Using this logic, gacha games aren’t p2w either. Paying for convenience/faster progression is a form of P2W. People get way too hung up on the literal definition of the word “win.” Tokens are a form of p2w.
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People with a simplistic argument get into the “it’s a pay to win game or it’s not, according to my own personal definition” framing. I think of it more as “what makes a game pay to win, and how much of that is that in a game?”
A common pay to win mechanic is to design boring, tedious content that players will want to skip past to get to the content they really want to do, then provide a cash shop option for making that happen.
Another common pay to win mechanic is to be able to buy power with money, which anybody with enough money can do in wow.
When Diablo Immoral was released, you really could earn everything in the game. It would have taken 10 years. In your opinion, is that not pay to win because somebody could spend 10 years catching up to where a whale was on day 1, only to be left behind as inevitable future changes happened?
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Most carries are sold for middling goals. Someone wanting a quick hand up when starting out for their weekly vault loot and the like, rather than someone paying to bank the very top rewards. A jump-start, rather than a plan of spending their gold to FULLY gear out their guy.
If people are talking about the top rewards, the stuff that marks a character as “done” with the tier, I think the pricing gets pretty crazy prohibitive when you actually target the top-level things. (And in Rated PvP, I bet it’s hard to actually find someone even willing to deliver a carry to something like Gladiator for low rated PvP players).
Simple, the exact same thing was done before the WoW token, the only difference was people used external websites, many of which were shady and because of how they worked many people would get their accounts compromised in the process of getting their illegally purchased third party gold (aka the infamous gold sellers).
Runs would still be purchased through raids, things would still be bought with gold paid for by a credit card, all before the token, the only difference was a high risk of account compromised leading to a bunch of hassle about trying to get accounts, characters, items recovered etc…
The token simply gave people a place to get what was already being done since the start of WoW, without that risk, while also letting those who want to play without spending money do so (buy token with gold for game time)
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Every genius who calls this game pay to win has never played a pay to win game. They aren’t even in the same stratosphere. Diablo Immortal is pay to win. It doesn’t cost you 150,000 dollars to beat all levels of content in World of Warcraft. It doesn’t cost you anything but the monthly subscription.
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I’d argue it’s only partially p2w. Definitely not pure p2w like all the Asian mmo’s are. But it’s also dependant on what you classify as “winning”.
Some people treat the concept of “p2w” as literally meaning that you swipe your card, the credits roll, and the game is over so you walk away.
It’s the most nonsensical definition of the term that no game has ever or will ever qualify for.
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It’s a fruitless discussion. Ask ten people what “win” means in this game, and you’ll get at least three divergent opinions. And unless we can get a definition of “win”, the “pay to” part is meaningless.
Generally that power exclusively comes from the shop, or takes an unreasonable amount of time to get naturally that a regular player will never catch a whale.
While you can buy carries in WoW, no amount of money will ever make a whale equal to or better than the players he is buying the carry from, which is what sets WoW’s system apart from other P2W games.
Whale as hard as you want in WoW, but you will always be in 10000th place.
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All of those risks served to disincentivize the practice. The token does not.
The consequences of those risks should have been laid on the person taking them entirely and Blizzard could have essentially ignored them. Now, instead of that kind of player walking away from the game or choosing NOT to take the risks in the first place, they’ve turned them into a source of additional income by monetizing and implicitly endorsing these grifts.
That additional income has done nothing to improve the game while the boosters and run sellers are just a blight. Instead of using those resources to make the game better, we now have resources spent on designing a game around boosters with changes coming in each update to play this kind of cat and mouse game with people selling services, ie cobalt assembly “nerfs.”
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You’re still not guaranteed at the best end gear, just getting an opportunity at a run that may drop a piece of gear. However, in a true P2Win game, you game pick which piece of gear that you’d like to get, and pay for it directly with cash, charge, PayPal , Bitcoin, Wampum ect.
Same as a gacha game. You aren’t guaranteed the specific item you want from a gacha roll. Gacha games are still considered heavily p2w.
Its 200% pay2win lol
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This makes no sense…if you’re raiding and doing +20 keys you don’t NEED to be making gold for carries because you are already earning the stuff yourself. I’ve been clearing 400k a month (after paying for gametime, purchases, etc.) since SL and only play 10-12 hours a week. And no, I don’t farm mats endlessly, I do WQs, dailies, LFR on all my alts. The gold comes pretty passively. Gold is relatively easy to get. The game is nowhere near P2W. Carries and gold selling existed long before the token. The game may be P2skip, but so is every other game out there. 
If you have a group of friends to play with, you will always be ahead of the person that is trying to buy friends. Being carried has never been a way to win.
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No thats called player economy…
Show me where I can directly pay blizz for direct power as an advantage over others/
You can’t. P2W is just another word people use like “communism” without actual knowledge of what it really is.
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the people who say wow isn’t P2W seem to be the ones selling services…
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how is paying for runs not p2w? i really cant understand how u arrive to this isnt pay 2 win.
Are you paying Blizz for the runs/power gained? Are you paying blizz for XP boost or loot drop increases? Play an actual pay to win game then get back to that question and realize how wrong it is in thought process
i will call wow p2w if they put out op gear in the shop you only need to buy once
but if they do that do it to the pvp gear and watch the fireworks lol
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