WOW- Now pay to win?

[sam86]

You couldnt buy it for real money? Are u living under a rock? U could litterly buy gold from farmers, hell you could even buy boe with real money, tcg items. You could pay a chinese kid to level your char in fucking days. Stop this p2w bs. In ANY game where trading is a thing their are elements of real life money involved, its as simple as that.

i wasn't living under rock
it was illegal
this is like saying that since u can buy heroin government should make it legal, or since u can grab a gun and steal a bank government should make it legal

[Daronokk]

buying BoE’s has been a thing since
Classic so if that’s your metric then the game has always been P2W.

As long as there is no real money involved it's not pay to win.

WoW tokens made it possible.

[Lolites]

It's been the case ever since the idiotic token was unveiled.

its been the case long before the token was even an idea

[nocturnus]

Anchoring expectations is a known tactic in sales. A good example would be the case of Personal Loot vs Master Loot. Despite the arguments on both sides, Personal loot was pushed through due to vocal outcry. Now how often do people even think about Master Loot? Cosmetic loot boxes being a normal thing that many people now defend as being harmless is maybe a better example.

Maybe my question wasn't clear; you suggested that buying low quality items for a "higher price" (higher than what?) would translate negatively in the game. I wanted to know what made you come to this conclusion. The examples you provided seem to be unrelated.

I highly recommend that you watch the Preach video on the effects of corrupted gear. But as for why it's a problem what demands Timmy has? You clearly haven't seen the rampant elitism in the public group finder. Asking for gear and achievement requirements that are double what the run actually needs is commonplace! To be fair, it's a condition that existed before corrupted gear. But corrupted BOEs are only going to make it worse.

I watched a little bit. I found the part about randomness being more of a factor than skill quite interesting since this is the reason I quit playing in the first place; I don't want a proc to determine that I'm top DPS.

As for the elitism you're referring to: Yeah, I agree that it's horrible and I also agree that people generally demand a much higher itemlevel than is required to warrant an invite. But a. it's their right and b. it suggests there's a much, MUCH more pressing issue Blizzard should acknowlegde: People do not like the content they make.

Allow me to elaborate: Developers make content that's generally perceived as bland or boring. Yet, said content has a very small chance to reward you with disproportionally powerful items, which means that people are inclined to repeat content that they find boring, ad nauseam. What would you do, if you felt like you had to do content, you do not enjoy? Make a group that overpowers said content to minimize the chance of failure which would result in frustration and in the end a massive waste of time.

Do I agree with this mentality? Absolutely not; I never gave a fuck about itemlevel. But people that play games like wow, generally do and are willing to go to great lengths for a stupid piece of purple gear. Even do things they dislike, which is ironic considering the fact that wow is a game and games should be fun.

There are a number of factors that have changed since the days of TBC. The market for F2P and P2W has increased drastically. The overall atmostphere and environment of what's acceptable and normal has likewise changed. Buying items in-game with real money has become a growing concern in the entire gaming industry, as illustrated by the Battlefront 2 fiasco with EA, among many other cases.

People buying in-game items and cosmetics with real money is more or less an accepted norm for many people. Whales are a reality of gaming, and with Activision-Blizzard's increased focus on the mobile market(and associated business models), you can see the influence in wow with more paid cash shop items than ever before. I have ZERO personal doubts that all of these BOEs being dropped into the game are a test or data-gathering experiment by Blizzard. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm not.

All true, yet, neither of the examples provided is evidence of an increasing amount of people buying "full sets" of gear from the AH and thereby 'paying to win'.

Just to make myself clear: I think that buying gear is like paying someone to build the Lego you bought. Ergo, one of the most dimwitted things you can do. But heck, if people want to 'play' the game that way, it's their right.

[Lolites]

i wasn't living under rock
it was illegal
this is like saying that since u can buy heroin government should make it legal, or since u can grab a gun and steal a bank government should make it legal

robbing a bank is the worst analogy to BUYING stuff ive ever heard...
and yes government SHOULD make drugs illegal, would be better for economic, crime rate and addicts too...

