It was a comment on your definition of “pay to win”
I’ve seen the trend developing over many years. The mental gymnastics people come up with to excuse it are out of this world. It’s been condensed down such that people debate whether something is pay to win by a very narrow definition that applies to almost nothing. Pay for convenience, pay for power, etc.
As long as you insert one or two steps between the purchase and the winning, it magically is no longer pay to win.
Justify it how you want, paying money then ending up with a tangible in-game benfit is pay to win, in all cases.
you’re not too bright are you? If everything costs more because of inflation… that means you can farm for those things in your free time and sell them at an inflated price…
you just want instant gratification and forget that you still need to play the game with or without GDKP
There were gold farming cartels camping all the black lotus with pixel change notifications so they would pick every lotus, then sell for obscene amounts of gold. You couldn’t farm lotus because every node was camped and picked on cooldown by these cartels.
There were never “cartels” farming black lotus. There were just players waiting at the spawn points. It was never an organized group beyond “hey you get this spawn point” and “hey you get that spawn point”.
It 100% was organized gold sellers camping the lotus nodes. They had a level 1 (or level 2) dead corpse on every node with the ghost standing there watching for it to spawn, with a pixel change notification that would alert the farmer when the lotus spawned.
This was also after layering was removed, so hopping layers was not an option. The only chance you had of getting a lotus was to get your guild together to patrol the nodes and get lucky. Because the gold seller piloting the 40 virtual machines (10 nodes per zone) would always know exactly when it spawned and immediately head straight for it.
Yes I do recall Blizzard changing it so you couldn’t see nodes while dead. There were also real players farming black lotus by standing at the spawn points. I know this because I did it. And I got black lotus.
Raid leads and MTs and others who benefited from GDKPs got multiple gold capped toons and eventually started selling the gold at wholesale rates to goldselling websites.
Gold selling websites competed with each other to sell this gold back to players at retail rates.
Making every BoP drop effectively BoE and auctioned for gold pushed the demand for gold higher than players can or could naturally make in the ordinary course of events.
This provoked a massive demand for gold bought with RMT $ and a massive spike in bots.
pro-GDKP players will handwave over this but this affected everyone, not just the people in raiding. You want to make some of the gold for your epic mount by selling bags? Good luck getting the runecloth bag pattern from Qia in Winterspring because there are bots waiting 24x7 to snap it up and maintain a strict control over the bag recipe on the AH, which is now 50g each. Ditto dark runes, for example. Swipers can afford to pay quadruple a reasonable amount for dark runes and anyone who doesn’t have max consumes is “holding back the raid”. Doesn’t matter that Naxx was designed to be cleared by people on dialup who hadn’t seen a combat parse in their lives and who had no idea what the word “bis” meant and for whom keybinds were advanced play and macros, black magic.
Instanced content became an exercise where raiders could expect a certain gold / hour payout. Subsequently, normal raid events like wipes or even deaths came to be seen as unforgivable. Ditto, raids where people had to drop out because pets, parents or kids needed attention. Why engage in normal gameplay when you can swipe, get gold, get boosted from lvl 8 to MC in your levelling whites and get carried to epics? If you have a GDKP-wealthy main, why should your alt compete for rolls when they can just buy whatever they think they might need?
Of course, just like people on one side of twinking or multiboxing or “harmless” botting, GDKPers just can’t see why anyone else would have a problem with it. But it’s far more toxic to the game than twinking or multiboxing ever was.
Almost like you let people down who had earlier helped you get your drops?
Real money is involved. You’re just buying gold with extra steps.
Let me spell it out for you
Step 1.) Make GDKP group
Step 2.) Find “Whales” whose money usually comes from buying gold
Step 3.) Carry them
Step 4.) Get a cut of the whales gold that was obtained with real money (goldbuyer gold)
Tell me how that isn’t pay to win. You’re either buying gold to get gear or you’re the carry essentially buying gold with extra steps. If you can’t follow that then I can’t help you and this falls on deaf ears.
You can’t use rule breaking and define something as pay to win. That’s just nonsense because you can always break the rules to achieve pay to win no matter what rules are or are not in place. I could say WoW is pay to win no matter what because you could pay some website to level your character for you or pay someone real money to get into a raid.
Literally any game ever becomes pay to win if rule breaking is part of your pay to win definition.
GDKP is only pay to win with 1st party sanctioned RMT like the WoW token. So retail and Cataclysm Classic are pay to win versions of WoW. Era is not.
No I just can’t convince someone with illogical thoughts that their thoughts are illogical.
It’s like trying to convince someone who can’t comprehend evolution to accept evolution or it’s like when stupid people look at you like you’re the stupid one.