"Pay to Win"

[pateuvasiliu]

Pay to win = Paying real life money to improve your character ingame.


Whether it's buying gear, buying extra stats you can't get normally, level boosts, gold.

Those are just different levels of p2w but they all are p2w.

[Raelbo]

It isn't, "advantage" is very easy to define -- anything that impacts game mechanics in your favor.

Allow me to disabuse you of that notion. It is possible to gain an advantage without having any impact whatsoever on the game mechanics. For example, a better player is at an advantage of a less skilled player.

And it translates into "winning" by definition.

False again. Here's a perfect example: Pet battles: Many people have and will continue to argue that the ability to buy pets off the pet store puts the player owning those pets at an advantage over other players. I mean it's obvious right? More pets with unique abilities to choose from, surely that must be an advantage. You're certainly not going to convince many people that owning all, or even some of the pet store pets, is not some sort of an advantage.

That being said will it help you "win". I would argue not. For pet battles you get to choose 3 pets, out of a possible 800+ (on top of which you can have duplicates). In the end you can compete just as effectively in any pet battle related activity (either PvP or PvE) as anyone else without the "advantage" of owning the pet store pets. All they actually give you is a little choice and variety, but no real competitive advantage.

If you have an advantage, all other things equal, you have a higher probability of "winning".

Only if the advantage pertains to the thing you're trying to win in the specific context.

A lot of people have argued that buying tokens allows people to buy Epic raid gear items (from the AH and BMAH) that then help them do better in the World First race. On the face of it, it seems like a fair point. The ability to buy gold means that guilds that do so have a gold advantage over guilds that don't. But is that advantage meaningful? Not really. The barrier to a top guild being able to snap up OP Epics has NEVER been gold. It has always been the availability of those Epics, or the fact that some random person might snap them up off the AH/BMAH when the guild is not paying attention. There was that incident in MoP where Method (IIRC) resorted to douchebag tactics like sitting on top of the mailbox to stop another player from being able to collect his gold to continue bidding on just such an Epic item.

Or maybe people will argue that this saves the guild time from gold farming, thus it gives them an advantage, but again, that advantage only helps them win if they would have spent that time doing something else that contributed to the win. Top guilds make most of their gold selling BoE items that drop in raids that they don't need, and from boosting other players, something they do because they have nothing else to do after the world first race is over. The reality is that they have no need of the time saved by buying gold for cash, and if they had that time, they'd waste it on something arbitrary.

That doesn't work because "meaningful" is vague and cannot be strictly defined

I disagree. "Meaningful" has a dictionary definition:

"having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose".

If you prefer you can use the following synonyms:

"significant, relevant, important, consequential, valid, worthwhile"

If the advantage gained meets these criteria, then it's sufficient.
Including the term serves a dual purpose:
- to disqualify arbitrary (ie the opposite of meaningful) advantages.
- to force the person arguing that something is pay2win to justify how the advantage leads to "winning" by establishing the significance, relevance, importance, consequence and validity of the advantage in the contest.

And "competitive" is vacuous since you can compete about anything in game.

This is why you shouldn't cherry pick words from the sentence. Sure, you can be competitive about anything, but unless that thing is meaningful, and you can justify why it is meaningful, then it doesn't count.

But yes, I get it. You'd rather just accept the open ended "advantage" because being able to identify arbitrary, meaningless advantages in some banal competition someone is having with himself allows you to put the label "pay2win" on something, and thus associate it with something else that is egregiously "pay2win" but which in reality is actually something totally different.

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ummmmm...

use $$$ buy wow gold from blizzard...pay Super Mythic Raid Guild to carry and feed you gear. <---how is that not pay to win?

You aren't winning anything that you could not have won easily without using $$$ to buy WoW gold from Blizzard. Implicit in the phrase "pay to win" is that if you don't pay, you don't win.

• The 30 odd people in the guild that is boosting you all "won" without spending any gold at all
• There are many people for whom the amount of gold you got from selling that token is so trivial that they are happy to spend that gold to save a few euro. Clearly it's not that onerous to earn that kind of gold.

