Several games nowadays have the option to pay real money to enhance the experience of the player, often frustrating them unless they pay up.
Good ways to milk players of the money they thought they wouldn’t spend in the game include: energy bars that reduce the time they can devote to their game, huge timers that need to be reduced for the player to be able to continue their journey, better gear to deal with players that don’t want to pay, and, the most common one, the existence of a currency in the game that can’t be earned without your credit card.
Pay to Win is a situation in gaming where COMPANIES allow you to buy items or advantages with real money that cannot be obtained normally by playing the game.
So please, stop throwing around the " Boost / Carry " runs are P2W…they are not.
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Carries are not P2W, but that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t have P2W aspects. If you think abysmally low drop rates in raids, low ilvl of M+, and the abundance of BoEs in the AH are unrelated you’re being willfully ignorant.
One could choose to use real world currency and be 210+ ilvl in game with zero effort. What could be more P2W?
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There are no pay to win aspects in WoW.
Period.
Play any MMO with P2W elements in them and it’s a night and day difference.
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Ok Ion I get you want to convince us its not p2w but we can see through your farce.
Also, who made you the king of defining pay to win?
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by definition its not…you can still obtain ALL of that playing the game normally…the company itself is not selling items / runs to give you an unfair advantage so there is no P2W.
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If a person who spends no real life money goes toe to toe against someone who’s willing to dump a lot of real life money and the real life money spending person is in a much better place gear wise after 1 month, the game has some pay to win elements.
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if they bought it directly from the company yes…if they paid someone else to boost them through normally playable systems then no its not
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Funny story about P2W definitions…
A few years ago on the Star Trek Online forums in a thread talking about F2P and P2W, I think there was someone that said that extra inventory space that sub players get is considered P2W since it gives them an advantage over F2P players.
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if you can get to the same point, in game, without paying the hosting company to get there while its not possible to do as would other players then and only then is it P2W
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I have a better system than your potato, therefore its pay to win
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And buying gold (regardless of how convoluted the system is) is a part of that.
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The accepted definition for pay to win is quite simple.
The company that makes the game must offer items of a competitive advantage, for either real $$ directly, or, they must offer those items through a currency that can only be bought with real $$.
Then, and only then, is a game pay to win, because players who have more disposable income can purchase items that players without that income have no way of obtaining.
WoW does not do this, it has never done this, and it never will go down that route.
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WoW is Pay to Look Pretty at this point with cosmetics, mounts, and pets in the store. Pay to win would require not carries but loot boxes to drop from mobs instead of loot. So at the end of the day you’d have a bag of boxes and a message telling you to go to the online store and buy keys to open them. See Champions Online, Star Trek Online, or any PWE game as a reference. Hell Star Trek sells Tier ships in their store, not the good ones but the current ones. Imagine Blizzard putting current content Raid and M+ armors in to the online store for a real $$$ fee…hic!
Oh and by the way, the not so good current tier ships go for about $30 a pop right now. Want a current Tier Constitution Class? Expect to fork out a few hundred dollars of real cash…hic!
Now realize that on a P2W setup those people put out about one or two quests every so many months even before the pandemic hit. Their main goal was to sell lockbox items and such and tied quests around that a lot of times. Raids and PvP? Good luck with that in a P2W game like STO especially. Raids are non-existent and PvP is so out of whack from the P2W ships and items it’s not funny…hic!
You may want to Google pay to win…
can you obtain the item through questing / Auction house / just playing the game?
Yes?..not P2W
Is the only way to advance or obtain an item through the company itself?
Yes?..thats P2W
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I did…those are direct quotes from reddit…mmo gamer…ect
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no, it is not since gold is available in game at any amount up to the cap that anyone can get.
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