People that buy runs don’t do it just once. They do it over and over to get geared, or pay extra for all the loot with armor stacking in mythic + or heroic runs.
You can buy gold with real money and use it to get carries and anything else you need. I dont care what anyone says, this game is pay to win.
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People have been selling carries for gold for almost 14 years in this game. It isn’t anything that just started happening with tokens.
And no it isn’t safe to say many are purchased with tokens.
I see it as pay-to-win in that circumstance, yes.
People are claiming that OP doesn’t know the definition of “pay-to-win”, but by applying the concrete definition of “paying” and the subjective definition of “winning”, it makes sense.
People are claiming that “as long as you can get it through normal means in-game, it’s not winning”.
So, if this is the case, would you be fine with someone paying a certain amount of money for full “best-in-slots” since it’s all “attainable in-game”?
And maybe someone being decked out in a 445+ ilvl is their version of “winning”, so it makes sense.
That’s my argument and I’m sticking to it. My answer is, yes it’s “pay-to-win”.
If anyone wants to reply to this with an argument, please make sure to make sense and not cherry-pick. A lot of people like to do that, especially when they’re defending Blizzard. I wouldn’t call them shills, but, yeah…pretty ridiculous.
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The difference is blizzard wasn’t making decisions to promote the sale of carries they were actively taking measures against it. When blizzard has something to gain from players buying runs they make development decisions accordingly. Even if the majority of players are buying the runs legitimately without tokens (which they are not) but lets go ahead for arguments sake and say that they are, when you promote this type of behavior in game and give it the go ahead as the game’s developer it makes a significantly larger impact on the amount of players who will feel encouraged to do so. This decision is why you can see 440+ players with extremely high IO’s perform so terribly in mythic plus or mythic raiding. It doesn’t help the player base because gear use to say whether or not you were good at the game to some extent it was your aotc it was your CE achievment link. You didn’t get to a certain point in the game if you didn’t have the skill to carry your own weight. Were there exceptions who broke the rules? absolutely. Did they carry a negative social stigma that no longer exists or at least is near non existent now that blizzard has put their stamp of approval on it? Yes. Absolutely.
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Pay 2 win is when you can buy gear, abilities, power ups, etc directly from the developer using IRL money. When someone buys a M+ or Raid run they are buying it from a third party, NOT Blizzard, so it is not P2W even if they buy a token to pay for it.
I always feel like such a dingus when people say this because I’ve always been the poorest little murder hobo I know.
In fact BFA is the first expansion my gold stores actually went DOWN instead of up. I have no clue how I managed it.
- paid runs have always been a thing. As has chinese gold farmers. All blizz has done is make a way to get gold without spending a full time jobs worth of work to get gold. We are not paying blizz for gear. So that already is not pay to win.
- They do not JUST add the cool mounts and pets to shop. There are many cool ones in game to get. Honestly? I rarely use my shop mounts. Few are thematic for my chars. It goes to personal taste. Nothing wrong with blizz putting cosmetics that do not impact gameplay AT ALL in shop either.
tl;dr OP, you must not ever play real pay to win games if you think WoW is that.
I knew someone who used to be very familiar with gold farming websites and the way they functioned.
i can tell you it is more expensive to purchase gold now then ever before and that tends to happen when you monopolize a market as blizzard has with wow tokens. There used to be various competitors always looking to undercut and get the business of would be buyers now it’s just basically just blizzard and the market has been messed up because why risk a ban hammer or getting ripped off / having your money stolen when you can get it directly from the game developers. Whoever is selling the run can say well we want 400k for a mythic EP right now that’s 40 bucks at other times 400k could be a lot more. In anything WOD or further back 100k gold was worth no where near forty dollars.
So your argument that it was harder or more expensive back then to buy this stuff is just painfully wrong and misinformed. You can also try to wiggle around the fact you’re not paying blizzard you’re paying the runners but that’s just semantics and nobody takes it seriously.
As to your point about the game shop mounts, they are notorious for putting all the money into making the store mounts look as good as they do and nothing in game looks half as nice as some of these store mounts do.
the few ones that do are rightfully locked behind achievements or are difficult to obtain like the nazjatar crab, the brutosaur or the mechagon wheel. I don’t think i’m against them having in store mounts i don’t like that the store mounts nearly always put in game mounts to shame.
Which would you prefer the terrified donkey? the golden mane? or the mystical arcane fox off the store that can fly?
Why don’t they just make every mount available for purchase in game then? Partly because they know the players would react extremely poorly if suddenly you could spend 20 bucks and buy ashes of alar and the other half is that most their mounts that have been coming out aren’t even worth the gold their sold for let alone actual cash. Have some nice mounts come out recently? yes absolutely i loved the frog mounts, i think certain reputation mounts are unique and reasonably priced but it’s impossible to argue against the fact blizzard has put more effort and emphasis on the micro-transaction store than the actual game a lot lately.
Also how is Kong and the Crew doing? Hope all is well.
nope. the cosmetics don’t improve skill or combat damage, the boosts don’t apply to everything (boosted characters are pretty low in ilvl, they’d still have to farm gear to be competitive in raids/dungeons and such and are no more “OP” at level than anyone else) and if you plan on getting some of the nicer things (mounts, heritage armor, etc) you still have to grind it in game. the game still requires A LOT of grinding and farming for most things, and was always pay to play/have nice things. it’s not pay to win, it’s pay to play as the game has always been.
The point of this post is that players can buy runs through raids and dungeons with gold now and it’s legit blizzard will not ban them for advertising or for purchasing runs. That is not how the game has always been.
Except you could literally always buy raid carries with gold. Hell, go over to classic right now and you will see people selling MC/Ony clear just fine.
with some of the drop rates, whether you run it 100 times or 10 times hardly matters. it’s still not really pay to win, since on most things the “paying” players have no more real probability of getting anything than anyone else. a 0.01 chance is still the same even out of 1000 runs as it is 100. for instance we have the headless horseman’s mount, which some people got maybe their first 3 or 4 maybe even first run, whereas most players have run it for 11+ years every day the event was up and never gotten the drop.
As we’ve addressed already in this thread, it’s not the same when the behavior is a ban-able offense as it is when the game developers actively promote it (which one could argue by selling wow tokens they do promote this behavior)
It is pay to win if you get even one chance at gear more than someone who doesn’t use gold for runs.
Really, I have never seen them take measures against selling carries. Do you have a source for that or any kind of prove they were doing so ?
Sure they are.
Really ? Why the heck would someone who has bought carries to that extent even bother with doing a mythic plus or mythic raid ?
You could never get banned for selling a raid carry for gold.
- If you think blizzard hasn’t taken measures against selling carries you need to look a little further into wow’s history than BFA. It should be an educational experience in your instance.
2.Why would someone buy carries to get gear then not try to use the gear they purchased on their own?
Then I think it sounds like a good time to cite your sources. As long as it was with in game gold, carries have been fine and people sold lich king kills or arena rating or whatever even back in stuff like Wrath.
but DO they have a chance? at 0.01 percent drop rate out of like 3 mil drops they don’t, that’s about anyone’s chances of winning a lottery in any tri state area. it’s only pay to win if you actually WIN something. otherwise you’re just paying to play, as loot crates in other games DO give you something if you open them, most people will just get outdated junk from running stuff.