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End of thread right there, thus WoW is now pay to win.

and always been, as buying gold was so common blizz rather introduced token than baning huge part of their playerbase

[MoanaLisa]

Oh they do..apparently Method spend 50 000 $ (or rather Euros) on gear. Limit as well. People here claim they have to do it to be competitive in their guild etc etc.

On the other hand they will be/are selling mythic carries to make the money back. (well...not sure how it will ever go back to their wallet, since converting gold to money goes into the b.net balance, right?

My evergreen objection to this argument is that the people who make it seem to believe that this level of spending is common. Yes, it happens. No, it's not common for people to drop a lot of money on a BOE. You are very unlikely to ever run into anyone that spent that much real life money on stuff to get from the AH.

[Raelbo]

Oh they do..apparently Method spend 50 000 $ (or rather Euros) on gear. Limit as well.

That is false. And easily debunked

Method didn't buy any tokens. They spend 300M gold (some of which was spent on tokens to buy realm transfers and such), which was the equivalent of spending $40K. But they made the gold in-game.

[Raelbo]

Yeah I dont assume everyone knows how logic work, but at least I do.

Maybe it's time for you to start applying it to these discussions then.

Yes, you think it's "simple" and that the token clearly makes WoW p2w. That just tells me you've not really put enough thought into it.

The truth is that p2w has no universally accepted definition. So how people will choose to define it for themselves is subjective. People who are genuinely capable of thinking critically and logically (as you'd like to believe you do) would at least consider the following when deciding how they choose to define p2w:

1) people generally regard a game being "p2w" as bad/player unfriendly/undesirable
2) so what it is about "p2w" that creates that negative association?
3) are those same characteristics part in your definition?
4) what is the agenda of the person defining p2w?


p2w is regarded as a negative thing because it coerces players into either spending money or having to settle for an inferior gameplay experience (either an inability to compete on an equal footing, or lack of access to certain content).

The WoW token has none of this nonsense associated with it. While it gives players the ability to obtain a bunch of gold for zero effort, it isn't nearly compelling enough to coerce anyone into doing anything. It's perfectly feasible for anyone to play WoW, see all the content, and compete on an equal footing with anyone else, without ever needing to resort to tokens.

The only reason that it's popular for people to push the notion that tokens are p2w is because they want to use it as a strawman in some other (typically anti-WoW) agenda (like the OP of this very thread).


Yes, it is totally true that the token has some p2w-like features. But it shouldn't require some kind of genius to recognise that there's a bit more to being p2w that is conspicuously absent in the token system.

And before you accuse me of having some agenda of my own, of course I do. I like WoW. So I want features that are good for the game and good for me. I have zero motive whatsoever to defend a feature which is bad for the game.

You, however, as a vocal hater of the game have every reason to manufacture false arguments in order to shit on it. Stop pretending that this is about logic for you. It's patently not.

[Raelbo]

As long as there is no real money involved it's not pay to win.

Close, but not complete.

As long as real money is not required, it's not pay to win.

WoW tokens made it possible.

WoW tokens aren't even close to being a requirement for anything. It's not even possible for them to become so because the gold they buy is created by people playing the game. You literally cannot have everyone choosing to buy gold.

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It doesn't mean anything in itself, it only means what you and only you do with the conclusion that you come to. Does it ruin the entire game for you? Is it morally apprehensive? Do you shrug it off? How do you act on it / have acted on it when you found out?

Spot on. And therein lies the problem.

By and large (with a few exceptions) people who want to argue the case for tokens making the game p2w simply want to claim that being p2w is evidence of how shit the game/Ion/Blizzard have become. It's a strawman argument which, sadly, a lot of people seem to fall for.

The reality is that regardless of how anyone chooses to define p2w, the term itself remains a pejorative and I believe it's disingenuous to come up with a defintion for the term that ignores this.

It's like calling someone an asshole, defending the label on the basis that they're really good at sorting shit out.

[SirCowdog]

Maybe my question wasn't clear; you suggested that buying low quality items for a "higher price" (higher than what?) would translate negatively in the game. I wanted to know what made you come to this conclusion. The examples you provided seem to be unrelated.

