P2W traditionally means you can get an advantage that can only be gained by spending real money directly.
WoW does not offer anything up for cash only(outside of battle pets, although you can do gold to token to bnet balance technically).
Everything you can “P2W” can also be gained by simply playing the game.
People have been using real money to buy things in WoW since Vanilla, from gold to gear, but it still isn’t P2W.
You can pay to have a shot at gear, usually weeks/months after others have already got things on farm, so you aren’t even getting early access to stuff.
It’s more like a Pay2pretendyouhavefriendsoracompetentguild than P2W.
If they start selling things that increase player power directly that are only on the shop, then we can cry out P2W, until then it’s just paying to be lazy.
That’s Pay to Bling. Pay to win would be getting AP boosts for artifacts as well as weapons and armor with stats from the store or gambling boxes sold by the store.
Literally the first two sentences from Wikipedia’s entry on Pay to Win.
“In some games, players who are willing to pay for special items (tokens) or downloadable content may be able to gain an advantage(gold) over those playing for free who might otherwise need to spend time progressing in order to unlock said items.
In general a game is considered pay-to-win when a player can gain any gameplay advantage over his non-paying peers, which is shown in games such as FIFA.”
Urban dictionary’s entry.
” Games that let you buy better gear or allow you to make better items then everyone else at a faster rate (no need to find a group or gear up, just go get carried and no need to farm the gold for that carry either) and then makes the game largely unbalanced even for people who have skill in the game without paying."
The first response from Google when you search for “pay to win definition”.
“Pay to win - a situation where the player can buy in-game content or in-game changes, with real money, that give the player a gameplay advantage or advance the player gameplaywise.”
No definition of P2W necessitates that the items sold must be gear solely obtained from a cash shop that cannot be earned in game for it to be considered p2w. In fact they all say the opposite.
Your personal opinion is the outlier, not mine.
Buying tokens to buy gold so you can purchase runs for better gear is a form of pay to win.
Im wow a person can also get a mythic level item for doing 4 m0 dungeons and getting lucky. Same amount of luck. Someone could by a mythic run and get 0 loot. They didn’t buy the loot they bought a run. No one can buy specific loot
You pay people to help your run a dungeon, and if you get loot you are just lucky. It is NO different than running a group otherwise, except you paid the people to do a good job. You are just shift definitions to serve your foolish narrative. Much like you didn’t understand capitalism is economy not political…
@Disglain A lot of people arguing in bad faith in this thread, thank you for making consistently reasonable arguments and backing them up with sources.
WoW is P2W with real world money immediately translating to bypassing significant time and effort. It’s true of leveling and gearing up.
you talk about changing definitions but it’s not you paying people for doing a good job right? no it’s paying people for the privileged of sitting back and doing nothing while they carry dead weight to gear. If it were simply getting paid for doing a good job the carry team would still invite you to the group even if you weren’t paying them. Hypocritical to say the least and trying to equate the wow economy to actual capitalism doesn’t work because it’s not free market there is a single monopoly on wow tokens anyone who gets caught dipping into a black market is punished or simply exiled but if you want to continue to use that comparison because it feels comfortable to you sure. You can either have wow tokens, or gold carries and not be considered PTW but when you combine the two it’s silly to argue it’s not.
The only thing one must ask themselves to see if wow is pay to win.
Is it easier and faster to obtain gear by spending actual money on wow ?
The answer is blatenly obvious yes. It is easier and faster to obtain high end gear by giving USD to blizzard who will then give you gold so you can find someone else to buy your random chances from. It’s an obfuscated convoluted loot box lotto system that we see in so many other games the only difference is you are going through the extra step of finding a group to get you the chances you would otherwise not be privy to.
