WOW- Now pay to win?

[Lora]

I see 475ilvl items with socket and good corruption for like 2-3 million on the AH. So now ppl buy wow tokens for real life money and then buy this items...

Is this good gameplay or not? Pay to win?

Blizzard probly happy about it as they earn more $$$




EDIT: What i mean by p2w is win the damage meter. More dps make dungeon/raid/pvp easyer. One with buyed BIS for real life money VS one with no corrupt or a bad one. Who would you put your money on? Who would you like to have in your raid/dungeon/arena. Also my english are pretty bad so sorry for not explaining so all understand. I did my best, sorry.


VERY funny thing is that i asked both if its good gameplay and if its P2W. None/few answer if its good gameplay. All get stuck if its P2W instead. Ppl are funny

Apparently Preach Gaming have a video about it.

WoW became pay to win the minute they released the token.

[Beuargh]

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

Its not just the token. Its also because they gave a chance to BoE items to become that powerfull with rng. Buying gold to pay for a run and get a chance to loot something powerfull is one thing. Buying gold to get it directly from the AH is another.

[sam86]

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

no it wasn't!?
wtf u talking about ? heck what was gold sink in old times in first place ?
exact opposite, we have the 10k mount wrath, the yak mount in MoP and half of playerbase didn't get it, now wow swim in gold and inflation is a joke
if u bought gold illegal i can name guilds who didn't, majority of wow players didn't, most ppl don't break laws, blizz made tokens only because activision decided to, and activision has a history that make even EA seems consumer friendly

[nocturnus]

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.

As I said, I don't know how corrupted gear works or how big its impact is. What I do know, is that when 'someone else wins', it should be due to skill and not luck. Which is why your example of Method seems out of place to me; another team was better than them, not luckier. Right?

As for the your example of predictibility being 'boring', couldn't you argue the opposite as well? If player X knows that player Y always tops the meters, player X might do an extra effort to beat player Y the next time.

Anyway, I admit I'm a bit ignorant on the subject, so don't take my opinions on the matter too seriously. I'm not a player, after all.

[Lolites]

Don't you mean they should make it "legal"?

well, obviuosly

[nocturnus]

no it wasn't!?
heck what was gold sink in old times in first place ?

The flying mount in TBC was 5k gold. Heck, that was a lot of gold for me; I just bought that shit. But as I said, I hardly ever do things I don't like. I didn't like farming gold and it was financially much more compelling to buy gold then to farm it, so it was a no brainer for me.

[Charge me Doctor]

It wasn't the case since Vanilla. No single item could increase your dps by 20%+

a krol blade or teebu

[SirCowdog]

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.

Corrupted gear, and before that Essences, and before that Azerite traits....are all examples of sub par products that Blizzard keeps spewing out. Why? Because I believe that players keep paying them for it. By extension, BfA is largely considered to be in competition for the title of "Worse WoW Expansion". But people keep paying them for it. 8.3 not really having all that much in the way of content, yet blizzard offers a 6 month sub "deal" to lock players in during a known content drought. Why? Because people keep paying them for it!

I really don't know how else to illustrate this point in a way that you'll accept. To me it's clear as day that this is happening. But you're right, it seems to be leading in circles.

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.

Some people, yes. But it's clear that there's at least an equal amount of people who aren't interested in challenge of any kind. Hence the idiocy of things like the movement to create an "EZ-Mode" for games like Sekiro. Hence why we have people who attempt to require absurdly high iLVL gear for relatively easy runs. They don't want "challenging but fun". They just want free loot with no effort.

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.

I don't think this type of person is very common. I think there are people who will turn up the difficulty and honestly seek to overcome greater challenges for greater rewards, and there are people who only want the rewards without working for them.

The type of person who will get bored very much WILL just go do something else.

Now, having just said that, I do think there's something to be said for burning out on the grind. That's certainly a problem of Blizzard's over-reliance on systematic, layered RNG that creates rewards and performance on pure luck rather than player effort or skill. That's definitely feeding into the problem. When a player has a choice between potentially spending weeks or months grinding away for almost nothing, or dropping some gold on a best in slot BOE.....which do you suppose they'll choose?

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.

Because the entire point of Souls-like games IS the difficulty! Take that away and the games are meaningless. Timmy would be better off just watching someone else stream it rather than pitching for the entire genre to alter its fundamental premise just to satisfy his laziness or lack of even trying to understand the purpose of the game. Where the harm comes in is with Timmy robbing himself of the very thing the game was meant to be.

