In a recent viral r/gaming post there was a whole topic about P2W games and WoW kept making it’s rounds, a lot of people attribute being able to buy gold and using it to get gear/achievements as a definite sign the game is P2W.
But I don’t think these arguments for P2W make any sense.
You aren’t winning anything by buying gold and getting items/achievements, there is no “winning” because this is not a race it’s an MMO.
It’s also very easy to spot someone who’s been boosted vs. someone who got it legit as well, all in all I don’t think WoW is P2W and this type of rhetoric only makes our community look worse.
It’s not just reddit
But the answer is because P2W has no official definition. Everyone is free to define it how they wish
So to some people wow is 100% P2W and to others it isn’t anywhere close.
If you try to quote someones entire post then it will vanish, you have to edit it a little bit. See with your quote above I took the period off the end so I can quote the whole thing.
The majority considers getting high tier gear and especially BiS as “winning”, or at least a temporary form of it.
If you took away gear as a reward for endgame activities or flattened the rewards to match world quest quality, how many would bother with that content? Probably not very many. The ones who play for the challenge and prestige are a relatively small portion of the playerbase, probably a single digit percentage. WoW has been centered on chasing gear basically since WotLK or Cataclysm when Blizzard started funneling everybody into endgame and specifically CURRENT_PATCH_ZONE.
If one follows that chain of logic I could see where they might see boosting as an indirect form of P2W.
The forum will remove quotes from immediately preceding posts if the content is identical. Leave a character or two out of the quote and it won’t be removed.
WoW isn’t pay to win. It’s pay for convenience if anything. You can do everything without paying, but if you don’t have the time, skills, then you can pay for achieve,title, mount, mog, and such.
That’s pretty funny, since the people actually doing the content that gives the higher-end gear don’t consider the gear to be “winning” at all. It’s just a tool that will be vendored in a few months.
Higher-end players tend not to care about gear at all.
And some people believe that because you can get the items without money that it isn’t P2W
Personally I don’t care because I look at it like this, what if we all agree that wow is P2W? What changes? Nothing changes for me, the game is or is not enjoyable to me regardless of some label that now applies to it. What changes for you? Would you quit if wow was deemed 100% P2W but didn’t change at all from how it works now?
If so, why not just quit now? What’s the difference? If nothing changes but the label then I see no reason to stick around.
Don’t the crafted items in Dragonflight require drops from raids, and the items made with those drops are soulbound to the person who farmed them? My understanding is that only the person who did the raid and got the mats can actually wear the resulting gear.
That’s only true if you have skill to back the gear up, which most people buying boosts very much do not, otherwise they’d be running the content normally. Gear has to be used to have any actual value.
It lets you curbstomp freshly dinged players in random BGs but that’s about it.
Honestly most buyers lack ability and just end up coming back because nobody takes them. Also anybody buying experience can usually be spotted easily, either with logs of volume of runs with higher exp players.
At the end of the day they just sit around cities with their 1x of each mythic boss kills in their shiny gear with grey parses and nobody to play with without paying.
Yep because use of boosting is obvious from just glancing at armory or raiderio, and nobody wants a booster in their high end content party/raid.
Personally speaking I’d take someone who’s undergeared but has signals of some level of experience over someone who’s decked but was clearly carried. The latter gives the impression of someone who’s lazy and won’t carry their own weight in a party setting.
