WoW Token is pay2win

Community General Discussion
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Taliesin and Evitel just put into their video that WoW has pay2win. And I think it does and I can’t think of a better time to reignite this discussion just ahead of Shadowlands, so I’m going to open that can of worms now.

Here’s the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etwua9opBtQ

I am SO glad he, because he has a lot of influence towars Blizzard, finally called out the WoW Token for what it is, and for what I’ve called it for ages. It’s a way for Blizzard to position themselves as custodian and exchange for the gold market.

That obviously comes with all the positive effects of having an exchange and a custodian. But in this case it also comes at the expensive of the integrity of the gameplay itself and introduces P2W, which is exactly why it wasn’t allowed originally.

I also disagree with Taliesin that it has little to no impact outside of mythic or WF raiding. It has a profound impact that I, and I have done this so I’m no saint, can play less and just buy everything I need for real money. It takes out one of the aspects of skill that I should be living up to as a mythic raider.

Further, because the money is being fed back into the economy by selling tokens instead of being spent on Longbois and things like that, it inflates the prices of the consumables, making it even more necessary to buy gold; gold is not being drained out of the economy at the rate that it should, which is bad in a game with infinitely spawning gold.

But Blizzard have detailed logs of every gold transaction, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out when a real-life gold trade has taken place. Denmark has a law that operates on that premise called “Hvidvaskningsloven” and it has basically outlawed cash (which is a bit silly really, but for WoW there is no cash by definition so it works here).

Gold trading might be consumer friendly or whatever, but it’s also damaging to the game, and it needs to be removed.

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2

Token isn’t the problem, but when your mythic BiS gear comes from AH that’s the problem. AFAIK they talked about it on Method or Limit stream. Preach also. Like good BoE isn’t bad, but powerlevel of mythic BiS is really really bad.

And it affects everyone as BoE flipping right now makes every WoW gold maker wet right now. I got one from normal, bad one, but still 150k.

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Yea this is terrible, they should remove it and let bots and hackers and scammers to run riot again.

Gold trading is damaging to “your vision” of the game. But since Blizzard are custodians of that too (you seemed to neglect to mention that part) perhaps its part of their vision.

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You know it’s true when some guy on the internet makes a youtube video about it :slight_smile:

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Corruption is a big problem and it’s very easy to buy your bis corruptions on the AH. WoW is probably as close to pay to win as it can get atm.

It’s a fault with this god awful corruption system.

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If you couldn’t buy it it would not be a problem :wink: At least they blocked mythic BoE farming without doing first mythic boss.

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Could you explain what BoE means. Best of Enchant? I haven’t done much Nyalotha raiding so I’m unaware.

That being said, I think WoW tokens are great for people like me who aren’t exactly poor and wouldn’t mind paying a subscription on one hand, but on other paying 13eur for a game that is buggy and broken ( 8.3. patch memory leak that has never compensated me for 3weeks i have paid for) and on top of that paying for an expansion that has content that is worse every year is absurd.

You will pay on average 156 euros per year just for sub, and i’m not counting expansion that adds additional 20-30 euros.

So paying 176-186 euros per year to have access to a game that will be timegated crap?
If anything subs should be going down and blizzard is not a small indie dev team to require that much money.

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No, that isn’t a problem in my opinion. If anything BiS items should come regularly, but of course not the majority of the time, from tradeskills and BoE’s, which are both going to involve BoE’s.

Tradeskills are “first get the BoP recipe from really hard content” and THEN “gather all the materials”, as opposed to just getting the item drop directly. It’s higher effort.

They’re running rampant anyway. The game is full of bots.

And them having a different vision for the game somehow means I can’t say I don’t say share it or something?

That sentence makes no sense to me in a world where there’s a bloody forum to discuss the game, which you are currently on.

The issue I take with this view is that I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the game having a way to earn great rewards through making lots of gold. I think that’s absolutely fine - if not desirable outright.

But we can’t have that while we have WoW tokens.

Bind on Equip - an item you can trade to other players unless you use it.

As for the rest of your post, I will completely agree that it is convenient, but that does not mean it’s better.

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9

BoE is bind on equip gear. Such gear can drop from trash in raids and instances aside M+ as well as open world mobs. Such gear can be sold on AH and such gear can corrupt, so corrupted BoE gear is selling super gear on AH for the first time. One piece of good corrupted gear, even of low ilvl can be worth over 10 million gold.

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A YouTuber told me what to think too! Now I wear glitter every day

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That’s the same guy who thinks Asmongold is Spiderman…
Just ignore it , he probably doesn’t know what he is talking.

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Just here to say, Pay-2-Win is when the best items/items in general are only obtainable through real life money, not possible to get with in game needs

Pay-2-Play is being able to buy an advantage in game faster, but you could also just obtain it normally

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Right now it’s god mode. It’s not a good ring or titanforged BoE, it’s on completely new level of power and price. And with such power on AH it’s very tempting to buy tokens to then buy such gear.

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That’s great. Good thing it doesn’t apply to both of us.

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If that’s pay to play, what’s a subscription then? :no_mouth:

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Ah great, and I thought it was a smart idea to craft armor as blacksmith with new recipes for 440 ilvl.

Why even craft and spend tons of gold on materials when you can just brainlessly farm mobs in raids and get op gear?

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How it is trading my gold for useful currency.

You give me via middle man- AH /blizz token for 1 month sub /13 euro on battlnet and you will get my gold from playing.

Who ever would want to would get gold before it existed.

I like wow token adds value to things and keeps economy working.

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TRADING CURRENCY IN MMORPG is damagin game so tell me how.

GO AHEAD say i am up for argue.

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Bots were far worse pre token days.

And of course you’re entitled to your opinion, just don’t pass it off as fact “they are damaging the game”. No, they aint according to Blizzard. If the whales want to come in to the game and buy a limited time “win” (whatever that should mean) I couldn’t care less, and nor could Blizz.

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I agree with you that Corruption has really brought this problem into the spotlight more so than previously, but it was still there the whole time. There is no mechanical difference in how it works. The auction house isn’t new and the tokens aren’t new.

Both this tier and last tier Method racked up the equivalent of €50,000 in debt in order to win the race. Is that appropriate? I don’t think so - I think it’s absolutely ridiculous.

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