Granted, WoW is not a Souls-like. However, I believe the harm in WoW stems from something similar as I just mentioned. In that when people start to come to expect the game to be easy, even when it's meant to be difficult, we start seeing situations like in M+ PUGs. Rather than just playing on an easier setting, Timmy is now asking everyone else to massively overgear more difficult runs....so that they're easier for him. And there are a LOT of Timmy's in the game right now.....largely, IMO, because Blizzard has not done anything to help Timmy play the game as it was intended.

Sorry, that's risking going off on another tangent where I'll start ranting about rated matchmaking for M+. Which is waaaaaaayyyy beyond the scope of this discussion.

I might just have misunderstood you when I read this:

Yeah, I think what I meant there was a combination of purchased BOEs and purchased carries. I probably was also using hyperbole too.

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.

You really should finish watching the entire Preach video. He explains it really well. What Blizzard wants is infinite gearing and infinite possibilities in order to pad the replayability of their content.

I might be confusing that with a Bellular video tho....

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

Referencing back to the Souls example: I think games need to be true to what they're designed to be. WoW is, in a general sense, a progression-based game, with the performance of the player influencing that progression. Whether it's raw time spent grinding, or raw skill in overcoming challenges, the player should have a fairly large influence on how they progress.

Corrupted gear and other layered RNG systems(Like legendaries in Legion) that take away player agency, in terms of both progress and performance, are VERY bad for the game.....by my standard.

But you're right. Maybe Blizzard wants to turn the game into something else. It's entirely possible. I've even suggested that Blizzard's focus on moving into the mobile market is having a distinct influence on the way in which ALL their games are being balanced and designed. Maybe Blizzard wants WoW to be more of an Gacha game than an actual MMORPG.

I hope not. But I can some of the signs. That's why I argue against these kinds of changes with so much fervor.

[Charge me Doctor]

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

WoW tokens made it possible.

Are you pretending that before tokens people couldn't buy gold or boosts with real money?

The only thing that changed is that those people willing to spend real money don't have to go to fishy websites or invite people to play their toon on their pc. I'm not even starting that weird thing some guilds had with paypalling cash for loot to lootmaster

[SirCowdog]

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

I think where your logic is breaking down is here. Beecause no, it's NOT the same as if people farmed the gold the normal way. The reason why is because one person is swiping their credit card instead of actually doing the work to gain the gold by playing the game.

Granted, it's not full disgusting predatory P2W. Blizzard is not selling the gold directly out of nowhere. Some player somewhere IS doing the work. The problem is that other players are bypassing doing their own work, not by socially getting their friends to help them, or organizing farming runs, or playing the auction house, or any of the other ways that a person can make gold by playing the game. They're swiping their credit card.

That is almost exactly the definition of pay to win. I don't see how it can NOT be viewed as such.

[Charge me Doctor]

you could always win at wow by paying

The thing about "winning at wow" is that it's a subjective goal.

[SirCowdog]

Are you pretending that before tokens people couldn't buy gold or boosts with real money?

The only thing that changed is that those people willing to spend real money don't have to go to fishy websites or invite people to play their toon on their pc. I'm not even starting that weird thing some guilds had with paypalling cash for loot to lootmaster

That's a pretty clear line in the sand, though. Here's the difference:

The black market gold selling, ToS breaking, loophole-abusing, grey area industry was providing the P2W element. The game itself had no function to facilitate trading real money for gold or other P2W services until the paid character boost was introduced, and later the Token.

If you can't see the difference there, then I don't know what to tell you.

Anyway, signing off for 24-48 hours. Have fun arguing this. I'll be interested to see what turns up over the next few days.

[Charge me Doctor]

That's a pretty clear line in the sand, though. Here's the difference:

The black market gold selling, ToS breaking, loophole-abusing, grey area industry was providing the P2W element. The game itself had no function to facilitate trading real money for gold or other P2W services until the paid character boost was introduced, and later the Token.

If you can't see the difference there, then I don't know what to tell you.

I'm not arguing about pay to win, because i see no winning in wow, as i don't see a league of legends as pay to win game, just because you can buy a character using real money (i mean, if you goal for winning is getting a renekton asap - good for you, the game is pay to win i guess). I'm saying that wow always had open economy, you could get gold, items, raid spot, whatever for real money, gold, or other services, Token is just a cherry on top (for me), because it's what players wanted (judging by their actions), there was demand and blizzard provided players with a secure way to transfer gold from one person to another for cash, instead of dealing with keyloggers or scamming.

