Notice its all the people hiding on alts that say the game is pay to win. Cant let us see their 243 ilvl mains that cant suceed in the game
That’s why I keep saying this debate isn’t black and white and WoW does have some elements of P2W.
In order for the term to have any meaning, we need to define it in a way that really makes a distinction. I think that distinction should be based on whether you can directly buy an advantage big enough for high end content (or “winning”) to become easy, or at least for skill to become less relevant than your wallet.
If we define the term as including any game that has any element of P2W, then it loses all meaning for almost all online games, specially MMOs, have an element of it.
I mean it is though. In order for a game to be pay to win the item/advantage must be locked behind a wall where ONLY cash/real life currency is how you purchase said items.
Since that isnt what happens this game isnt anywhere close to being pay to win.
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I’ll humor you but you’ll only find that we’re philosophically not at the same place about what the game does.
If said gear is otherwise unobtainable by the party who didn’t pay money, yes it would be bad for the health of the game.
If said gear can be acquired over a short amount of time (its relative for an MMO but I’d place that as a week of casual play, it’s a completely personal thing though) then no it’s not bad
It merely mimics IRL interactions through an economic system in game.
Kinda like me working to get soccer shoes to get better traction on the field, doesn’t make me win the game de facto.
Then this didn’t start with the token because you were always able to buy gold.
Only thing Blizz did was put a system in place where they are a beneficiary of player transactions.
If that’s your gripes with it, you have a problem with human greed and no game designer is gonna tackle this.
If the token is not there, the gold farms will be. And they are far worse on the health of the game than any scrubs buying some gear pieces to get a week advantage over another scrub. The end-game content is where the crux of the game is and there, well, your dollars are meaningless.
We have nothing more to talk about if this is your honest opinion.
I disagree as I don’t agree with “P2W” games like Hearthstone.
I’m just asking what the “winnings” are, in this game, and what it takes to “beat” it. Just because some (not all) have fancy purples doesn’t mean they’ve “beaten the game”. That’s why it’s worded very specifically by this person as:
So, unless “winning the game” means “competitive advantages”, I’m inclined to agree with that the game (as a whole and not just a sublet of it) is “P2W”. But since nobody can agree on how to “win” in this game, we’ll never objectively reach a conclusion.
Humorously, you call my question “feebleminded” but failed to see that you actually made my argument for me! That is PRECISELY WHY it is an advantage. TYSM for making my argument for me better than I could, pal!
If you really wanted WoW to not be P2W you would have to remove these Mythic BoEs from the game, since as you yourself describe they constitute a potential advantage in early weeks for people with money to burn as having multiple BoE mythic pieces week one will, other things being equal, clearly let some players start pushing further into high keys, gladiator, and mythic raid than they would have otherwise been able to, sans spending. As you noted so well, that gear helps you “meet iLVL requirements for endgame content so that they can start getting real gear quicker.” Also the gear is still mythic item level, it just may not be absolute Best in Slot. As such, getting multiple mythic level pieces early on for cash would allow someone to obtain the true BIS gear and other mythic slots more quickly as a result of having filled several mythic level slots in the early weeks. Probably the worst this ever was was in Nyalotha tier; hopefully we never see that extent of purchasable advantage from BoEs ever again, but as you yourself helpfully argued for me, the source of potential advantage clearly still remains to this day. Thanks again!
I’d argue it’s pay for convenience but not P2W. You can get to your goal, be it whatever rank in PVP, mythic raiding, or keystone hero without having to buy anything. If you have gold/money for tokens then you can buy boosts to get those achieves, gear, mogs, titles, mounts, whatever. It’s not needed, it just makes it more convenient to get the rewards you want.
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I covered this earlier. You labor under a false theory of language where you mistakenly believe language must be literal to be meaningful. You do not literally have to win anything for the term “pay to win” to make sense. We all know what it means. It means you can pay to get advantages over others who don’t pay, or who pay less. No need for the semantic nonsense.
There isnt anyway to “win” at this game that you can buy.
Even if you were to buy a full mythic CE farm and get all BiS gear you wont because your performance will still be trash and will show on the logs.
Even with that gear you are going to be equal to best players in the game and not having an advantage.
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You are mislabeling things and passing them off as P2W because you lack a better word for it.
WoW has pay for cosmetics and pay to catch up. The latter being a good thing as to allow player to somewhat jump in at any moment and not be to left out too much, which is a real challenge in the design of any MMORPG.
Yeah the whole thing feels like a deflection.
Rather than discuss the negative impact it might have had on the game, we’re now all caught up in a semantics debate over what the term “pay to win” means which has never been a term with a 100% set in stone definition as it applies to gaming.
It doesn’t much matter what we call it, the idea of being able to buy gold for real money is bad for the overall health of the game. It has played a massive part in the boosting culture that became so rampant they had to step in and try to mitigate it.
I would argue the entire culture of “Just pay your way past the parts of the game you don’t like” has been overall bad for the health of the game, as it encourages Blizzard never to fix those parts and make them more fun to go through when they legitimately have problems.
Well it’s also fair to say that P2W isn’t a binary thing.
Diablo Immortal is clearly a MUCH worse case of P2W than buying gold is in WoW under pretty much any definition being applied here.
That said I think under at least what I noted not almost every online game is P2W because the problem stems specifically from the fact that you can buy gold for real money in a system created by Blizzard.
The key is that it’s not about buying player behaviour. It’s the fact that Blizzard is selling us the means to do that.
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Your advantage is compared to players who are otherwise equal in skill, effort, talent, determination. To take your example, if your performance is trash with a full set of purchased BIS gear, then the equally skilled and determined player who spent nothing will have even more trash performance. Why? You purchased a gear advantage over them with money. I don’t really see what’s hard to understand about this. No, WoW doesn’t have a “You beat the game!” screen, but so?
According to you, maybe.
Clearly we don’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this “debate”, now would we?
That’s the definition YOU want to push and as a way to deflect the question “what are you winning” question.
Correct. Like I’ve said, over and over, again:
Now, answer the question, “what does it mean to ‘win’ the game?”
There’s literally 20 people typing away ready to defend WoW as NOT a pay2win game…when it clearly is.
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What’s the “winnings”? What’s the jackpot prize?
I would argue it even encourages them to make the game less fun, so you are more likely to buy your way past grinds.
Buying gold is utterly toxic for the game, and all roads lead to this only getting worse. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were in Lost Ark territory in a few expansions with all the success Diablo Immortal has seen.
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I do not needed gold to get the KSM, only for personal consumables, me and a couple friends did them all in 3 weeks and get our mounts, now we thinking on getting gladiators, I mean if you pay for this is because you lack the skill to do it yourself.
Another point is that we also sell the carrys for 50k on keys 15, so that way we get gold, is just like gdkp nothing ilegal happen because we are not trading the runs for real money, and the gold we get is used to purchase more consumables, transmog and mounts.
But the moment the game becomes a real pay to win (pay real money to get premium and superior weapons and gear in general) that moment this game goes to hell.
I didnt pay for anything and I was able to manage everything I wanted to do pretty easily.
False. I have routinely out performed better geared players on other toons.
The only comparison is against the top players.
Either way youre just bad and trolling at this point
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