At best this is a case of pay to really be slack but still be able to get a few things.

[Deleted]

As mentioned before, everything is for sale in wow... blizz have stated they have no problems with people selling boosts/runs for ingame gold. Which can be used to cash out on Bnet credit. So yea... everything can be obtained by p2w.

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Allow me to disabuse you of that notion. It is possible to gain an advantage without having any impact whatsoever on the game mechanics. For example, a better player is at an advantage of a less skilled player.



False again. Here's a perfect example: Pet battles: Many people have and will continue to argue that the ability to buy pets off the pet store puts the player owning those pets at an advantage over other players. I mean it's obvious right? More pets with unique abilities to choose from, surely that must be an advantage. You're certainly not going to convince many people that owning all, or even some of the pet store pets, is not some sort of an advantage.

That being said will it help you "win". I would argue not. For pet battles you get to choose 3 pets, out of a possible 800+ (on top of which you can have duplicates). In the end you can compete just as effectively in any pet battle related activity (either PvP or PvE) as anyone else without the "advantage" of owning the pet store pets. All they actually give you is a little choice and variety, but no real competitive advantage.



Only if the advantage pertains to the thing you're trying to win in the specific context.

A lot of people have argued that buying tokens allows people to buy Epic raid gear items (from the AH and BMAH) that then help them do better in the World First race. On the face of it, it seems like a fair point. The ability to buy gold means that guilds that do so have a gold advantage over guilds that don't. But is that advantage meaningful? Not really. The barrier to a top guild being able to snap up OP Epics has NEVER been gold. It has always been the availability of those Epics, or the fact that some random person might snap them up off the AH/BMAH when the guild is not paying attention. There was that incident in MoP where Method (IIRC) resorted to douchebag tactics like sitting on top of the mailbox to stop another player from being able to collect his gold to continue bidding on just such an Epic item.

Or maybe people will argue that this saves the guild time from gold farming, thus it gives them an advantage, but again, that advantage only helps them win if they would have spent that time doing something else that contributed to the win. Top guilds make most of their gold selling BoE items that drop in raids that they don't need, and from boosting other players, something they do because they have nothing else to do after the world first race is over. The reality is that they have no need of the time saved by buying gold for cash, and if they had that time, they'd waste it on something arbitrary.



I disagree. "Meaningful" has a dictionary definition:

"having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose".

If you prefer you can use the following synonyms:

"significant, relevant, important, consequential, valid, worthwhile"

If the advantage gained meets these criteria, then it's sufficient.
Including the term serves a dual purpose:
- to disqualify arbitrary (ie the opposite of meaningful) advantages.
- to force the person arguing that something is pay2win to justify how the advantage leads to "winning" by establishing the significance, relevance, importance, consequence and validity of the advantage in the contest.



This is why you shouldn't cherry pick words from the sentence. Sure, you can be competitive about anything, but unless that thing is meaningful, and you can justify why it is meaningful, then it doesn't count.

But yes, I get it. You'd rather just accept the open ended "advantage" because being able to identify arbitrary, meaningless advantages in some banal competition someone is having with himself allows you to put the label "pay2win" on something, and thus associate it with something else that is egregiously "pay2win" but which in reality is actually something totally different.

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You aren't winning anything that you could not have won easily without using $$$ to buy WoW gold from Blizzard. Implicit in the phrase "pay to win" is that if you don't pay, you don't win.

Are you saying it is not p2w because you could get "mythic raiding" easily yourself?? Mythic raiding for 97% of the playerbase is not obtainable unless they "p2w" and buy a boost...

[Raelbo]

As mentioned before, everything is for sale in wow... blizz have stated they have no problems with people selling boosts/runs for ingame gold.

pay2win means spending real $$$, not spending gold. Gold is easily earned in game without spending a single cent of real $$$, hence how it is that tokens are sold for gold in the first place....

Are you saying it is not p2w because you could get "mythic raiding" easily yourself??

