I don’t know if you’re doing it on purpose or not, but by trying to shove what might have been a legitimate complaint into a box it doesn’t fit into, you’ve just alienated people from your cause. Everybody hates P2W, so you try to shove this issue into the “P2W” bucket to garner instant support. Instead, you’ve found that words matter and definitions are important.
Intentional or not, it’s intellectual laziness. Instead if making and supporting your own points, you attempted to piggyback an already existent established opinion.
If you’d simply made a case against boosting or against the token, that would have been a more compelling approach.
Pay to skip still sucks and doesn’t belong in competitive games with a monthly sub.
It destroys the competitive integrity of the game. It reduces the number of people willing to do mid-level content, either because they felt disgusted by the cheating and quit or because they’re skipping right to 15s. The commoditization of cooperative play between players of different skill levels slows growth for legitimate players. The advertisements all over suck.
I think it’s a pretty even mix of both. There’s just an overall lack of critical thinking by Americans in general, and the NA-EN forums seems to be more dominated by Americans than Canadians.
It ends up just being a boosting game for buying and selling. It has become worse over the years as there no control exercised by Blizzard, they are infact supporting it.
Fun question, define “boosting community” Blizz says
As of today, we will now prohibit organizations who offer boosting, matchmaking, escrow, or other non-traditional services, including those offered for gold.
But what is a boosting community? What if Houkan makes a guild and continues selling boosts? Are they not a boosting community because they made an in game guild? If no, then what makes a guild not a boosting community?
A troubling area of understanding, which is why Blizz clarified
So despite inaccurate article titles such as
Boosting communities are allowed, “Cross realm boosters with man-in-the-middle/escrow services” aren’t allowed.
Shortcutting the process with a credit card is a form of bankruptcy in not only moral standards, but also to those who legitimately earned the rewards.
Video games are meant to be played. Plenty of gacha games in the mobile market if you just want to buy success.
It’s more that people’s opinions on what Pay to Win are differ on a few key points, generally associated to how strictly they view that name. To some, there is no pay to win because you can’t buy the best gear in the game with money from Blizzard directly. However to others it is Pay to Win because you can buy tokens from Blizzard directly which you can then sell on the auction house to get sums of gold which you can further use to buy a boost to achieve the best gear in the game with a credit card.
There are people that think “pay to win” ceases the second there’s another step involved. If I can buy upgrade materials for gear from the store, but I could also earn those in game, some people will say it’s pay to win, others won’t. People saying it is will argue you can use money to get something that can translate into an ingame advantage which is the general rule people seem to operate under. Not if the money buys you the literal best to 100% win, but if the money can buy you any advantage that saves you time in acquiring better items. Others will say “Well it’s not extra, you can get it playing so it isn’t pay to win.”
With regards to boosting though, it falls under the parameters of what most people would call pay to win, just they don’t see it as such because there’s the two additional steps of selling the token and using the money you won’t get banned having since you legally RMT’d through Blizzard to buy everything you could ever want. If we cut out the middle men entirely and Blizzard instead used tokens as a store currency and you could buy the individual raid loot on that page with an equivalent amount of tokens to what a guild would charge for that kill people would argue pay to win but it’s literally the same exact concept just it goes to Blizzard instead of players.
I dunno, honestly, if someone pays for a couple mythic runs and gets gear funnels, it matters zero to me or my enjoyment of the game. It literally has no impact to me.
Unless you in the top 1% your not in any way shape or form competitive enough to have it be an issue, and gear is not the main factor in a players performance. A set of top level gear wont mean much if you cant play your class/spec. And realistically, all your buying is a few weeks head start.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about. People are stretching the term because it’s a known thing to fit something they don’t like, in order to appeal to broader established opinion.
It’s like when political pundits call the opposing party communists or fascists. They aren’t really, but it’s right over the top rhetoric that is meant to hype people up for your argument, but instead it makes anyone with half a brain disengage because of the obvious lack of work gone into forming the opinion.
I don’t understand in the slightest why multiboxxing and botting isn’t allowed in the game? Boosting has the same negative impact on the health and integrity of the game…
No, because you’re assuming they are doing this deliberately to try and influence the reaction to be greater. I am stating they are not doing this and people genuinely do feel this way and it isn’t like “pay to win” has eight different meanings, it has one meaning but how far that meaning is applied varies based on people as nothing was ever fully agreed upon additionally games have changed their models since the term was coined and we may need a newer one.
Pay to Win was coined back when games, generally free to play ones would sell the strongest gear on their cash shops, or gear that had powerful passive effects, or a way to fast track getting something meant to take months if not that item outright. I mean like shop costume boots give you 20% movement speed passively kind of crap. Or in UO you had MarkeeDragon who ran a website where people literally ebay’d their UO items and characters and OSI took a while to figure out how they were approaching this unprecedented occurrence given it was 97, it was the first MMO with what we would consider an MMO with very few things being soulbound. Legendary mace was incredibly rare and difficult to get with all the thieves, entirely tradeable, usable by 8 different people, still tradeable.
Now games have gotten a bit smarter where they make the bonuses there but “on par with what you can get in the game” or sell you items that basically prevent unfortunate power losses. I.E BDO is a gear upgrade lottery with mats, if you fail it downgrades style game. Store sells items to prevent the item from de-leveling if it fails without limit.
Now where does this translate with WoW? Money. The one thing everyone kind of universally agrees is bad for most online games is gold selling. We hold this because in games money carries the most weight. If you can’t buy the sword with money, gold is the next best thing.
That’s why I say people take a more principled interpretation to the term rather than a to the letter of strict definition, because if you say “Game is pay to win if you can buy gear”, okay they stop selling gear so you can’t call it pay to win. Except if your reasoning is more on “IRL money should not be allowed to have any tangible effects on a character’s power or rewards” then you get the same point across while also being able to justify it instead of having to shackle yourself to some outdated definition from when the term was coined to which the landscape has entirely changed.
Most people agreed pre-token that buying gold was bad and that if Blizzard just didn’t enforce it that it would lead to a lot of problems. How the hell did they suddenly abandon all of their reasoning when Blizzard decides to sell the gold that this is now magically not equally as bad if not worse for the game?
Blizz says