If players are against token - then it wouldn't exist in the first place, because players showed that they are willing to pay money to get gold off the hands of other players.
If players are against powerful BoEs - well tough luck, these things existed throughout the history of the game, good morning sunshine etc. Same goes about open player-made economy

[melodramocracy]

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.

I cant recall what the $ hard cap was when D3 had its cash AH, but rest assured plenty of gear sold for it. Someone paying $200 isnt surprising.

[Raelbo]

As I said, I don't know how corrupted gear works or how big its impact is. What I do know, is that when 'someone else wins', it should be due to skill and not luck. Which is why your example of Method seems out of place to me; another team was better than them, not luckier. Right?

The point was to demonstrate that contests are more interesting when there's some degree of unpredictability to them.

As for the your example of predictibility being 'boring', couldn't you argue the opposite as well?

The opposite would either be predicability being interesting/entertaining - I don't see how really, or
unpredictability being boring - again, I don't see how really.

If player X knows that player Y always tops the meters, player X might do an extra effort to beat player Y the next time.

If player X knows the player Y always tops the meters then putting in extra effort is futile. Adding some luck to the equation, including luck during the fight, means that the outcome is uncertain, so player X knows that if he does well, he is in with a shout. Here's the catch though. Player X probably doesn't attribute his win to luck.

[nocturnus]

Some people, yes. But it's clear that there's at least an equal amount of people who aren't interested in challenge of any kind. Hence the idiocy of things like the movement to create an "EZ-Mode" for games like Sekiro. Hence why we have people who attempt to require absurdly high iLVL gear for relatively easy runs. They don't want "challenging but fun". They just want free loot with no effort.

I don't get why you're so preoccupied with people who'd appreciate an easier mode for games like Sekiro. This example alone, proves your theory about people "only wanting the free loot" wrong; there is no loot in Sekiro. Some people just want to lay back and play a game which they find interesting due to its story line, setting (heck, who doesn't find Samurai cool?) or graphics without the stress they experience on its default difficulty. There's nothing wrong with that, especially because it doesn't affect you, me or anyone else in any way.

The people who push high keys and demand extremely well geared people, don't fall in the same category as the aforementioned ones who want an easier version of Sekiro. These key pushers don't want to 'relax'. They consider themselves among the elite and don't want to waste time on content they stopped enjoying a long time ago. ergo, (as I said before) they want to eliminate as many variables as possible that could result in fails.

I don't think this type of person is very common. I think there are people who will turn up the difficulty and honestly seek to overcome greater challenges for greater rewards, and there are people who only want the rewards without working for them.

it's not black and white; there are many kinds of players. People who only want to be the best, people who only want to best gear, people who only want to have fun and don't give a flying fuck about achievements, gear or loot in general, etc. etc.

The type of person who will get bored very much WILL just go do something else.

I'm afraid this isn't how addictions work, my friend.

Because the entire point of Souls-like games IS the difficulty! Take that away and the games are meaningless.

No one is asking to take it away, as far as I can tell. Did the "easy" option make Doom less entertaining for you? Again, what does it matter how another person plays a game? Do you somehow feel less 'l33t' if people are able to kill Sekiro's lightning Sensei? If so, you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself why you have this need to feel special.

Timmy would be better off just watching someone else stream it rather than pitching for the entire genre to alter its fundamental premise just to satisfy his laziness or lack of even trying to understand the purpose of the game. Where the harm comes in is with Timmy robbing himself of the very thing the game was meant to be.

Says who? You? The developer? Don't get me wrong, I love the DS series even though I found Sekiro a bit on the boring side. But I couldn't give a flying fuck about an easy mode being added; I won't use it anyway.

Granted, WoW is not a Souls-like. However, I believe the harm in WoW stems from something similar as I just mentioned. In that when people start to come to expect the game to be easy, even when it's meant to be difficult, we start seeing situations like in M+ PUGs. Rather than just playing on an easier setting, Timmy is now asking everyone else to massively overgear more difficult runs....so that they're easier for him. And there are a LOT of Timmy's in the game right now.....largely, IMO, because Blizzard has not done anything to help Timmy play the game as it was intended.

No, that's not the reason and I already explained why. Timmy has already put in the hours, he doesn't want to 'progress' anymore. He wants to crush the shitty content and be done with it.