No. Of course not. Don't be silly.

Mythic raiding for 97% of the playerbase is not obtainable unless they "p2w" and buy a boost...

You can earn the gold in-game without spending $$$ and buy the boost that way. Like I said, buying a boost for gold is not p2w.

[Deleted]

It is possible to gain an advantage without having any impact whatsoever on the game mechanics. For example, a better player is at an advantage of a less skilled player.

Correct. Pay2win means paying cash to get that advantage. Getting an advantage through skill accumulated via practice is what games are all about.

That being said will it help you "win". I would argue not. For pet battles you get to choose 3 pets, out of a possible 800+ (on top of which you can have duplicates). In the end you can compete just as effectively in any pet battle related activity (either PvP or PvE) as anyone else without the "advantage" of owning the pet store pets. All they actually give you is a little choice and variety, but no real competitive advantage.

I never bothered with pet battles so I don't know the mechanics. But that sounds like classic pay2win to me. Having more choices (or getting access to those choices quicker due to not having to achieve them in game) is an advantage by definition.

Only if the advantage pertains to the thing you're trying to win in the specific context.

Different advantages help you in different contexts. What you're "trying to win" is irrelevant, you can still buy advantages, which makes the game pay2win.

The ability to buy gold means that guilds that do so have a gold advantage over guilds that don't. But is that advantage meaningful? Not really.

It absolutely is an advantage. Being good at making gold was one of the big advantages my guild had back in TBC, and certainly contributed greatly to being able to get server firsts. I was also personally good at making gold, and I got a huge advantage from it in many, many ways when I was still playing. Being able to buy gold is undeniably an extremely significant pay2win mechanic.

I disagree. "Meaningful" has a dictionary definition: "having a serious, important, or useful quality or purpose", "significant, relevant, important, consequential, valid, worthwhile"

All of which are subjective. Two people can disagree whether an advantage is "serious", "important", "significant", "relevant", etc. but cannot disagree about whether it impacts game mechanics in advantageous way or not because that is a simple, verifiable fact. When we're talking about a definition of a term, the only important thing is for people to agree on the meaning. That's why your definition is useless, because people still won't agree what is "meaningful/serious/important/significant/etc." so they won't agree what is pay2win or not. My definition does not have that problem.

But yes, I get it. You'd rather just accept the open ended "advantage"

It is not open ended, it is very precisely defined: "Impacts game mechanics in a favorable way." You can even drop the "favorable" if you like and it will still hold. Games that sell things that don't impact game mechanics, like name changes, are not pay2win. Simple, factual, precise, clear.

[ComputerNerd]

The game mechanics for trading player to player have changed very little over the years.
Much of what we can do now we have been able to do from a very early stage, if not from release.
The tokens did not introduce some fundamental change as to what we could trade to players.
Therefore it is not making the player trade into something it was not.

As the player trade mechanics define what is possible, then it has always been the model it is now.
Therefore anyone saying it is only pay to win due to the tokens is quite simply making a fool of themselves.
Another buzzword thrown around with no understanding of what it means.

[Deleted]

As the player trade mechanics define what is possible, then it has always been the model it is now. Therefore anyone saying it is only pay to win due to the tokens is quite simply making a fool of themselves.

The token changed it in a very fundamental way. Before you had to achieve something worthy of trading in game (e.g., farm a lot of gold) to be able to trade with others for something valuable (e.g., crafted raid gear). With tokens you no longer need to achieve something of equal value in game to trade, but can simply use your credit card. If you deny the huge importance of that change, you're quite simply making a fool of yourself.

[Deleted]

Pay to win = Paying real life money to improve your character ingame.


Whether it's buying gear, buying extra stats you can't get normally, level boosts, gold.

Those are just different levels of p2w but they all are p2w.

Errr no.

Pay to win, is pay to win. I pay and i have the 100% chance to win something, while someone else don't.