Yeah if the only way to get gold was to buy tokens, you could have an argument about monopoly, but that isn’t the case. Some people with disposable incomes can bypass the grind, but then they use the gold for whatever they want. Free market. You just hate that others are using their disposable income to pay others that want it for something. These people affect you in no way but you still want to complain because you feel your way and your definitions are the only way to be right. Its laughable and hypocritical. You know an MMORPG that was pay to win? Shin Megami Tensei Imagine. Guess where its at? Dead. What could you do in that game with money? Buy gear to immediately get stronger and be better. What in WoW can do that? Even if you argue that a token does that, it doesn’t. It just bypasses leveling to get to the core gameplay: End game. Can I go to blizz and buy a shield that won’t drop for me? Can i go to blizz and pay to have my HoA be max level to bypass the grind? Or what about the upcoming cape? Can I buy a skip of all the grinding to get more powerful by paying blizz to increase it? No.
Its funny how you still have yet to face the fact carried runs existed before tokens. They have been around since WotLK based just on what I have seen. Others have told you it was vanilla. What did those people pay blizz for those runs?
If the fact carried runs never changed, but you are complaining that tokens caused them to make WoW P2W, there is key factor missing…
What happened before? Tokens made it available to people to get more gold and have more flexibility to do anything they want, and thats it.
Your argument is a joke, and you have had just as many people proving that its wrong, purely because its existed in the same iteration before people gave blizz money. Were people that paid Chinese gold farmers making WoW P2W? Nope. Blizz just gave people a SAFE alternative to get gold, and gave people a chance to make WoW free for them if they wanted to do grinding and play the AH well. All you are saying is your opinion should dictate what others spend their gold and money on. You want a game free of tokens? Go play classic. Guess what though, You will see people selling runs there too. Oh wait tokens aren’t for sale on classic…hmm…argument seems kind of invalidated there.
Naturally farming gold is not the same as buying a wow token. Conflating the two is narrow viewed. They worked to get that gold and they can spend how they want that’s not the issue being addressed here as much as blizzards attitude toward carries for cash as long as that cash goes to blizzard. There are plenty of games, rift, swtor, ESO that have the exact same type of system that wow without the extra steps and yes they are just as much PTW just because you can get the items by doing the time doesn’t mean it’s not because you get an unfair advantage in the amount of time it takes to get said rewards over those who don’t have the extra out of game currency to spare. If this was an in game currency only issue it wouldn’t matter, but the problem is that wow has made it so that you can bypass any work and get straight to best quality gear by giving blizzard cash.
Carried runs changed because where blizzard was demoting and banning players for buying carries with cash, they are now collecting that cash instead.
3.It’s not about a safe alternative either before players were rightfully banned for buying runs with cash, now it’s promoted because the money goes straight to activision.
Blizzard is making money from players who throw money at their screens in order to buy all most anything in the game. While it’s not pay to win it’s just as bad because it devalues the time and effort of others.
“But that’s not paying to win because you didn’t give your money directly to Blizz!”
Pfft. You really have to follow through with this thinking. P2W describes something that happens to games that generally is thought of as cruddy.
Would every horrible cruddy game you admit is P2W be one iota less cruddy if the company just hid what it was doing and disguised its cash shop as real players and carries?
Does it change anything about what’s happening to the game if it turns out Blizz is using fake parties with entirely generated gear to cash in on these carries themselves?
No.
When you start insisting on novel definitions of terms that divorce those terms from the reasons they came into use, you’re just gaming the argument. If you win, everybody loses, because the meanings that language exists to convey have been lost.
Because you don’t “win” anything and nothing is sold in a store that anyone can “win” with. Everything is obtainable in game through regular gameplay and no one is guaranteed anything due to RNG. You can pay for your runs all you want, but no one is guaranteed BiS by paying for a run and literally anyone else can get the same stuff without paying.
You want to argue “pay to skip” or, more accurately, “pay to speed through,” then maybe. But this isn’t a pay to win game in the slightest.
If you think of your journey through wow as a graph, at any point in time X, the player who spent money will have greater power than the person who didn’t.
That’s not pay to win. That’s simply pay to skip forward. Anyone can acquire any of that stuff in game without paying anything extra. There is no gear in the store. There is nothing that people pay for that isn’t available in game for free.
Those here who think that WoW is somehow pay to win have never actually played a pay to win game.