Blizzard made the WoW token to try to offset the loss in subscribers. It’s been pretty effective as far as I can tell. Anyone that’s actually interested in buying lots of gold shouldn’t be buying tokens.
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You “proved” absolutely nothing. You stated your opinion and declared it to be fact. You’re the one who is reaching.
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To me, no, it is not. But I will tell you what I myself class as Pay To Win.
If I could use my credit card and buy the best gear off of the shop.
Or buy the mats to make said gear. While not needing to do ANYTHING
in game to earn it. Not even have someone run me through content.
That is what is P2W for me.
If you have to still do something in game to earn said gear. I do not
class it as pay to win. Simply due to the fact that the person could take
your gold and not help you. You are gambling with your gold and are
not guaranteed to get your gear or whatever you were after.
Someone is atop the economic pyramid of WoW. You really think that person grinded their way there, do you really think they don’t use their economic advantage to win in the areas they normally could not, do you really think that person is the only one doing it???
That’s an absolutely delusional take on the matter.
Overtime they abandoned the game because the token effectively made it worthless to do what they were doing at a reasonable return.
Here some context I wrote earlier.
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ILVL is secondary to parses and IO history. You can’t buy those things. Don’t give people the impression that if they buy achievements that they’ll be able to play with competitive players. You’re making it worse.
No, they realize f2p puts mechanics in to ,yes, buy at the store.
“Freeloaders” will not be top 10% of the game. Its how F2P works. Don’t need to be top 10% the game runs fine.
I will be happy to take my gunslinger and such to 50. and keep goals modest after that. Same as I do on say diablo 3. I will not be all seasonal done. I want basic set armour off the 4 tabs.
Higher stuff…nah. You must run gr at 150 one tied behind back standing upside side blindfolded at torment 500. Hyperbole? yes. A full season ain’t easy. BUt items needing max torment and almost max gr level I will not do lol.
this is my definition of casual. Lower goals but game enjoyed. Win win. How I will play lost ark too. for free after my founders bene’s run out.
game is not too bad, devs should get paid. so…I foundered it so I can say I helped the devs feed their family at least a few nights this month. now am i giving them $500? aww hell no lol.
I haven’t turned on most of those founder features even, yet.
want a more fair “ladder” buy an arpg that does that. Like diablo series. buy once, dominate as much as you want not 1 penny, yen, peso, won, etc spent after game bought. Noting step one is…buy the game.
those liking more scifi I did inquisitor seasonal as well. not a bad arpg and I like my wh40K universe so fun times there too.
in that definition then every MMO is a P2W games.
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By that definition, League of Legends is P2W. Some skins in that game make your abilities harder to see.
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Sure don’t, and I also get to opine that the earth is flat if I want to, but anyone with half a brain is going to look at me funny. That’s why I’m writing you off as someone with no good understanding of the topic as your arguments fundamentally misunderstand what a P2W system is designed to do when you say “It’s not P2W because you can invest time instead of money” or “Oh well it’s not a true victory to do that”
I especially get to tell you off if all you’re going to do is just respond to people with “No” instead of actually responding. It’s true that there is no solidified definition of P2W, but people do have a very broad established understanding of it and argue within those confines. Your arguments ignore even that broadly accepted understanding.
And I’m agreeing with that. Honestly I don’t think there’s a lot of people that buy carries for normal gear so they can apply to heroic. We’re going down a rabbit hole with a question someone posed and I gave a theoretical answer to it.
Again, it’s really not about how you or I feel about if that person is winning or not. Ultimately it boils down to does putting money into the game mean you can complete tasks faster because of it? To that extent let’s ignore carries for a second. If you wiki P2W the most basic way they describe it is if someone can put money into the game to get an in-game advantage that system is generally seen as P2W. So having more gold is an in-game advantage because you can spend less time farming cause you’ll buy your mats, you can buy expensive vendor mounts without having to spend time playing the AH or raw gold farming, buy BoEs you want, etc. Just at that very basic level someone buying tokens to fuel their raid consumables, a few BoEs, enchants, etc is paying to not play the game and be just as effective as someone who plays daily to maintain that all. Would that be a massive problem if that’s all WoW tokens did? IMO, not exactly earth shattering, but it’s still a system that promotes the P2W concept.
This means even mundane topics like a server transfer could be classified as P2W because, well, someone xferring off their dead server for a thriving one is advantaged over someone who chooses to start over. Of course most would agree that this level of P2W is extraordinarily trivial and not an issue in WoW. However, there is game I saw recently that relaunches servers several times a year and you can pay money to transfer over your characters versus starting from scratch. They’ve built a (garbage) game where paying money to keep your character alive is extremely advantageous over others because there’s really no good way to keep up with the people who choose to do this over people who play for free.
The trick of this situation is as the OP described it. Games being P2W isn’t a binary question, and maybe this is where people get tripped up on trying to say WoW is P2W or not because I think all these systems within WoW can be described as P2W, whereas you have to evaluate the impact all of these systems make on the way the game is played. The token is a massive outlier out of any paid service option we have because it can massively change the way you approach the game.