Pay to win must also be something provided directly from the Game Developers. So no, buy gold for a boost isn't even a direct pay to win. If you think it is, then it's my/your Country that makes the game pay to win, because i can have money thanks to the economy and then i can buy a token and then i can buy a boost. Or maybe are the trees that makes the game pay to win, because that's where paper come from......

A lot of people here shuold understand WHEN to stop the causal chain of events, because you can't go backwards where you find more confortable for your opinion. Blizzard sell gold. Period. Gold does not directly make me win the game (if we even can call this winning). The best comparison is weapon selling. Weapon selling is, under certain condition, legal.

If i kill someone, it's not the seller or the State fault, but mine. This mean that Gold or Weapon per se are not pay to win or killing instrument alone.

And if we really want to be honest, nowadays there are very very very very few pay to win games. A lot of games, even mobile ones, are more pay to hasten, you pay to get something really really faster in comparison to someone who never spill a cent. But, even if very very slowly, you can get everything for free.

You cuold say:"Well, if both Blizzard and State stop selling Gold/Weapon, everything cuold be better!". False, becasue both in WoW and in real life, there will always be someone willing to buy Gold and Weapons from illegal sources. Blizzard decision to sell gold is perfectly in line with a anti gold seller policy.

[potis]

ummmmm...

use $$$ buy wow gold from blizzard...pay Super Mythic Raid Guild to carry and feed you gear. <---how is that not pay to win?

What did you win? Gear 4 months after its relevant?

As i said 5 times in this thread already, only people that have no clue how the game works and what it is think of it this way or people that believe raiding is some hard thing to do.

[ComputerNerd]

The token changed it in a very fundamental way. Before you had to achieve something worthy of trading in game (e.g., farm a lot of gold) to be able to trade with others for something valuable (e.g., crafted raid gear). With tokens you no longer need to achieve something of equal value in game to trade, but can simply use your credit card. If you deny the huge importance of that change, you're quite simply making a fool of yourself.

The token did not.
There have for a very long time been 3rd parties offering the same, which was enabled by the player trade mechanics.
What actually changed mechanics-wise of what players could trade directly to each other via the in-game UI twhen the token was introduced ?
Not a thing.

It only changed the options for who the money went to.
It create that real money fo as seem you describe it, it not being an option before to use your credit card.

It existed before, that same option.
Just via dodgy 3rd parties.
Don't act like it didn't.

For years players have been able to get just what you describe there, and even more from goldsellers.
The token did not introduce that.

No, you are making a fool of yourself.

[Deleted]

There have for a very long time been 3rd parties offering the same, which was enabled by the player trade mechanics.

There are many ways to cheat that have existed in WoW, and will get you banned if you're caught. It is completely different from Blizzard officially selling gold. For the vast majority of players, buying gold was not an option, now it is. The token changes everything.

[Pratt]

Some years ago I would've never accepted this but I've since come to terms with the fact that most MMOs have some P2W elements nowadays and the possibility of buying gold in WoW doesn't bother me too much, partly because I've found it relatively easy to make gold in-game as well so I've never been tempted to sell tokens (on the contrary - I've actually bought a bunch!).

I remember when Bliz said they would NEVER allow players to pay $ for an in-game advantage. How the times change.

[ComputerNerd]

There are many ways to cheat that have existed in WoW, and will get you banned if you're caught. It is completely different from Blizzard officially selling gold. For the vast majority of players, buying gold was not an option, now it is. The token changes everything.

It is not.
You said it yourself, describing the very process that existed for years before the token.
But said that is what the token created.
Utterly false.

Before you had to achieve something worthy of trading in game (e.g., farm a lot of gold) to be able to trade with others for something valuable (e.g., crafted raid gear).

Before the token you could do exactly that.

It does not change everything.
Is it allowing players to spend gold or currency on anything that they could not before.
NO.

There is no argument to be made when the player trade model is virtually unchanged, something such an accusation is completely reliant upon.

You are just contradicting yourself, pretending you didn't say what you just did.

You made a very clear claim, that before you could not do that.
Wrong.