It was an illustration the concept of anchoring. You'll note that I said "IF players are willing to accept less, but pay more, what will the corporation sell?". I think what you're fishing for is some example you can pick apart, when all I was talking about is theory. Maybe I'm wrong on that.

But this is general market and economic theory. The AAA gaming industry has shown time and again that they WILL push the envelope for what players will accept. And they'll keep pushing until something breaks, like with Battlefront 2, or the Diablo 3 auction house, or Fallout 76. Until players stop accepting(and buying) sub-par products, AAA publishers will keep pushing to release them.

And, generally speaking, people DO keep buying and pre-ordering these unfinished, sub-par products. That's why game companies keep doing it.

As for the elitism you're referring to: Yeah, I agree that it's horrible and I also agree that people generally demand a much higher itemlevel than is required to warrant an invite. But a. it's their right and b. it suggests there's a much, MUCH more pressing issue Blizzard should acknowlegde: People do not like the content they make.

Allow me to elaborate: Developers make content that's generally perceived as bland or boring. Yet, said content has a very small chance to reward you with disproportionally powerful items, which means that people are inclined to repeat content that they find boring, ad nauseam. What would you do, if you felt like you had to do content, you do not enjoy? Make a group that overpowers said content to minimize the chance of failure which would result in frustration and in the end a massive waste of time.

I agree that the scenario you just described does play a factor. Where I think the real issue comes from is not that the player is perceiving the content as bland or boring, or that they don't enjoy it. I think that a great many people simply do not want to be faced with challenging content. Who mostly just want to receive items with as little work as possible. This is why the concept of swiping a credit card for gear, then using that paid gear to further seek easier runs, is so corrupting(if you'll forgive the pun) to the community of PUGs. It's no longer about playing the game, but just being fed rewards with as little effort as possible.

Granted, that desire to get easy rewards manifests in many different ways. The requests for EZ-mode in games like Dark Souls. The complaints about being entitled to gear during the Master Loot debate. The purchasing of gear through the token system.

All true, yet, neither of the examples provided is evidence of an increasing amount of people buying "full sets" of gear from the AH and thereby 'paying to win'.

Just to make myself clear: I think that buying gear is like paying someone to build the Lego you bought. Ergo, one of the most dimwitted things you can do. But heck, if people want to 'play' the game that way, it's their right.

I don't believe I ever claimed people were buying full sets(please do correct me if I'm wrong. I'm involved in many debates, and it's sometimes hard to keep track of t hem all), nor that full sets were required to fit a P2W situation. :/ But even a handful of corrupted gear pieces with the right traits can provide a significant boost to performance, as described by Preach.

As for playing how a person wants, as is their right: I actually tend to agree. However, Blizzard is facilitating a poor gameplay dynamic and exacerbating the issue by enabling players to be more and more lazy. Basically catering to the problem I described in the middle of this post. And that, I hope you agree, is a direction that doesn't lead anywhere good for the game, despite being an attractive method for blizzard to further monetize the game.


EDIT: Just a heads up. While I find this discussion super interesting, I'm going in for LASIK surgery tomorrow to fix my eyes. I won't be able to respond anywhere from 24-48 hours. Don't think I'm ignoring posts during that time. I just won't be able to read the screen.

[Raelbo]

Okay Im not taking you serious after that statement.

In your logic "being critical of something = hater"

If thats as far as your grasp of this discussion goes, I dont think I have much else to say to you.

Ah right. Nice response. Ignore the entire argument because you know you're beaten, but still try to claim victory.

And no, I never said "being critical of something = hater". The logic that made that leap is clearly broken.

If you want to be perceived as "critical" then please demonstrate critical thought in what you say. Which means constructing arguments instead of firing off baseless assertions all the time.

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Just a heads up. While I find this discussion super interesting, I'm going in for LASIK surgery tomorrow to fix my eyes. I won't be able to respond anywhere from 24-48 hours. Don't think I'm ignoring posts during that time. I just won't be able to read the screen.

Good luck with that dude. Hope you make a speedy recovery!

[Sofo1]

It's closer to p2w than we have ever been

But i like corruption !

[Very Tired]

It's not really a question that's going to have an agreed upon answer seeing as there's no official definition of what "pay to win" means in this context. Webster certainly isn't going to weigh in here.

