See again, people like you really likes to keep it overly simplistic.
It’s a theme really with all of the people pushing this point and it is not a coincidence.
You’re doing that because more in-depth analysis demonstrates without the shadow of a doubt that this categorization as “it is” and “it isn’t” is intellectually dishonest at best. So you’re not willing to go in depth to defend the point. Why would you?
It doesn’t help you, it essentially cripples your positions by clearly showing that
- At it’s core the token was the least terrible outcome of 2 bad situation
- One being letting goldfarmer and scammer exploit the player base
vs - The second being to give player the ability to aquire gold via selling in-game time in the AH
So advocating for it’s removal is tantamount to asking to bring back the game to a worst place than it is right now without suggesting anything to cover for the problem it is keeping in relative check.
- When put on scale of “P2W” the game barely makes it up on the scale as nothing that can be skipped (with a 4 step process let’s not forget to mention it) isn’t achievable in a similar amount of time by someone with no money at all.
In fact the whole process in WoW would be better represented by “paying to catch up” as all the carries that occurs would be made by people who have already cleared the content a long time ago and no longer needed anything from it.
This furthers the point that they do not get ahead of anyone because for a carry to be able to happen, you need to have an already substantial amount of players with gear far surpassing the difficulty level of the content they are attempting to carry. Usually for that to happen, as I said, means that those players already cleared most of the relevant content and can now focus on carrying other players and are willing to do so.
Realistically it means that you can only really “P2W” once a major part of the player base already far surpasses you.
At which point you don’t get ahead of anyone, hence making the P2W argument null because no advantage was gained over anyone at all.
The players paying for those will also never realistically catch up or get ahead anyone either because their approach to the game is intrinsically lazy.