Removing the token cancels out pretty much all P2W design the game currently has in it because then there’s no legal way to buy gold which means no way to buy progression. You can’t call a game P2W because people will cheat, nor can you put that on Blizzard. You might as well argue games are hack to win because if you hack you’ll win.
My guy, that’s how a lot of P2W games cash in on profit. The blatant P2W/F2P games that thrive off microtransactions LOVE giving players a grindy, drawn out system filled with road blocks while offering a paid solution to avoid it. That’s what we call hitting a paywall.
As an aside to WoW I used to play some silly FB game that let you pick an archer, knight, or wizard as a character, I mostly did solo play, but I tried their PvP system once or twice and guess what? I got wrecked. AFAIR none of the loot was ever exclusively locked behind the shop, but the game was such a grind that trying to keep up with paying players was impossible.
So just like I predicted, some people are trying to enforce their definition on others and we’re just going around in circles. If you think pay for convenience is the same as p2w, fine, I really don’t care. However, you aren’t convincing enough for me to agree. That’s why this topic is ultimately pointless. Everyone has their own ideas of what it is and no one is changing anyone’s mind on the subject.
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You’re getting crazy with it now. The ability to actually play the game on a server that isn’t dead isn’t P2W. There’s more competition on a larger server, so the odds of you landing a spot on a premium guild are lower.
Why does the legality of it matter? If the tokens were to be gone, would the people buying gold from gold famers circumvent the P2W model that you say exists? Paid carries have existed since day one. It’s been 20 years and now people are saying this is an issue. At least back then you could argue that everyone could do the one button rotation that existed in the base game.
And there’s the difference. In those games you can permanently skip the grind. If you buy a mythic raid carry, you are not prepared to just pick up mythic raiding. You need to go back and do the grind. You need to do progression in heroic and on each mythic boss. There’s no way around that.
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I encourage you to compare this definition to how PvP gearing works right now. Clearest definition of pay to win you’ll ever see. It’s why Blizzard has the lowest Maus ever but some of the highest profits. P2w is profitable.
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I’m not pretending they’re anywhere remotely the same as money into gold which let’s you buy pretty much anything you’d ever want in the game, but I’m just pointing out it’s an in-game advantage compared to someone who doesn’t, but I gave you an example of a game that’s designed where server transferring does amount to P2W because the game is being managed in a way that makes paying for transfers matter.
If you’re going to ignore legality/fairness in game design then all games are either hack to win or cheat to win, but also P2W is a game design concept that the developers made themselves. You seem to be taking the term P2W very literally, just like some people try to argue “Oh well what truly is winning”
It’s not a phrase that is meant to be literally parsed down, it’s a term use to broadly describe any system that revolves around money in, in-game advantage out.
Um, no. It depends on the game, and the systems, but usually they’re temporary. Like buying unlimited lives in candy crush…for the next hour. Or triple XP for the next two days.
It really depends on the game though because sometimes it’s as straightforward as having the grind repeat itself every few months. The game offers a currency to buy the lootboxes for a chance at the shiny gear, and you can either farm them slowly to buy them occasionally or buy the currency from the shop to buy your boxes. A while later a new season begins and there’s new gear to be had and the cycle repeats.
In that respect
No, you just wait for the new raid tier to buy carries again.
Then by your own admission you’re not really winning anything. You’ll always have to pay because you never learned how to do it. You’ve tagged the boss and died in the corner every 7 to 8 months. Congrats?
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I started this conversation off by pointing out that the way you specifically don’t want to think about these systems is your perception of whether that person is “winning” or not by participating in the system. When I say they are waiting for the next tier to buy more carries they are likely not literally sitting there with their thumb up their butt, they went off to do other things in the game they wanted because now they don’t care about the raid.
They bought the mythic carry for the mount and achievements because they’re achievement hunters so now they went back to achievement hunting. They bought tokens so they could buy the long boi because it was expensive and they don’t want to waste time farming gold when they instead could be farming mounts or pets on the 50 alts they run. They bought carries so they could get geared so they could stomp in random BGs. Etc etc.
Your perception of what they are getting out of inserting their money into the game to get progress out that matters to them is unequivocally irrelevant for whether or not that system is P2W. You want to argue that this system is harmless to the game and doesn’t impact you or me or anyone else? That’s another topic entirely, but it doesn’t change what the system actually is.
Apparently that is hard to drive home for some people.
Now that’s interesting. If they were to spend the 8 months in between tiers just farming gold for carries in the future…it stops being P2W? So it’s the source of the gold that matters?
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Doesn’t “Pay for Convenience” sound better?
I mean where else in the free world can can we buy four other humans undivided time for under half of a Token ($10), for thirty minutes?
If what the person is paying for can also be earned in game, through normal in game means, even if it takes longer, I don’t consider it truly p2w.
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WoW is pay to get ahead faster and to skip playing content and with the WoW Token that’s being heavy encouraged by Blizzard.