Pre-order a game, get to play it earlier than someone else.
Oh wait, that makes it pay to win surely because you gain an advantage.
See how silly that argument gets.

[pateuvasiliu]

Errr no.

Pay to win, is pay to win. I pay and i have the 100% chance to win something, while someone else don't.

No. In the gaming world pay to win = buy ingame benefits with gold.

Doesn't matter if it's gear you can earn ingame or if it's gear superior to the one ingame. It's still pay to win.

If I farm Illidan 1 year to get Warglaives and you buy them for 200$ then that's pay to win.

[Deleted]

No. In the gaming world pay to win = buy ingame benefits with gold.

Doesn't matter if it's gear you can earn ingame or if it's gear superior to the one ingame. It's still pay to win.

If I farm Illidan 1 year to get Warglaives and you buy them for 200$ then that's pay to win.

Nice to see how you ignored my other half of the post! Very smart!

[pateuvasiliu]

Nice to see how you ignored my other half of the post! Very smart!

You were being apologetic.

Pay to hasten. Pay for convenience. There's no such thing. It's just a term people invented.

It's pay to win.

If someone can earn with real life dollars what I have to work for ingame, it's pay to win. And I have no intention of playing such games.

WoW doesn't have that big an issue since it's just gold and gold hasn't meant much in WoW for a long while now.

I've always been a Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK guy, what comes after doesn't interest me. And none of those were p2w.

[Thage]

My definition of 'pay to win' is games like Black Desert Online where players who have been buying off the cash shop have an insurmountable advantage over those who haven't, or games like Phantasy Star Online 2 where you're almost required to purchase 'safe' grinders off the cash shop if you want to craft anything meaningful at level cap (and the best gear is crafted) or if you want to improve your kickass crafted gear without a risk of destroying it or downgrading it from using obtainable-in-game grinders.

[-Spetz-]

You were being apologetic.

Pay to hasten. Pay for convenience. There's no such thing. It's just a term people invented.

It's pay to win.

If someone can earn with real life dollars what I have to work for ingame, it's pay to win. And I have no intention of playing such games.

WoW doesn't have that big an issue since it's just gold and gold hasn't meant much in WoW for a long while now.

I've always been a Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK guy, what comes after doesn't interest me. And none of those were p2w.

So under your definition every single game is pay to win? Even offline Skyrim/Fallout/Minesweeper/Solitaire? Because you could always get ahead by paying real dollars to some powerleveler to level you up or progress you in the game.

[Quibble]

Pay to hasten. Pay for convenience. There's no such thing. It's just a term people invented.

It's pay to win.

Pay to win is also a term people invented.. What is your point?

I've always been a Vanilla/TBC/WOTLK guy, what comes after doesn't interest me. And none of those were p2w.

If the current game is P2W, then those were aswell. People have been selling boost runs since vanilla..

[Deleted]

If we take a look to all the other games with real P2W elements, we see the whole P2W process requires usually 2 or 3 steps until you have the stuff in your bags.

Pay -> klick -> win

You can do this all the time you want. There is nothing unpredictable, no suprises, no extra work, no limitation... just

Pay -> klick -> win

In most cases you got already spammed with new available features once you logged in. Advertises all over the place. You only need to

Pay -> klick -> win

If you want your mount, your legendary or your second level cap char right now in this second

Pay -> klick -> win

If you want gold over the offical WoW way, then

Pay -> klick -> get the token -> put in the ingame AH -> wait minutes/hours/days -> hope for the exchange rate you aimed for -> win?

The legal and fastest way to get an 110 Char in WoW

Pay -> klick -> get an 100 char -> level it to 110 -> win?

If you want an 925 titanforged six-feathered fan with socket and tertiary stat in WoW

Pay -> klick -> get 50 tokens just to be safe -> sell 50 tokens on the ingame ah -> wait minutes/hours/days/weeks/months -> hope for an not so volatile exchange rate -> wait 635 days until this trinket appears in the AH -> win?

If you want the best of the best endgame weapon in an another true P2W-MMORPG, then you must only

Pay -> klick -> win