Winning the lottery doesn’t sound like pay to win, sounds more like loot boxes.
Smart drug dealers don’t mix in poison, they cut the drug of choice to dilute it, making the user need more and more. If they do it too noticably then the users out them and they go out of business. It’s a balancing act. I don’t see this as a long term issue. Every tier has had BoE’s and imbalance with new lower ilvl players vs veteran top tier players. The only real solution is to make scaling dynamic based on situation, they tried that multiple times, but never worked well. We shall see if the next xpac lvl squish and new technology makes that balance better.
WoW technically became P2W when you could buy a level boost, people always try to argue against the notion by putting their own definition of pay to win out there but the real definition is simply buying power or buying the ability to skip ahead (pretty much anything that isn’t superficial or cosmetic), you don’t need to actually win anything, merely spending money to attain what someone else would need to spend time to earn is P2W.
There are different levels to it, most mobile games are the harmful versions, but they’re all still P2W nonetheless.
P2W is the ability to translate real life money into ingame advantage, in the case it’s a power increase. This is the literal definition of P2W like it or not. Sure you cannot buy these from the ingame store but you can buy them through the auction house.
Your argument is that because there is an extra step involved that it isn’t P2W, this is a factually meaningless when you remember the fact that you can buy the currency with real money. You cannot deny the fact that you can pay real money for a substantial upgrade ingame. I will happily argue with you that it is infact a large upgrade.
Also, I think you need to understand that it’s not just mythic raiders or content creators that are buying tokens to get an advantage. A lot of average players like you and me who have more money to spend on the game have been buying tokens for this gear. I will even admit that I myself have been tempted to spend a couple hundred so that I could have an advantage (I have had an addiction in the past to spending money on P2W games so I understood the warning signs).
Gearing shouldn’t feel like a lottery in the first place, this is why people had a problem with WF/TF and are now mad at the corruption system. you wouldn’t have this problem if these systems were removed from the game.
The problems start when you understand that there is a very possibility that you will never catch up to the person who starts off the patch 2 months ahead.
They are not smart enuff to figure it out, using pachinko loop holes. Bottom line is you pay real life money for in game things to get ahead of people in situations being dps/raidspots/ect. The option is there, weather you choose to use it or not, just because its not on the same level as other games does not mean its any less there.
Blizzard is shapeing to take advantage of more people like this way to feed them and give them reasons to not slowly change so you do not notice the culture shift.
If you didn’t know corruption has ranks that increase its power based on how high of a rank is. If I remember correctly it’s 4 ranks for most of them. There are layers of RNG at play like the WF/TF system but only worse. People are buying the best corruptions at the best ranks.
Just so you know there are pachinko machines in japan, you win little balls you trade the balls for a doll. You then walk that doll to a store down the street and exchange it for money. That is how japan bypasses gambling laws.
its not gambling right? since there are two steps in-between?
I hear you, but that’s not really pay to win.
A player with good enough profession and auction house skills can make enough money to buy these items without spending any real world money.
They aren’t even that expensive, at least on my server.
Are you daft? no one is argueing that, they are saying there is a way to pay real money to bypass that
you can do all that on CoD too for 2 years or pay money to bypass that, you can get any mobile game and get time locked out of everything for 20 years or pay 100 bucks to bypass that
While that is true I believe that this is healthy for the game in the long run. There is an argument to be made that if BoE corruptions are P2W than so are carries but I think it’s important to understand the difference in convenience in both of them.
I think they are doing the same thing they do in CoD, released an over powerd gun, people spends hundreds of bucks on lootboxes to get the gun. Then when a lot of people have the gun they nurf it to the ground and “accidently” break another gun to start the process over. This seems to be what they will do with corrupted
Wowtokens buy the 3 mil pc, nurf it after they see token sales are down, buff another pc people buy that pc ect ect. wow token use to be 230k, now is down to 140 =p
you went to every server and looked? Alliance don’t count they suck at raiding look at more competitive servers, on mine there are 5 gloves with stars 3 alone for 4 mil each. 6 rings……… that’s just the 460 ones, looking at the 445’s man can be here all day. also how do you know they are not instantly bought out?
Like you realize all the world first race guilds admitted to doing this right? they were advertiseing on streaming buying all buying all blah blah
Go look at auctions outside of the 6-7 (out of ~80 clusters) mega servers and most don’t even have a single guild getting CE let alone flooded with corrupted gear.
My servers hasn’t even achieved AOTC yet, and is more an indication of the majority of server clusters.
Since they can’t figure it out, pay to win means exactly that. You would be spending cash in the shop for the pieces for it to even be remotely considered that. The fact that there are good pieces of gear on the auction house does not make it pay to win. If I buy all the pieces do I win the game? Hardly. I still have to be good enough to win the raid. What part of that don’t you haters get? I could go on the ah and buy the best gear possible and where does that leave me? Looking for a mythic guild or pug that will accept me with no achievements to prove that I can play. So I finally get into a raid, and guess what, my overgeared self just got exposed in front of everyone for being a fraud when I don’t pull my weight. Doesn’t sound like winning to me. If you are skilled enough to win the raid with the gear you purchase, then you are skilled enough to win without buying it, there should be no argument here.
So multiple guilds with multiple members of said guild admitting to doing this on live stream, them paying for transfers with items after buying servers items out is not enuff for you Me on my server alone with just looking at rings and plate gloves not even looking at cloth leather mail or any other type of plate isn’t enuff. even if I did do what you said you would still try to deny it short of screen shots wich im not going to sit here all day and do.
We’re having a (imo) very interesting and respectful discussion about this system and it’s possible implications or lack thereof on the playerbase. So hold off on the insults <3
Anyways,
I think it’s a very valid point. So let’s take a piece of BOE gear that’s selling for say 3 million gold on the auction house.
Player 1 buys $380 worth of WoW tokens at currently price and buys it within 5 minutes.
Player 2, has profession farmer, already has enough gold and buys it. Even if we argue they hadn’t saved up (which, they usually do) it will take them maybe a day to do so.
Player 3 is a mog farmer. They will take a week, maybe two farming per hour legacy raids to reach the same goal. This is all with Auction House addons, which are free.
I don’t think this is Pay2win. A player cannot make a character in WoW, boost to 120, buy gear and kill anyone in PvP or get top charts in Raids. They need experience. And experienced players more often than not have enough money or the methods to make money.
I saw players running around on the Brutasaur on day 15 of BfA. These people are crazy with gold
way to feed them and give them reasons to not slowly change so you do not notice the culture shift.