"Pay to Win"

[Xires]

Not pay-to-win at all? So you can't say... Pay money for a game time token, which you can then auction for gold, and then use that gold to buy a crafted legendary item, a piece of gear with stats?

Granted, I don't think this elevates the game to pay-to-win status, but when arguing this point, be careful of the words you choose.

Personally, I think it would only be pay-to-win if the ONLY way to get the most powerful items was by paying Blizzard for them. You instead have a choice of buying gold or farming it up yourself - either way you end up with the same item.

exactly...."a piece of gear". You aren't going to deck your character in 20 pieces of BiS gear from the AH because it doesn't exist. You can can 1 or 2 BiS items from the AH and even then it won't be the highest ilvl because right now I doubt you'll find a 925 ilvl piece of gear on the AH and you won't be able to deck your character out in it. You STILL have to raid mythic to get the BEST gear. "Pay to win" is when you can get ALL the best gear via money/gold...and you can't....nowhere NEAR that. You can't get your BiS trinkets, tier gear, good legendaries, or even anywhere near your BiS gear list. So, no....WOW is not pay to win as you can't get anywhere NEAR the top with what little you can get. Also, not everyone wants to spend $20 dollars on a token so that they can put it on the AH (one still isn't enough to buy a legendary) to gain a bad legendary and those crafted ones are just that....bad.

People like you see "orange" and automatically think "ZOMG!!!!!" when in reality...a lot of them suck and were infact so bad...that blizzard needed to buff or even redesign MANY of them and the whole purpose of the crafted ones are so you can feel special until a REAL legendary actually drops that doesn't suck.

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Spend real money to get gold, spent your newly acquired gold on a guild that carry´s you through anything in the game you are not willing to progress yourself on, get your new gear/titles/achievements. Blizzards ToS are not against this so: indirectly you can play this game in a P2W scenario.

How many people have MILLIONS of gold to spend for each run of the multiple the carry's it will take to get you decked out in the best gear?...btw, everything would need to titanforged to be "the best". Also that is up to guilds entirely and there's nothing that blizzard can do about it. So the question is is wow "PaytoWinNow" and officially it isn't and never has been, but unofficially it ALWAYS has been if you want to look at it as a "supply MASSIVE amounts of gold for multiple weekly carries until you finally get your full BiS list". Only a small fraction of a fraction of the player base has the gold to do that so like today and the last x-pac and the one before that and so on and so forth....we still have massive amounts of people who can not and never will get the best gear with the same low ilvl/low skilled player on the forums asking the same tired question "Is wow pay2win"? The answer is still the same...."No". That is why I am likely 60+ ilvls higher than you....because you can't pay to win...but I do raid to win.

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The game has been P2W since molten core opened. You could buy raid carries for real money since 2005.

That doesn't make the game "pay to win" and you'd need multiple carries to get your BiS list and 99% of the playerbase do not have anywhere near close to that kind of money. Most of the player base actually has less than 20k gold on their account.

[Deleted]

lol..no you can't. You need skill and LOTS of gear that you can only get in mythic raids. You can't buy gear in the quantity or quality that you need to have any advantage over anybody that raids end game.

if one guild decides to buy all the best gear possible from the ah and another guild does buy no gear at all from the ah, you say to me that the first guild will not have an advantage over the second guild in the progression race?

[Lodreh]

What is YOUR definition of "pay to win"?

As it relates to WoW, do you believe the game is now pay to win, or not at all pay to win?

Pay to win means that paying money has a distinct advantage over those who do not.

WoW is pay to play... doesn't matter if you use tokens or not... someone is paying. There is not enough meaningful gear that is BoE to consider WoW pay to win. At best you could spend a couple hundred dollars on tokens to be on par with someone else that raids regularly. It doesn't give you an advantage over the raider. In fact without earning the gear chances are your skill is subpar and you will have a harder time progressing past that point.

[Deleted]

Unless you can buy BoE gear that is ilvl 940 which others cant have then it's not P2W.

[Cromatus]

I thought Jaylock is known by now in the mmo-champion community as just a big troll. 36 pages man... come on guys.