But you're right. Maybe Blizzard wants to turn the game into something else. It's entirely possible. I've even suggested that Blizzard's focus on moving into the mobile market is having a distinct influence on the way in which ALL their games are being balanced and designed. Maybe Blizzard wants WoW to be more of an Gacha game than an actual MMORPG.

I hope not. But I can some of the signs. That's why I argue against these kinds of changes with so much fervor.

Like everything, games evolve and for all intents and purposes, if the 'core' game play isn't appealing to a great enough audience, it needs to change lest it remain a niche game with all the difficulties that entails.

- - - Updated - - -

The point was to demonstrate that contests are more interesting when there's some degree of unpredictability to them.

I don't agree. I find things more interesting when there's the least amount of luck involved, which is why I'm a martial artist and not a football player.

The opposite would either be predicability being interesting/entertaining - I don't see how really, or
unpredictability being boring - again, I don't see how really.

I explained how. Read again.

If player X knows the player Y always tops the meters then putting in extra effort is futile.

In that case you can just throw in the towel and accept you'll always be mediocre in everything you do. This point of view is so flawed and basically everything I stand against.

"Gordon Ryan wins all his fights, ergo, putting an extra effort is futle; just give up."

Nah, we're just very different persons, you and I. When I see someone beats me, it gives me an incentive to train harder and not the opposite. Weaklings hang up their gloves after a beat.

[Zephire]

I think where your logic is breaking down is here. Beecause no, it's NOT the same as if people farmed the gold the normal way. The reason why is because one person is swiping their credit card instead of actually doing the work to gain the gold by playing the game.

Granted, it's not full disgusting predatory P2W. Blizzard is not selling the gold directly out of nowhere. Some player somewhere IS doing the work. The problem is that other players are bypassing doing their own work, not by socially getting their friends to help them, or organizing farming runs, or playing the auction house, or any of the other ways that a person can make gold by playing the game. They're swiping their credit card.

That is almost exactly the definition of pay to win. I don't see how it can NOT be viewed as such.

I get your point. Though that's what economics are, isn't it? Someone does the work while someone else pays for it?

One farms enough gold to buy a token.
I recieve the gold because it's my token.
I use said gold to buy a boost run in Ny'alotha.
The booster uses the gold to buy a token.

Isn't it just the same as it always has been? Me as a buyer of a boost run doesn't do anything either, it's someone else that does all the work, the booster.

Now it just happens to be real life money involved with tokens though as mentioned, they don't add nor substract anything from the game.

If no one supply gold, you would not be able to sell tokens. Whereas a shop that sells digital items that increases your powerlevel never runs out of stock (if said items doesn't have a digital stock, ofcourse).

[kenn9530]

In p2w games you buy things you can't reasonably get without paying, directly, from the game developer. Buying gold to buy an upgrade isn't p2w.

Gold can be used to get almost anything ingame so WoW has p2w, it can be a power upgrade or an acheivement most people cant get otherwise, its still p2w

[nocturnus]

Gold can be used to get almost anything ingame so WoW has p2w, it can be a power upgrade or an acheivement most people cant get otherwise, its still p2w

Depends on your interpretation of "winning".

For me 'p2w' has always been paying money to gain an advantage in a player versus player scenario. For example, buying cheats to compete in 5v5 team death match or buy an overpowered gun from the itemstore to win gun fights against players who aren't willing to dish out the cash.

Pay to win is like cheating to me, which is despicable and so are people who make use of such services.

In single player games, or in non player versus player scenarios I really couln't care less. They're not affect my game play, so it's all fair game.

[Tident]

Are you pretending that before tokens people couldn't buy gold or boosts with real money?

The only thing that changed is that those people willing to spend real money don't have to go to fishy websites or invite people to play their toon on their pc. I'm not even starting that weird thing some guilds had with paypalling cash for loot to lootmaster

Much,much more changed then just that. I sold runs from tbc onwards starting with the bear though I stopped after wod. ( didn't have the time to farm ap to remain competitive).

The token brought about a massive change. Runs used to be reserved to selling mounts to auction house mongrels and it was exceedingly rare to sell to people who bought gold. We were the server first guild and could charge a premium.

Once the token hit we started to get utterly flooded with buy offers. It got to the point were we could not reliably get new members mount at the end of the tier from being booked up. For the first time we saw a real demand for runs where people didn't care for the mount but wanted gear.

So yes, there were carry runs before the token but it massively changed the lay of the land once it hit.