never killed Diablo.
That’s because the design intent of Diablo II was that the best player is the trader.
Diablo II is a game of trading.
WoW was designed to be different. If you kill Ragnaros, then the items he drops are bind-on-pickup. Why? So you can’t trade them. Because the design intent of WoW was that the best player is the raider.
WoW is built around a design where the players who put the most time and effort into the game and who are skilled at playing it, they are also the most accomplished in the game, because they alone are the ones able to overcome the great challenges in the form of the raid encounters. And they alone are the ones that reap the rewards of their accomplishments. Hence why only the people who defeat the raid boss can get loot from it.
That’s WoW’s most fundamental design.
The player is as good as the time, effort, and skill they are able to put forth.
And the rewards they obtain are meant to reflect how accomplished they are.
That is why in Vanilla when you saw the guy in the top guild on your server standing on the mailbox decked out in full Tier 1 armor, you knew that guy was a God. Because he had the gear to show it, and having that gear meant that he was a devoted and skilled raider.
That design was the magic of MMORPGs and what made them tick.
That design is what Blizzard have eroded by legitimizing and proliferating gold buying and boosting.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t need to buy gold or use boosting services. The game’s integrity was lost the moment Blizzard allowed you to.
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If this was still going on you would ahve absolutly needed to buy hacked gold to play Shadowlands for the legendaries.
But thanks to the hackers mostly being removed people like myself had the gold to actually play that expansion.
So people in real life who earn more money than other people are cheaters? There will always be people with more money than others.
Blizzard would not be a very good company to invest in if they didnt maximise their profit potential.
To give off this attitude of “Blizzard are bad because they want to make money” is just a naive and rather childish viewpoint.
If they can leverage that money in the game despite it being against the Terms of Use, then yes, they are cheaters.
If they can leverage the money in the game and it isn’t against the Terms of Use, then they are not cheaters.
And over the years Blizzard have basically just legitimized what they previously considered to be cheating.
There’s nothing wrong with Blizzard making money.
There’s everything wrong with Blizzard making money as a consequence of undermining the design of their own game and preying upon the psychology of their customers.
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