Getting the best gear in the game doesn’t mean you “beat” WoW. You beat WoW if you’ve completed everything in the game, ranging from pet battles and mount farming, to raid achievements and gold cap. Getting best in slot gear falls into this category, but unless you have every achievement in the game, every possible mount, every battle pet, every appearance unlocked, every title, every reputation exalted, etc. etc. then the game isn’t beaten.
That being said, microtransactions for cosmetics in a game that rewards you with progression for collecting these cosmetics, is in its own regard a pay to win.
Like Mage Tower, for example. a book mount and recolored tier set doesn’t give you any stat boosts, but people still flaunt it around because its prestige. people still participate in Mage Tower because people actually, really care about these rewards.
Mage Tower would have very little participation if it didn’t reward anything for completing it. If you didn’t get an achievement, or any sort of appearance, any reward whatsoever for doing it, then no one would do it. Doesn’t give you any power bonus, but it does offer prestige in the form of vanity.
Everyone, I have to confess. I bought a couple of tokens this month and I used some of the gold to make consumables. I then used those consumables in H SoD today and I got 4 items. I did in fact win because I payed real money.
As near as I’ve been able to find, the current maximum number of achievement points possible is 36985. There are exactly four characters worldwide that have reached that point total, so these are theoretically the only four people that can be said to have ‘won’ the game.
For now. Blizzard will undoubtedly add more achievements with 9.2.5, thus moving the finish line yet again.
People who think WoW is pay to win have clearly never played an actual pay to win game.
WoW is pay to get carried, but if you actually do that you’ll be geared for content you don’t have the skills for and it will be very obvious to everyone what you did.
As I said… there are a multitude of opinions on what is “winning”.
In your case, it would seem to be “prestige”. In my case, I personally could not care less about who has what mount or cosmetic or achievement; they do not affect me at all.
To me, pay to win is being able to buy player power (not cosmetics) DIRECTLY from Blizzard, which at this point you can’t do. You have to still interact with other players to convert that token gold into an actual player power reward.
And anything you can “buy” with token gold, you can also get by playing the game. It just takes more effort and time.
So…
My opinion happens to differ from yours. That’s not “wrong” (except in your opinion), that’s just agreeing to disagree.
Weird stance to take that a game can either be P2W or not at all instead of understanding that games can have varying degrees of it.
Pay to get carried
Pay to advantage
Pay to convenience
Pay to pay because I’m allergic to money
WoW is apparently pay to anything but win because people really love trying to parse down the term “win” yet want to ignore that it starts with “pay”, even though when you really think about it no game is actually pay to WIN since those games geared towards microtransactions never actually end. You don’t buy your way to the finish line and move on.
That has no actual bearing on whether the game is P2W or not.
My understanding of “pay to win” has been that of the very first games that implemented the system - which explicitly and exclusively kept the highest power rewards behind a pay wall. The idea being that you HAD to pay real money for that power level. You then used that power level against other players, which is where the “win” also comes into play. I believe EA sports games (soccer maybe) was the “grandfather” of “pay to win” where you had to buy card packs to get the players with the highest stats.
WoW doesn’t have this kind of exclusive pay wall. It also doesn’t have the same kind of “win” condition in it. Outside of the world first race, there isn’t a “win” condition that relies on power level. Arena and M+ are hosted on tournament realms - so any gear obtained by purchasing them doesn’t matter in those environments.
The bottom line is “pay for convenience” is NOT “pay to win”. That’s why different words are used entirely. You can still disagree with “pay for convenience”, but saying the two are the same is ignorant of how words work.
People seem to think of P2W as outright black and white; it is either or it isn’t. I used to think closer to these lines, but have come to accept that game design can be grey, and WoW certainly has functionality that distinctly makes it different than games that focus on microtransactions for progression. But at the end of the day if your game has a feature in it that allows your customer to insert money into the game for an in-game advantage then that feature is P2W. That doesn’t make it an inherently bad feature, that’s just what it is.
This means even mundane features like server transfers, race change, etc could be described as P2W since you save yourself the time of rerolling compared to someone who doesn’t. I assume most can agree that since these features aren’t the focal point of WoW design that they are not problematic in the grand scheme of things.
The reason why the token is so heavily critized is because that it makes an obvious impact to how the game can be approached.
Again, there’s no one true definition of P2W, but if you look it up and read what Wikipedia describes it as your definition doesn’t appear anywhere.
