It’s not really p2w, you don’t get any bonuses from paying that you cannot normally get in the game.
Paying to get gear is in no way “winning” the game.
Take a look at black desert. That is p2w at its peak.
yep
WoW is pay to win if u really want it to.
Have boatloads of money , translate it to gold ingame and buy all the highest BoE items from AH and also get carried to Mythic raids/M+.
Having money and willing to spend it will enable a person to get ahead much faster than others.
That is definitely p2w.
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That isn’t how P2W works in P2W games.
Do u have a group of friends who can do M+20 and Mythic Azshara ?
I dont.
So if i really want to do those high mythic+ and get AotC achieve now and get whatever mythic items that drop from raid, i can pay a group of raiders to carry me to victory.
That is power of money and p2w basically.
If u still cant see it, u either dont want to see it, have a strange sense of p2w definition or just simply delusional.
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What form of power over players that don’t pay cash does getting an achievement get you? Or even gear, considering you will never get into the content even with it, with carries being so easy to spot.
P2W explicitly involves getting power over others that don’t pay. Like damage increases that aren’t available without cash. Anything you can get with WoW money can be gotten in-game for free if you don’t suck. Even stuff on the store can be bough with gold.
But that is not what was said.
For a refresher, this is what was said.
The person in question said they can use what they bought to get into content permanently.
You are not getting into m+20 runs and clearing Mythic Azshara PERMANENTLY because you bought your gear and paid for a clear.
The OP is obviously delusional and doesn’t understand what P2W means. If a dum dum wants to pay people for carries for Heroic and M+ that is easy mode then so be please waste your money. Your gear will not magically make your dps any good.
You can easily tell who paid for their gear and who didnt. I have ran many tens with healers and dps who dont know how to play but have 445 ilvl.
If you also bought AOTC or spent way too much money for CE and join a pug you will be kicked because you will be pulling 20k dps and people will know you paid for your titles and gear.
Also what are you really “winning” there is not winning in this game. There are always new expansions and new raids to do. So you P2W to get gear and title, well now you have to do it again with the next expansion and new tier.
So many delusional people in this thread who still dont think that WoW can be construed as p2w.
No amount of explanation will work i guess.
Im out.
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And so many people lacking basic reading comprehension skills.
You can buy all the books you want, that doesn’t make you a skilled reader. Reading isn’t P2W because you paid for the gear to read.
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If a player has no clue about even the pruned talent trees we have now…430 BOE will not help them.
15th anniversary event showed this well. Even famed stripped out raids with some people in nice gear separated the good players from the terrible ones. real fast…
And so no one’s feelings hurt…I was one of the terrible one’s lol. that one raid opening up with thedance dance revolution electric slide left and right all the time…yeah I failed horribly at this. Many did. I felt bad for the pro’s who had to deal with us really.
What with changes to stat weights, 110 twinks are so last year. 111 is where it’s at now.
It isn’t a RNG Lockbox, so doesn’t come under the label of “gambling” that people are up in arms about. You are BUYING the gold, so you are getting exactly what you pay for.
What you DO with the gold, such as paying a guild to give you a carry, is your business.
I don’t feel it comes under “pay to win”, since it isn’t really you playing (rather being carried/coddled.) If someone is paying to get all of their mythic/whatever gear, it is more like “pay to lose” 
What are they paying for it FOR?
It is more like what other people said, that you’d be doing the Mythic stuff YOURSELF and paying for ways to be better at it.
I feel like I’m winning on my own, when I wait until the next expansion to finally do the four falcosaur mounts. Boy, I’m finding it way more fun doing it solo (the raids required and such.)
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Of course it’s pay to win. The blizzdrones fly into a rage whenever it’s pointed out and use extremely questionable arguments to try and prove it’s not. Some of the more dishonest and fallacious arguments they use:
“you could always buy gold, therefore it’s not p2w”
“you aren’t guaranteed loot if you pay for an M+ or raid carry, therefore it’s not p2w.”
“i spent all my token gold on pets and mounts, therefore it’s not p2w”
“If you are a bad player then buying gear won’t matter, therefore it’s p2w.”
Learn to identify and spot shill tactics like these. This forum is full of them.
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Do me a favor and check out an MMO with actual P2W, preferably one with PvP, and tell us about the experience.
You know what’s cool? Having several equipment slots that are exclusively for cosmetics you can only get from the cash shop. You know what’s better? When those cosmetics have heaps of stats on them. I’m sure you’ll have a great time getting into a match, finding a guy with a giant fish on his back, and seeing that he has 80% more health than you despite being the same class and 3 levels below you.
WoW’s P2W and actual P2W are miles-no, worlds apart.
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^ Exactly this…
A true Pay 2 Win game model are games where you literally outright can buy gear or weapons, and generally these items that you pay for are far more superior than any item you can acquire in-game or can acquire immediately without any grinding, effort, etc.
So paying gold for a guild to carry you through content isn’t pay to win at all, it’s just a in-game transaction no different than trading or purchasing something off the auction house, as you are trading gold which you or another player put in effort to acquire. <— You are ignoring this blatant fact, as when you buy a token with real money, the gold you get for it isn’t generated out of thin air, but rather another player buys your wow token with their gold (gold which they put in the time/effort to acquire), and that gold/time/effort is exchanged for the guild’s time/effort to carry you through the content…
Pay-To-Win on the other hand, there is ZERO effort and ZERO time requirement in any of those steps mentioned above, you straight up eliminate all the middle steps and simply exchange real money for the end result.
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Hey I like my pirate! 
…$139.99. But it was on sale! 
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I found one item. Dottie…lol (thread needs a tension breaker)
I have been having good luck with her ability that can have pet attacks miss. On a good night I can push 2 levels higher than her and not even break into a backup pet because she was gonna die.
I break out the backup at the end to ofc get the added xp for difficulty. But dottie was still pretty healthy.
People can and do pay for runs, raids, others to farm stuff for them.
However is that required to progress or ‘win’ in this game? Of course not. Actually you can do any content for free and it’s not behind a paywall.
Many popular F2P games aren’t even directly P2W anymore but rather P2Progress faster. Meaning that using $ will get some long term farming goals done for a player in 3 months rather than 9 months.
thats pay to skip. pay to win is getting items stronger than what can be found in game at the cost of real money. wether it be items directly stronger, or enchancments to weapons/armor that make them stronger.