So a rich kid pays for carries till he’s full bis. What has he ‘won’? Has he won any sense of accomplishment? Maybe, if he’s very shallow. Has he won our respect? Has he had any fun? I would argue that slogging out AOTC with my pleb guild, while farming M+ for most of my gear, is more ‘winning’ than paying for carries to bis and Cutting Edge. I will improve more as a player and have a richer experience. With or without a brutosaur.
According to who? And why do they get to decide? Blizz tells me the real loot is the friends we make along the way.
I agree with toxic. I don’t see the issue if others can pay with money if I can pay with gold. That way this is something I can still get via playing the game.
You better get farming gold.
I’m not really interested in what your personal parameters are for winning. If you don’t find any value in that, then that’s fine. It doesn’t really change the fact that a kid can sling a ton of money endlessly at this game until he’s fully decked out in the best gear possible. Under any other game in any other community, we would be able to see that for what it is, so I’m not sure why we seem to be in denial about it here.
The design philosophy underpinning any RPG is character progression. That is the design philosophy underpinning World of Warcraft, whether you choose to play it that way or not.
So when you’re able to spend money and progress your character, that is pay-to-win.
Any multi-player game that’s popular enough will develop a market for paid carries. That’s human nature. Only way to prevent that is not having group content or not being popular enough.
You can buy it with gold, so it’s not pay to win. Pay to win confers an advantage that’s not attainable without paying cash. If you actually fit the use case for the mount, you’d likely have enough gold sitting around to convert to buy it, and wouldn’t be here complaining.
If you aren’t a serious gold farmer, what use do you have for it, other than a minor convenience? Because it only becomes an advantage if you’re in a situation where you are quickly filling your bags with stuff to auction off, in a remote location, aka gold farming.
I really gotta warn my friends that random raid bosses are gonna be snatching them up and holding them hostage now…
“Hey uh Steve, Azshara is coming to kidnap you… oh, you’re OKAY with this? Makes sense I guess. What’s that, Jeff got dragged off by Jaina Proudmoore? Well, least the poor sap died happy.”
That’s part of the design philosophy, a significant part, but certainly not all of it. You’re missing a lot of the brilliance of WoW. Gear upgrades provide shots of dopamine. Feeling like you’ve improved as a player boosts serotonin. And forming bonds with team mates boosts oxytocin. There’s a reason Blizz continues to encourage social interactions even though a segment of the player base would prefer anonymity and random queues: Blizz knows social connection will keep players engaged even when they don’t have other reasons to play.
Some people get much of their social interactions through Facebook or Instagram. Millions of people get it through WoW. It’s social media for gamers.
As a business move, the brutosaur was a oft-requested cash cow and crowd pleaser. It generated some hype, pleased players who missed the original and were hoping for another version some day, and… I wonder just how much they did make? What % of players bought it? A million players at $90 each = $90 million. Half that is still $45 million.
As a gamer, I bought one for the convenience and I’m loving it. As a consumer… I hope they will reinvest a significant part of these proceeds into hiring, rewarding, and retaining the best artists and content creators in the market. Profitable games get supported; unprofitable games wither away.
you can spend gold to buy carries for all of those things so you are correct, 15 seconds faster for real money is p2w.
even 0.001 seconds faster is an advantage. so yes still p2w. 15 seconds faster to access the AH is a paid for advantage regardless of the degree of advantage.
Blizz walks a fine line of bringing some practices into the sunlight and denying profits to scammers. Kind of like when society decides some drugs should be legalized, taxed, and regulated.
WoW tokens, in theory, allow players with more money than time (e.g., working parents) to exchange with players who have more time than money (for whatever reason). WoW tokens also deprive 3rd party gold sellers most of their potential customers. Some of those 3rd parties were scams and tokens help limit their impact.
Similar decision was made in allowing guilds to offer gold-only carries in new Trade Services channel. Carries been going on since Vanilla, but bringing them into open in game makes it easier for Blizz to moderate.
If that were even remotely true, then the bot situation in this game would have ceased to exist at the onset of its inclusion into the game.
Bots continue to persist anyways, because all Blizzard has realistically done is force the bots to undercut the price for the token. Rather than charging $20 for gold, they’re charging $17-18 instead. Nothing has changed, Blizzard just has its hands in the pie now, too, except more people are probably buying gold now more than ever because Blizzard has made a “legal” means to do so, so to speak. Previously, you may have had a subsect of the population unwilling to risk their account to buy gold, or perhaps unwilling to buy gold at the risk of being scammed out of their money. Now it’s just the normal thing to do because Blizzard made it normal.
And that’s not how it works in a true P2W game. You dont have to take the extra step of paying people (who could possibly fail, btw) to do the work for you.
So no; it isn’t.
Edit. Additionally, people who’ve never spent a penny on the game can buy the same carries with gold they earned in-game.
Semantic arguments about what constitutes p2w and not have always been the absolute best arguments about clear anti-consumer, worst-practice game design where games are created from the money up, rather than created game-first and then monetised!
Wait no, that’s on opposites day.
Every person in this thread, and in life in general, knows exactly what is meant by P2W in the context its used here. The fact that you can do it with gold is essentially irrelevant when the vast majority of people will never have that much gold in their life - it’s paying lipservice to the argument. It is overwhelmingly more likely that people will part with $100 than that they will have the amount of gold required to do the same.
