Because people paying for gear aren’t suddenly good at the game. When they sign up for pugs, I’m going to notice that they have one boss clear and gray parses. They’re not getting invited. If they manage to sneak in…they die to all the mechanics or finish at the bottom of the meter. That’s going to be a kick in pugs.
If you pay for boosts, you’re getting stuff that you don’t know how to use. The guy with less gear than you is still better in every measurable way.
Again you’re misrepresenting a situation as if Blizzard took that decision unprompted in a vacuum.
WoW was plagued by gold selling farms in which scammers were rampant. Although Blizz never endorsed such a practice and actively advised/took measures AGAINST it, a number of people would still engage in it.
They had no practical way, that weren’t literal espionage of their player-base, to fight it.
Going after the gold farms and scammers would be an endless endeavor that would amount to close to nothing as any competent GoldFarmer and scammer could hide their trace IRL.
So they were left with a bad choice to make, either keep status quo OR sell the gold yourself.
Selling the gold themselves would mean taking a STEP toward pay to “whatever word you want to use cause apparently definition don’t matter” (P2W) but it would ensure a secure and scam free transaction for their player base. This completely gutted the goldfarmer as the players now had an option to buy gold without the inherent risk of compromising their account with 3rd party.
Now Blizzard did try to implement it as legitimately as possible when dealing with such a feature by making the value player driven. So that when you buy a token you don’t directly buy gold but instead game time that you can sell.
And of course Blizzard being a for profit company led by financial goals they took a cut out it. Obviously they would have never had the go from the board if they didn’t make any money out of it.
You are ignorant of the situation and you just demonstrated it.
I take back the malicious intent, clearly you are unaware of the basic historic of how the tokens came to be and are making assumptions out of nothing substantiated.
As I said
And you just did, big time.
Unlimited gold? False, it’s limited in time.
Unlimited power really? That’s just a bad troll at this point…
So what? You can’t buy skill, though you can pay people to play for you, which you can do with gold that you buy with tokens. This one is a bit of a stretch, because realistically you’d probably just give them real money anyways, but I think you get my point.
Again, so what? You’re talking about two different things. You’re talking about the ramifications of buying boosts and runs, and not the initial purchase, which can be done and has been done for a very long time.
Wonderful point, kinda… but that doesn’t mean their actions and their relationship with Blizzard isn’t pay-to-win.
You’re being overly dramatic. Besides, yes it is true that the token supposedly came about in an attempt to curb gold selling, but it didn’t stop after it game out. Also, the method to which gold was farmed was account stealing and botting, and botting got WAY worse after the token came out because it gave people a means to to purchase and boost bots which would then recoup their costs many times over.
Again, what have you won? They practically throw gear at you now. That’s why parses and IO history have become so valuable when assessing skill, for lack of a better word lol. The days of people inspecting you in front of the auction house are gone.
In my opinion this argument starts and ends here; if WoW were pay to win, then the boosts you buy would enable you to complete M+ dungeons, win PvP matches and kill mythic bosses in a raid team. Boosts do not do that; you still have to have the gameplay still to do these things.
That doesn’t matter.
We’re talking about some random schmo buying a run. Why they did it doesn’t matter, it’s that they have the ability to do so.
And not just buying a run, but using real world money to do basically what ever you want in game. Gold makes everything easier, gives you access to just about everything. You buy gold with money, hence why it’s pay to win.
It doesn’t matter that you can see that they aren’t a good player after the fact, in fact it should upset you more, because the thing you’re working for, they just purchased and got for almost no effort at all.
It’s not a as simple as a switch my dude. Yeah of course it didn’t stop right away.
You think the pushers in Canada just disappeared when they made pot legal?
Yeah, you know why?
Because people were not engaging as much with the goldfarmer/scammer. So in turns the scammer couldn’t steal accounts as much as they could before.
Being cut from their primary/cheapest source of gold, they turned to automated character to farm materials/broken infinite re spawn mobs in bulk. All of this in an attempt to stay competitive with the token.
An other effect of that was that the gold farmers could no longer AFFORD to hack their clientele because it would mean loosing it altogether as the alternative token was pretty enticing.
After a while Blizz seemingly got better at tracking bot/fixing broken loop and together with inflating token value the incentive for gold farmer just slowly went down and down.
Blizz made the right call and even thought it sucks that we have that now, it doesn’t make the game a full blown unabashed scummy P2W.
Blizz was never gonna find a fix to a problem that is human in nature in the first place.
We got the least terrible of 2 bad situation.
For the 3rd time, what are you winning? By the time you can reasonably afford raid carries and KSM carries, good players would have had those things for weeks, if not months.
Those are your words not mine. I don’t think it’s a full blown unabashed scummy P2W, I do think it’s P2W and that the token is incredibly bad for the health of the game and that it highly incentivizes botting. I also think that the P2W elements of the game become much worse with the token in place, and wouldn’t exist to the same extent otherwise.
The token made gold buying mainstream, giving any random person access to this “feature”, before hand you had to go searching around and I highly doubt it was very common.
They can’t answer that because the term P2W as nothing to do with the words that composes it anymore.
It apparently became a thing of it own making, with an evolving definition which ironically cannot be changed from the current one they are giving it now.
So what? That’s your mind set. That’s not little Timmy’s mindset, who wouldn’t be able to get KSM unless they swipe moms credit card for an easy 260k gold. Again, gold solves all of Timmy’s problems, if it’s being left out or buying a token with real money, what’s he going to do?
I don’t want to sound rude, but I don’t think either of you are capable of having this conversation. You clearly aren’t smart enough, and you clearly don’t know anything about the topic. The examples and questions you two bring up are so random and out of place, we might as well be talking about football for all it matters.
So, make a good post because I’m getting tired.
That still doesn’t answer my question. Timmy won’t ever be able to get KSM without being carried. Even after he’s gotten the achievement, he’s never going to be able to do a 15…unless he’s carried. If anything the people carrying him tier after tier are the ones winning lol. We never have to pay for subs or expansions because of him.
You wasted your last post on this?
That’s my entire point. Timmy doesn’t see it your way. He sees it as winning, he sees that achievement pop up in his achievement tab and thinks he did it, or he doesn’t care, either way he just got it for real world money… pay-to-win.
To be clear, the conversation we’re having right now is me trying to explain the basics of pay-to-win to you guys… that’s how little this conversation has progressed, and how little you two know about this topic.
The basics of P2W is that you’re paying for an advantage that can’t be gotten any other way. Mobile games generally work on that model.
Certain aspects of pet battling could be P2W based on what I’ve heard from others, but you must be able to see the difference in buying a battle pet and doing a raid that anyone can do?
I’d argue the game would be in an even worst position have they left the situation, which prompted it, to run amok.
Which makes you a unwitting advocate for a return to a worse state of the game than it is now.
Don’t get me wrong, we would all love to have the naive and fresh experience that the earlier iteration of the game gave. But we can’t turn back time on people seeing opportunities to make a quick $ with WoW. As soon as they would remove the token we would see the goldfarmers creep back in.
You insist on WoW being P2W because of the token (I think it doesn’t clear enough checks to qualify but whatever), then what is your suggestion to prevent the return of the problem it’s keeping in check if we were to remove it?
let’s change pay to win to pay to get 2nd place. People seem to have no idea what pay to win is. Go play a korean mmo and tell me what pay to win is again
The craziest part about all this is that I’m sure lots of guilds will carry new players and alts through this stuff for free. What would that be classified as?
Does a WoW token save you time than having to obtain the gold yourself in game = P2W. So much copium in this thread. Time is the most important commodity of them all.