But personally I would argue that pay to win sources would need to be official parts of the game. Paying real money for gold should be taken under consideration from wow tokens, but paying real money to a gold farmer shouldn't seeing as that's actually against the rules. Otherwise I could go bribe a GM somewhere to give my character the best gear and suddenly every game is pay to win.

I will say though Limit and Method are lucky that corrupted effects came on BoEs in the first place. Seeing the massive DPS boost they gave and what was needed to down the final boss. Had that not been the deal, it could have easily been a case of waiting for the first mythic guild to get enough RNG luck with enough good corrupted drops. Which could have been anyone.

[iosdeveloper]

a long time ago before WotLK came out i got the beta key and managed to negotiate 4 T6 pieces from Black Temple raid for this beta key, than i paid webmoney to a hunter for a agility polearm from sunwell trash

that's how i geared my retri pala right before the WotLK prepatch, it was a 2 days massacre on battlegrounds lol! good times

you could always win at wow by paying

[nocturnus]

It was an illustration the concept of anchoring. You'll note that I said "IF players are willing to accept less, but pay more, what will the corporation sell?". I think what you're fishing for is some example you can pick apart, when all I was talking about is theory. Maybe I'm wrong on that.

But this is general market and economic theory. The AAA gaming industry has shown time and again that they WILL push the envelope for what players will accept. And they'll keep pushing until something breaks, like with Battlefront 2, or the Diablo 3 auction house, or Fallout 76. Until players stop accepting(and buying) sub-par products, AAA publishers will keep pushing to release them.

And, generally speaking, people DO keep buying and pre-ordering these unfinished, sub-par products. That's why game companies keep doing it.

You keep providing completely unrelated examples. No, I don't care about 'picking apart' an example I deem related; I don't care for wow, nor for the route it has taken. But regardless, we can drop this subject, lest we go in circles.

I agree that the scenario you just described does play a factor. Where I think the real issue comes from is not that the player is perceiving the content as bland or boring, or that they don't enjoy it. I think that a great many people simply do not want to be faced with challenging content. Who mostly just want to receive items with as little work as possible. This is why the concept of swiping a credit card for gear, then using that paid gear to further seek easier runs, is so corrupting(if you'll forgive the pun) to the community of PUGs. It's no longer about playing the game, but just being fed rewards with as little effort as possible.

Granted, that desire to get easy rewards manifests in many different ways. The requests for EZ-mode in games like Dark Souls. The complaints about being entitled to gear during the Master Loot debate. The purchasing of gear through the token system.

I think (and lets remind ourselves that these thoughts we're sharing are nothing more than opinions, we don't know anything, in the end) that people are willing to do challenging content as long as it's fun. Scripted content, be it raids, dungeons or m+ can be challenging the first few times. Afterwards, they stop being challenging and start being tedious. Tedium, isn't fun, ergo players stop enjoying the content. Rather than just stopping like any sane person would do, they feel compelled to continue running the treadmill for that shiny piece of gear. This results in attempts to mitigate as much of the content as they can and one way to do this, is to overpower said content thereby minimizing time spent doing something they dislike.

The wish for an easy mode in DS isn't related though; in that particlar case people just want to be able to play a game they seem to generally like, without frustration and bursts of anger. Why not add an easy mode for them? Who cares if Timmy plays Dark Souls on 'ultra easy super-tellytubby mode'? It literally doesn't affect anyone else's gameplay. If elite Tony wants to be a hard-ass he can play Dark Souls on ultra hard mode and flex that amazing achievement on his reddit channel.

I don't believe I ever claimed people were buying full sets(please do correct me if I'm wrong. I'm involved in many debates, and it's sometimes hard to keep track of t hem all), nor that full sets were required to fit a P2W situation. :/ But even a handful of corrupted gear pieces with the right traits can provide a significant boost to performance, as described by Preach.

I might just have misunderstood you when I read this:

The reason why people get so bent about Timmy buying a full set of gear is because Timmy then goes into the M+ scene and starts demanding that everyone else do the same.

