I did, for family familiar, and store pets came up often, such as Ragnaros, blossomming familiar, cinder kitten, and dread hatchling.
I know it’s different, but we should also consider Graves pre-nerf. It was free, but unobtainable in game, and I would have gladly played triple cause playing that OTHER game was one of the worst experience of my life.
Does it mean you’ll win every battle with just those pets - no.
Does it mean you’ll have advantage going into battles if you lack any strong pets - yes.
Did I say you don’t? You need to relax and chill and not be quite so defensive. I was countering your point, not you personally.
Are the store pets good? OK, they may well be - what would be the point of selling a pet that is crap? Are they better than every other pet available in game? No.
Let’s agree to disagree on whatever divergent opinion we seem to have and leave it at that.
I’m sorry but saying WoW is pay to win is ridiculous. If you really believe this is the case then I’m not sure MMO’s are for you. Is this post brought on because you can’t buy the token?
You consider this pay to win. You have a weird sense of pay to win. Again, I’m guessing this response is brought on because you want to get the 110 boost but unwilling to pay for it.
I’m guessing the next post will say something about pay to win if you buy mounts. Sounds like that is where you are heading. Anything bought with real money is considered pay to win, right?
First,
None of your examples are really pay to win. Sorry they are not.
Your whole premise revolves around the fact that buying gold with tokens allows you to “win”. But gold can be earned with by playing the game. I have millions of gold, none of which was bought, it was all earned in game. (And FYI, most if it was not made during WoD). I have made millions this expansion and you can do the same if you want.
Second, the things you mentioned like the battle pets are not as good as you think. I have done a lot of pet battling. The strongest pets are ones that can be earned in game, they really are. From a pet-PvP perspective, any store pet can be countered easily by easy to acquire in-game pets.
Third, before tokens, there were people that bought gold from illegal gold sellers. This did not make the game any less fun for me. Sure some people took a shortcut, but in the journey is more fun than the destination.
Fourth, going through life envious of people is no way to live. In the real world, life is not fair, some people will start the race with a head-start. But it’s not where you start or even where you finish, but did you run the race with dignity, honor and were you true to yourself and your personal values? (I know it sounds like a cat poster, but as you get older the important things in life become crystal clear).
I don’t agree with your facts, which you state as conclusions and then give no examples, but I think the bigger problem is your theme. It’s quite similar to the common answer I get on this issue, which is a personal attack on me (“Fourth, going through life envious of people”…which just assumes a negative motive).
It also completely lets blizz off the hook. There’s a quite famous quote from a TBC dev: micro-transactions or pay to win betray our users. We’ll never do that.
If you don’t see that the game is changed by injecting real life currency into game achievements, or you deny the very real connection between these things in the current iteration of the game, I don’t really know what to say. But if you understand those facts, you understand that I’m sticking up for what was “normal” for wow, for a decade. The wow I grew up with and loved.
As for pet store pets… the best pet in there a lil’ ragnaros; easily countered with any fast rabbit.
What is “nornal” is that people have been buying gold since the game’s inception. Nothing has changed except who gets the money. Billions of gold have changed hands; so what? aside from a few mounts and worthless battle pets, everything else can be acquired in-game. Even these can be bought if you are willing for farm some gold.
When you play a game so much that liking it becomes part of your identity, you will defend anything negative said about it, because anything negative said about it is also an insult to yourself/identity.
When you cultivate enough fans, you can get away with a lot. Just look at stores with games attached to them like Fortnite.
There is no pay to win at all here, however in the time I’ve been gone there have been two store mounts already, I think this game has a disgusting amount of micro-transactions, and if you want a unique mount or pet, you got to pay up for it, the dreadwake is one of my favorite mounts because it’s a freaking pirate ship, but I also hate it because I felt no accomplishment getting it, at least it was given with a 6 month bundle, which I had 6 months at the time. If you get banned from the forums though for talking about this, that is out ridiculous.
My demon kitty to go with the DH’s…does not p0wn pet battles. She needs work in battles. Same as a free one in game.
And while I win looking good wars, my iron reaver gives no bene’s I know of. Now if I get a button to press for an afterburner speed boost oneday…maybe we can talk more on this.
BoE on AH is not all that great really. If cheap pick it up to push your average ilevel score to break into the next scale to get better hits from wq’s/caches. But that was only in the old days of BFA.
When BFA first started this was an edge. Gear was not so common or easy to get. Now? even my druid fresh to 120 week or so ago is pulling the gear off open world to move up the charts. 370 avg already.
My only recent AH buy was an offhand when my s.priest was stuck in wand hell. I needed the wand’s ilevel. ergo I needed the offhand. I didn’t pay to win here.
I paid to get past crap mechanics. Drops by spec my butt. S. Priest by legion standards is a staff/dagger spec. Its artifact is Xal. Xal doesn’t play well with wands. Doesn’t play at all.
There is nothing but people selling Mythic carries in LFG because of pay to win. People buy gold with real money and use it to buy carry runs. That’s one part of the game that has been completely ruined by pay to win.
I get it, there’s a lot more wrong with the game, but some of the pay to win aspects are pretty crazy and deserve to be on the list of things currently wrong with the game for sure.
M+ designed to only have specific classes do well at higher level keys? Just give Blizzard $60 to boost a character of that class.
Honestly. WoW isn’t pay to win, it’s more or less that micro-transactions shouldn’t exist in a game where we already pay a subscription. Locking mounts behind money is absurd and subtracts from a potential effort for a player to work to achieve the mount.
You are literally on General Discussion. What did you expect? A few people who have 10-thousand posts on the forums that exhaustively defend the game to their dying breaths and mass-flag things they don’t agree with isn’t representative of the “community”.
Go to any YouTube video where they speak about what you’re saying and there’s overwhelming contempt by players for what you’re describing.