You really need to go look at a game with pay to win. One actually with it, not the GD perception of it. The difference is truly astounding. Ones that I can think of off the top of my head are BDO and Archage.
You can buy your way past the Cutting Edge players doing the content through progression. You can’t come anywhere near as close with your perceived “pay to win.”
Wow is nowhere close to pay to win
None of these are pay to win.
Let me be crystal clear to you and anyone else who doesn’t understand what pay to win actually means.
Pay to Win = You paying real $$ to get an advantage that regular players cannot get access to. Basically meaning that if you pay, your chances of winning skyrocket over those who don’t pay.
A great example of a Pay to Win game is NBA 2K18. The free teams that you get access to are fine for starting you off in competition against other players, but they will be quickly outclassed by teams created by players who purchased packs from the store. Eventually you will get to a point where you cannot win at all unless you open your wallet, because you will be outclassed in every possible way by the other teams. Not because they’re more skilled at the game, but because they paid for access to the best characters. A player who refuses to open their wallet will never get access to all the team members needed to remain competitive.
Basically, pay or lose.
Other examples of Pay to Win games include:
The list goes on.
Oh I know perfectly well how bad they are and can get. There are definitely varying degrees of paying to win and how bad a lot of games can be with it. That being said it still exists in this game with token sales and carries. A lot of people will dismiss it here because good players or others that have spent a lot of time can achieve the same goal. They will always change the definition of what is winning to support their argument as well.
It comes down to a very simple concept for me to call it pay to win. You pay the extra money to bypass mechanics of the game to achieve that goal without actually earning it through the game by yourself.
i cant wait to buy some tokens and clear the hardest boss in the game 1 shot!!
Good luck on that propaganda. Surely if you keep working on it you can convince yourself that the pay 2 win mechanics that have been incorporated into the game are entirely irrelevant, and the game has not changed one bit from the days in vanilla when people used to buy 20 tokens a week to pay for mythic+ carries to unlock valor upgrades.
??? what
But but the Carried took my raid spot!
No,.who ever ran the raid or guild was a moron who goes off an arbitrary score blindly.
Now they got the bad player with a nice score. Maybe next time….go you know I know this guy Tim. He is lower index but….he can work mechanics in his sleep
And you take Timmy. Less dps from score but…when your carried player face plants 5 secondsin every time on every boss….they are no dps.
Guild wars 2 seeing as the only thing your money goes towards is cosmetics
Okay, congrats, you killed the boss…
What did you win?
Assuming it dropped gear that you could use, you got what, one, maybe two pieces of gear (and that’s being generous), and an achievement. Oh boy, that’s maximum winning right there. In fact… there’s a song for that amount of winning!
(obviously I’m being sarcastic, there is no winning, except for that song…)
I would fully expect you to claim that none of the pay 2 win mechanics that have been integrated into the game represent a movement toward making the game more pay 2 win. The fact that a new player probably cannot reach end game without shelling out cash… Of course that’s not pay 2 win. It’s an improvement to keep new players from ever catching up, because as new players without connections they don’t deserve to reach end game and you don’t want them sullying your end game. But if they pay you cash money, you’ll let them pretend. Right?
I know you need to portray the framing of the argument as “either a game is entirely pay to win or it isn’t at all”. So 99% pay to win actually wouldn’t be pay to win at all, right?
None of what you just said makes sense.
There is literally no mechanic in WoW that can be considered pay to win. I quite literally explained what pay to win is, and gave examples of what games are considered ‘pay to win’. Please pay attention.
He’s incoherent. Better to just move on and let him ramble.
So all the changes they made that coincidentally make it impossible to get to end game in a reasonable timeframe without connections or cold hard cash, that’s just a coincidence! Carhagen says it so it must be true!
I have been paying attention to your rationalizations. Don’t be so transparent and maybe people won’t think you’re covering for blizz?
There’s no tokens in classic, nor any supported way of using gold for anything but player transactions.
There’s no incentive for Blizzard for people to buy carries on classic. And yet they still do. To the point where Blizzard are actively changing the Season of Mastery because of how strong Mage boosting is.
What does a new player need to buy a token for?
It’s not impossible though…
It really isn’t.
You can create a new character today, level to 60, get into Korthia, and between Korthia and the Maw invasions, you will be able to gear up enough to get into Sanctum of Domination Normal/Heroic within a few weeks. From there you can continue to gear up through raiding or M+, getting loot from the raid/dungeon or the great vault and you’ll be able to do mythic with ease, all without spending a cent on a token.
But I hear you. What about your legendary! You need to pay to get a maximum level legendary and that can only be done with a token!
Except you don’t need a maximum ilvl legendary. Sanctum of Domination is tuned around having a rank 4 legendary, and the runic vessels for those are incredibly cheap, especially if you provide your own materials to the crafter. If you’re absolutely desperate for max rank, the most expensive part of the new legendaries is the korthite, something you can farm yourself, and then you can just pay a crafter to make the token using your materials. It’ll cost you 10k as a tip rather than 150k+ to buy the vessel from the AH.
Oh and in 9.1.5 the gearing up process will be even easier for new characters thanks to the changes that Blizzard is implementing there.
So the people who tell us that absolutely nothing has changed about carries since vanilla are lying?
Let’s see. The new player does not have gold to buy gear in the AH. Even if he takes months earning his renown to upgrade his covenant gear, you would not only reject him from your groups, but you would probably whisper him and tell him to uninstall.
At 2 dungeons a day (waiting hours to fill groups or get accepted into very low keys) it would literally take him months to get up to a +15. If he wants to do PvP, he’s going to get wrecked constantly while earning honor to buy useless honor gear, useless even if it is fully upgraded. He certainly won’t be invited into groups.
You have control over player access to content. That’s what you guys wanted. You got it and now you are free to use or abuse it however you see fit, and then blame new players who get none of those shiny new alt advantages you crave.
This is correct. OP and his/her supporters are here to seek drama.
I’m saying that even when there’s zero financial incentive for Blizzard to sell people carries, carries still get sold.
It’s not some grand conspiracy for Blizzard to design the game around selling carries. People just sell (and buy) them now because the average skill of the playerbase is high enough to do so.
Gearing through the AH is a terrible strategy and has been long before tokens were a thing.
I mean that’s a pretty bold assumption on my character.
But lets say I would. I’m also smart enough to know how to spot boosted characters, so simply buying boosts wouldn’t help him in that regard.
Yes, he would have to progress his keys. So does literally everybody else. Though how fast he climbs through the ladder depends on him as a player, if they’re good enough to do 15s from the get-go, then it’s not gunna take him months to gear.
Yeah, it’s rough to be an undergeared new player in PvP. But that’s what WoW PvP’s literally always been like since it’s always been a gear based game. If you think WoW PvP is P2W now then it’s been P2W since literally BC.
I think you’re assigning far more power to me than I have.
There’s not some mysterious cabal of elitists personally overseeing the gatekeeping of WoW’s community and you have to pay your dues by buying a token simply to get in.