Anyway, I don't really know how 'corrupted' gear works, so I believe you when you say that even one item can have a drastic impact on performance. We're on the same page there, performance should be determined by skill and not by a random item. But that's a discepancy in vision, apparently. Blizzard obviously thinks everyone deserves a chance at 'topping meters' regardless of how well they play.

As for playing how a person wants, as is their right: I actually tend to agree. However, Blizzard is facilitating a poor gameplay dynamic and exacerbating the issue by enabling players to be more and more lazy. Basically catering to the problem I described in the middle of this post. And that, I hope you agree, is a direction that doesn't lead anywhere good for the game, despite being an attractive method for blizzard to further monetize the game.

We definitely agree here. But again, it's poor game play according to our standard.

EDIT: Just a heads up. While I find this discussion super interesting, I'm going in for LASIK surgery tomorrow to fix my eyes. I won't be able to respond anywhere from 24-48 hours. Don't think I'm ignoring posts during that time. I just won't be able to read the screen.

Good luck with that mate! /muscleemoticon

[Zephire]

Maybe I don't understand the token market but isn't the gold technicaly player gold only? I mean, the token doesn't generate money, only transfer it?

You buy a token for real life money.
Someone buys the token for gold.
The same someone uses the token to pay subscription.

Which means:
IRL moneys becomes gold and then becomes IRL money again.

Which means it would be the same if people just farmed gold the normal way?

If by p2w you mean real money, then no.
If by p2w you mean with gold, then no, it hasn't become p2w but kinda always was.

Please do correct me about the tokens though!

[Raelbo]

Anyway, I don't really know how 'corrupted' gear works, so I believe you when you say that even one item can have a drastic impact on performance.

I personally believe that the "drastic impact" has been massively exaggerated. Yes, some corruptions are better than others under certain conditions, even significantly so. But people's perception of by just how much has been severely distorted by, for lack of a better word, sensationalism. In real world terms, I'd argue that the vast majority of players are going to fall into a band where "luck" will affect their dps by up to 5% or so. It would take truly exceptional luck to obtain the kind of theoretical advantage that is possible of maybe 10-15%. But when people start making wild claims of 25-40% performance just from luck, they're talking bollocks, based on a log that was captured by someone who went out of his way to engineer it to make a point.

We're on the same page there, performance should be determined by skill and not by a random item. But that's a discepancy in vision, apparently. Blizzard obviously thinks everyone deserves a chance at 'topping meters' regardless of how well they play.

I don't agree that Blizzard think everyone deserves a chance at topping meters. I would argue that their philosophy is more along the lines that everyone who puts in the effort deserves that chance. Skill still absolutely plays a critical role in performance. The point of luck isn't take away the impact the skill, it's simply to allow a bit of variation in final outcome in order to remove the boredom that comes with predictability.

For example, whether you like Method or Limit, the fact is that the world first race got a lot more interesting when someone else won. In any spectator sport, knowing who is going to win isn't nearly as exciting as hoping that they're going to win.

[Beuargh]

Isn't a WoW token only like 200k gold.

Wouldn't that mean that to buy a piece of gear for 2 million gold, you'd need to pay 200 USD?

That doesn't seem like something people do.

Its not new. Whales. Thats how they are called and thats how EA, 2K games, rockstar games, mobil games etc are making hundreds of millions.

Maybe something you dont do, but there is A LOT of people doing exactly this. And every game company understood it and want their part. Blizz is just following the trend with a little twist: those powerfull items are not directly in the shop, but they are BoE and you can buy gold for real money with tokens....

[Raelbo]

Maybe I don't understand the token market but isn't the gold technicaly player gold only? I mean, the token doesn't generate money, only transfer it?

You buy a token for real life money.
Someone buys the token for gold.
The same someone uses the token to pay subscription.

Which means:
IRL moneys becomes gold and then becomes IRL money again.

Which means it would be the same if people just farmed gold the normal way?

If by p2w you mean real money, then no.
If by p2w you mean with gold, then no, it hasn't become p2w but kinda always was.

Please do correct me about the tokens though!

You're spot on.

[Frozenbeef]

Define win.... Haven't raised since wotlk as i just found is plain boring. Collecting achievements, toys,mounts and pets is where it's at :P