[Deleted]

if one guild decides to buy all the best gear possible from the ah and another guild does buy no gear at all from the ah, you say to me that the first guild will not have an advantage over the second guild in the progression race?

Buy what gear? All the gear dropping is capped at the ilvl, this isn't the black market levels of OP back in MoP

[Fabinas]

if one guild decides to buy all the best gear possible from the ah and another guild does buy no gear at all from the ah, you say to me that the first guild will not have an advantage over the second guild in the progression race?

You buy it from AH. From players that played the game and were lucky enough to get the drops. Probably the guild has enough gold to buy all that supposedly good gear from carry runs which means... they played the game for it. You cant assume they all got the gold from tokens. Also, having enough gear on AH to kit a guild roster means there are other guilds better than the buyer guild to farm the place and produce the gear. Is that also p2w?

So, hypothetically, yes, but this isnt happening in WoW. Try again.

[Deleted]

Probably the guild has enough gold to buy all that supposedly good gear from carry runs which means... they played the game for it.

What if they didn't?

Also, having enough gear on AH to kit a guild roster means there are other guilds better than the buyer guild to farm the place and produce the gear. Is that also p2w?

Something that you guys need to finally understand is that pay to win does not only mean having something in the game that immediately puts you at the top of the ladder for money. Getting ingame advantages that can be obtained with outside money is what is already defined as pay to win. It doesn't matter if you can get a little advantage in Elvwynn Forest or in Nighthold. Advantage is advantage and you kids need to grow a pair and just accept that stuff like this is in the game. It doesn't immediately make the game super terrible, but its in there.

[Deleted]

if one guild decides to buy all the best gear possible from the ah and another guild does buy no gear at all from the ah, you say to me that the first guild will not have an advantage over the second guild in the progression race?

Maybe people just are in bad guilds, but back when I was an officer in TBC/WotLK/Cata, we definitely used gold to our advantage. There were all kinds of things at various points in time you could do, like buy materials for resistance gear and flasks/food/pots instead of having our members waste time and burn out grinding them, buying some newly introduced expensive BoEs or crafting items, etc.

[Moozart]

there is NOTHING in this game pay to win, why is this thread even still open?

[Elim Garak]

Something that you guys need to finally understand is that pay to win does not only mean having something in the game that immediately puts you at the top of the ladder for money. Getting ingame advantages that can be obtained with outside money is what is already defined as pay to win. It doesn't matter if you can get a little advantage in Elvwynn Forest or in Nighthold. Advantage is advantage and you kids need to grow a pair and just accept that stuff like this is in the game. It doesn't immediately make the game super terrible, but its in there.

it's all pretty simple. You just have no idea what p2w means. Sadly the knowledge of that doesn't just magically come with age, oh grown-ass one.

[ComputerNerd]

There is really no need for me to do that, if you want to you have a go at it, but the one i described is perfect. Pay money to get an advantage in game, period.
What you want is proof why blizzard is p2w, not a definition of what is p2w.

What that just shows very clearly it isn't "perfect",.
It is simply insufficient.
You keep refusing which only proves the point.
You can't.

You say you have defined it elsewhere, but then say the one you have given is perfect.
Contradictory, as you can't have one be perfect but also added to in fragments scattered about the thread.

I am not the one trying to tell someone what pay to win is - or isn't.
I am simply telling you the argument is weak.
You are wanting to believe I am picking fault with the idea that the game is pay to win, when in reality to do that you need a good argument to start with.
It is your poor argument that I am picking fault with, not the original question.

You refuse to define it properly, because you can't.
Nobody who honestly has such a good argument put together would keep refusing to put it down.
You made the argument that wow is pay to win, so you should absolutely define it properly.

I have repeatedly shown how vague and therefore insufficient single word definitions of core parts of the argument are with no context.

[Salty Maud]

So not the best gear. Which anyone could've bought or farmed in BRF. Totally not pay 2 win.

Better than the best gear available actually. We are talking about highmaul progression, remember? Black rock foundry is the next raid after highmaul. Not really relevant to this discussion though since (legitimately) buying gold was not a thing in early WoD. But you asked an i answered.