There are plenty of games out that don’t have specific power locked behind it in the sense that you or I would think about for WoW. I played one game, don’t remember what it was called, but you built an army and battled the game for gold/gems to buy more packs for your army. Come back for small daily rewards with a sliver of a chance for awesome rewards.
There was nothing exclusively locked behind spending money on the game, but awesome heroes were a ridiculously low drop on top of time consuming to be able to buy packs. Instead you could just spend money on a boatload of packs, or buy legendary hero packs for guaranteed heroes. And when it came time to PvP against other people you were screwed if they had dumped money into getting packs.
So the power gap was artificially made by essentially screwing a non paying player out of any chance of ever being able to compete with a paying player despite that both players could theoretically have the same power.
P2W is a term more than it is a word. It could be legally defined to describe a specific design system in games if lawmakers wanted to regulate it and it wouldn’t matter what you think of the word win at that point because there’d be laws that would either describe the system as such or not.
I agree with the first part of the statement and it’s why I generally call most gacha games P2W. You can technically get everything the paying player does with free rolls and luck, but you can very easily tell apart a paying account from a free account at a glance.
I wouldn’t have said that WoW qualified as that kind of game though. I haven’t seen any evidence that the game is designed with player-run carries in mind as you can fairly easily play the game at a competitive level without interruption whether or not you purchase WoW tokens. All the main grinds that people (including myself) dislike are grinds you’d be forced to go through regardless of how much gold you had like Renown, Torghast, or Reputation. I am not aware of any major barriers that the game puts in front of players to inconvenience their progress that can be overcome with gold.
When you attempt to look for a raid in group finder that requires AOTC to apply/join, that incentivizes paying a third-party seller to get the achievement. Especially for a more casual player.
When the cost of legendary bases is hundreds of thousands of gold on your server, and you’re making a few thousand a day doing your dailies, the incentive to bypass this (unreasonable) grind with a Token makes it seem reasonable.
When item level is a key factor into being accepted into NON pre-made groups, paying groups to bypass the tedious gearing systems in modern WoW with loot funnels becomes another pay for convenience, aka win.
Just a handful of examples. Just because there’s extra steps involved doesn’t make it not pay to win.
Alternative solution: be good enough to get AOTC yourself. Even if I were to quit my guild I would never have a problem earning AOTC every single season because I’m a good enough player that I can reliably do that. If a casual player wants to pay to complete content that they’re not ready for then I guess they can feel free to do that. But I’ll admit the practice makes no sense to me. If they want to become a better raider it would be a better idea to start at LFR/Normal and develop their skills until they can enter those groups without assistance. The reality is that the most efficient path to good gear is to be a good enough player that you can get it yourself.
Legendaries I’ll grant you but I think they’re an outlier. Most people don’t think that WoW is P2W exclusively due to leggos and thus when they’re gone in 10.0 won’t change their opinion.
You’re definition of tedious and mine are clearly very different. I’ve never felt incentivized to pay to skip the gearing process in WoW. You mention the ilvl requirements for non pre-made groups. The highest ilvl gate in the game for matchmade content is 195 for SoD LFR. You can get 213 gear from world quests. If you’re paying for gear in order to get into matchmade content you’re getting scammed my dude.
I have a hard time calling WoW a P2W game because there’s no advantage that gold can buy you that you can’t also get just by being a better player. In typical P2W scenarios, you have something like buying the best weapons or the best mount or whatever. No amount of player skill will make your tank do more damage in World of Tanks but player skill WILL get you the exact same gear you’re buying. Using money to make up for a deficiency in player ability doesn’t sound like P2W to me.
In explicitly designed P2W games you’re still not improving your own personal skills at the game by swiping a credit card. By your own definition then, those games are not actually pay to win.
“git gud” is not a justification or argument against the way the game is currently designed as non-pay to win. Pay to win is an option in WoW, no matter how many mental hoops you jump through to try to say otherwise.
That’s not what I said. What I said is that P2W games grant you an advantage that you could not overcome if you were a better player. No amount of skill at a gacha game will supply me with a full set of 5 star characters and weapons without spending money. No amount of skill in World of Tanks will make me do as much damage as the best premium tank.
Getting good isn’t a requirement in any game, but if being good allows you to bypass the “P2W” aspect of the game then I don’t consider it to be P2W. It’s not like I’m in competition with people who pay for boosts. My boss kills won’t drop less loot just because they paid for theirs.
