Absolutely nothing about that paragraph is a direct result of paying gold for loot. There’s nothing stopping any raid from doing any of those things. You’re just talking yourself into it bc the GDKP you joined happened to be better than your guild … and bc you’re probably swiping.
That is until Sir Swipesalot wants it too.
Lol I have 70k and I’ve spent a total of <20k over 4 GDKPs
I’m hardly a big spender out here 
I’m not an experienced raider but from everything I heard, a good run should be a full clear in 2 hours. If I’m paying or being paid, I would think 4 hours would be unacceptable.
100% that is pay to win. In any game with RMT that is universally accepted as P2W.
Look at Korean mobile games which build their entire business model around that concept; ‘you can play for free for thousands of hours while we constantly dangle easy rewards in your face for $ … or you can spend thousands of dollars and get it ASAP with little effort & have an obvious advantage over anyone who doesnt’. Even the suckers that fork over those thousands of dollars openly admit what theyre doing is p2w.
Swiping to buy loot in GDKPs is the exact same concept. It is literally the only loot system any raid uses where a single player can ‘win’ the first piece of any loot that ever drops. No other raid functions that way. It would be like Venmo-ing $100s to a loot council for first prio on everything; nobody would put up with that. The only reason parasites put up with it in GDKPs is because they get payouts to launder that bot-farmed mastercard gold.
A 2 hour full clear of ulduar all hard modes is VERY uncommon, all normals, ya 2 hours is about right. For reference theres only around 2k total guilds that have a prog kill on algalon. Out of around 12k total that have killed flame leviathan normal. So that means that only around 17% of the raiding playerbase have killed alg at all.
There was another post in this forum where someone claimed that 95% of the player base is happy with Ulduar as is. Now we find out that only 17% have finished it.
A sub 2 hour run means youre one of the fastest speed clearing guilds in the world…
Youre not clearing in 2 hours
I’m not. I assure you. I’ve only run it as few times and it’s nowhere near there. But one of our returning guildies said that ~2 hour runs were the norm. If I’m paying big bucks for GDPK or being paid to play, I would expect the run to be under 3 hours at the very least, not 4.
Thats why people like it, you dont have to do the hardmodes, they just give you an extra, better, piece of loot, struggling on a hardmode, do normal, get more gear, then go back to it.
Again, maybe for a full normal mode run, but atm a full hardmode run is atleast a 3h run realistically. 2h run, your gaming pretty hard.
Lol @ all the gdkp defenders trying to claim gdkp doesn’t make the game pay to win. Player buys gold off the internet. Steps into raid. Buys item with the gold he purchased off the internet. In what world is paying with real life dollars for in game items that hugely benefit your player power not pay to win?
I think you over estimate the amount of RMT that goes on in GDKPs
If you spend your totally legitimate gold on gear than it’s akin to token gear essentially and no one claims that’s PTW, no one claims buying items off the AH is PTW
Apparently everyone who does a GDKP either infrequently like myself or frequently like some of the old heads is a RMTer
This is not what P2W means–nor what it ever meant. It’s borderline troll to assert it.
Classically, people defined P2W as any ability to acquire in-game power through the use of real world money, whether directly or indirectly.
UD is wrong about many things. I wouldn’t accept it as a source.
But not on this. This has been the definition I and many others use for pay to win, as you can see this is more than a decade old.
In order to compete, you MUST pay.
It’s significantly, although partially, wrong about this too. It actually doesn’t matter how the monetized advantages compare to non-paid equivalencies. It is whether or not the usage of real money has a tangible gameplay benefit beyond pure cosmetics.
Edit:
I’m not claiming Wrath Classic is designed to be P2W, btw. I’m simply saying the tolerance for bots/RMT has allowed room for P2W to exist.
Never has been that.
That’s simply a paid service.
Pay to win implies that you HAVE to pay in order to get the same thing, or that the method to obtain said benefit is locked behind an absurd timegate.
This is incorrect. Don’t buy the line the mobile industry has sold you.