I took your scenario and removed "buy gold" part and it's the same scenario with the same outcome, thus buying gold has nothing to do with it.

You just removed gold as a factor. If having millions of gold to spare was a common reality the prices would adjust accordingly and then again gold would become a factor. 925 items would be priced in tens of millions instead hundreds of thousands. Now then, if you don't have more than the average raiders total net worth to spend on a single piece of titanforged bullshit (which should be the more likely case), you have 3 options:
1. Drop what you are doing currently and start farming gold. You are now at a disadvantage because you could be spending that time more effectively farming m+ or doing pulls in _insert raid here_ instead.
2. Ignore the item and continue business as usual, keep doing whatever you are doing and stay on your natural curve.
3. Buy the gold, buy the item and you are now instantly ahead the curve by the one item you just effectively purchased with real money.

Unless you can buy BoE gear that is ilvl 940 which others cant have then it's not P2W.

925 is the TF cap currently. But yes, you can get 925 that others are very unlikely to ever have. I mean they could get lucky, but it not very likely to ever happen.

You aren't going to deck your character in 20 pieces of BiS gear from the AH because it doesn't exist. You can can 1 or 2 BiS items from the AH and even then it won't be the highest ilvl because right now I doubt you'll find a 925 ilvl piece of gear on the AH and you won't be able to deck your character out in it. You STILL have to raid mythic to get the BEST gear.

Have you considered the situation where you had 2 otherwise identical mythic raiders, but raider A gets that sweet 925 socket leech belt from the auction house and raider B keeps his boring ordinary 905 mythic belt. Would not raider A have an advantage over raider B now?

I doubt you'll find a 925 ilvl piece of gear on the AH

Thats easy actually, just set your TSM to watch for 925 items on all realms and when you find one, buy gold on that realm, buy the item, transfer the item with a character to your main realm. Ez pez, all it cost was money.

[Erous]

WoW has arguably been one of the cheapest games in terms of money spent that I've ever played in my life. Throwing money at WoW has never provided any strategic benefit.

[Elim Garak]

You just removed gold as a factor.

Are you intentionally obtuse or something?

IF someone with gold that they didn't buy can do this and it's not p2w - then it doesn't matter if someone else can do this by buying gold. Outcome is the same. Logic 101.

[Softbottom]

That doesn't make the game "pay to win" and you'd need multiple carries to get your BiS list and 99% of the playerbase do not have anywhere near close to that kind of money. Most of the player base actually has less than 20k gold on their account.

I am talking about real life money not gold. You think people don't have money to spend on stuff like this? Look how much money people on spend on hearthstone and HOTS shit

[Vorecien]

You can buy a WoW token for real money from Blizzard and then sell it on the AH for gold.

You're the second person to quote me on this one part. If you read further on, the OP and I came to that conclusion. This was covered like a week ago.

[Deleted]

IF someone with gold that they didn't buy can do this and it's not p2w - then it doesn't matter if someone else can do this by buying gold.

It matters a great deal. In one case you earned that gold by playing the game, in the other you just bought it. The first is the whole point of games, the second is pay2win.

[Softbottom]

Maybe if you focused on the subject instead.

There is a surprising rich variety of posts and perspectives.



FAR from everyone can afford. And especially not the amounts this thread is upon with BIS gear and boosts.

Isn't it nice when the wealthy expect that everyone else are, besides sunshine examples of poor addicts.

Wakey Wakey to a EU with record high unemployment, record high debt, record high expenses. etc. etc. etc. The poorest people i meet on the net are from US though. struggling to scrape together 10$. this other mmo i played, about half its players were doing in game labor to have their accounts paid. much what is happening in wow, but there it goes on in the silence. when the farmer sell his mats on ah to the gold buyer, proceed to sell the gold or now this latter times, token. the gold buyer now have his mats and only need to log on 2 hours two times a week. GG

Not everyone is in this boat though. Their are clearly a lot of people buying these services otherwise boosting companies wouldn't be in business.

[Skul]

Everyone saying WoW has no Pay 2 Win elements when my team sells top end gear to people for gold every week. And these people buying all this gear are definitely buying the gold with RL cash through Blizzard's supported system.