"... And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers, and you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee." - Ezekiel 25:17
"My name is Legion: for we are many." - Mark 5:9
My characters :3
Woww damnnnn.. have you seen the millions of gold sellers that privatly sell gold for real money? It exists just like in retail. Get a grip people. Wow is not pay2win, and never will be. People thinking other wise are just unintelligent fucks that dont know nothing.
I have spoken.
Close the thread now pretty please!
I genuinely do not see what you're trying to accomplish here. The 2 scenarios are very obviously different, where one is against ToS, the other is Blizzard selling the gold themselves (id est, not against ToS), possibly to prevent people from resorting to illicitly buying/selling gold, more likely to make more money. It's like I told you I'm allergic to peanuts but you don't buy it since you saw me eat cashews. Best outcome you can hope for here is that I agree with you that WoW came with a hint of P2W from the start.
I don't wanna make another long post, so I'll leave it at these 2 arguments. You say that the 3% with the Brutosaur mount show what is possible when you compete, yet we do not know how many of that 3% are people who didn't buy any tokens. The fact that only 3% has it and that the mount is, at best (or worst, depending on your perspective), available for another 9 months, shows that people who want that mount but aren't making enough gold might feel compelled to resort to tokens.
As for you dodging the question and the crux of your argument, I feel like you're dancing around the point and arguing about something I never contested. You already stated that gold is important multiple times yet your only argument against this being P2W is that you can also achieve it by not slacking or going hard. Funnily enough, people use that exact argument to defend HS not being P2W, as did I, in the past. I stand by my initial point that if 2 people of equal skill/standing are trying to accomplish a specific objective within the game, the person spending money has the advantage. Even if you consider 2 HC guilds competing to be a poor example, getting the expensive gold mounts, doing a +15, getting the mage tower back in legion, getting "the Faceless One", getting just about any PvP reward,... Almost anything your average player tries to achieve within this game can be made easier by buying tokens, in my head, that's pretty much as perfect of an example of P2W as you can get. The only thing that they aren't selling yet is gear that is otherwise unobtainable. By gear I mean gear with stats, as the ship on selling transmog has set sail years ago.
The only reason that kinda stuff annoys me is because it'd get you a failing grade in a middle school debate, yet apparently modern day politicians are too puerile to adhere to that.
Those goalposts are quite mobile.
First it was "They are better than anything that you can find in a raid"
Then "Mythic BoEs are better than normal mode raid drops"
Now we have "Buying items circumvents RNG, so it's obviously better"
Repeating that I don't know anything about the game doesn't really bother me. Keep going. You raid normal, I don't. I'll sell you my BoEs though, I've made a few mill this patch from it already. You can have a discount for entertaining me the past day or so.
Anyone who thinks WoW isn't pay to win now needs to have their brains examined. Never in the history of World of Warcraft could you swipe your credit card and be guaranteed to get an item that increases your DPS by such a substantial amount that you absolutely destroy anyone else regardless of skill and rotation. There's no reason to spend time on your character anymore. Just grab your credit card and pay Blizzard, join the party!
The game is 100% dead until this shit changes.
I literally never said that raid gear was better than the BoEs.....because the BoEs are raid gear. I don't understand how you don't get this. You're saying that the BoEs are more powerful than themselves lmao. You're complaining that BoEs exist that are on par with raid drops....this has existed for.....let me check my notes.....15 years. At least wing 3 of LFR got released for you!
Sims can be deceptive, especially in Infinite Star's case. Its performance is incredibly random; one fight it can do barely 1M damage, the next close to 3M if not more. It also sims great on Patchwerk fights which assume a single target and perfect uptime, but in an actual raid there's literally one Mythic fight like that, Shad'har, which is a parsemonger's dream but not much of an actual DPS check when all's said and done. Even just on Skitra, having to switch to the illusions kills your ramp-up.
I'm not saying it's a bad corruption, mind, quite the contrary. But it's hardly as overpowered as some claim it is after taking one look at sims. The only OP corruption left in my mind is Twilight Devastation, and even then mostly in M+ and aoe fights like Hivemind.
What is it? 130k for 20$? If someone wants to drop 400-500$ for a single upgrade then more power to them i suppose.
So what about titanforging? That existed. That made a significant difference in power. You're just bitching to bitch. BoEs = Raid gear. Raid gear can corrupt. There are many problems with the corruption system. Being able to buy BoEs is not one of them.
Remember when you said that 470 BoE with corruption was better than a 450 without and you thought that was a contribution to the thread? lol
Last edited by Torgent; 2020-02-27 at 04:11 PM.
Obviously it's hard to prove definitively given that we just don't have that data, however I expect that there is some insight to be gained from looking at the token price, tracked on wowtoken.info.
Any time any big event happens that would affect token buying, it's pretty evident on the graphs. You can clearly see a spike in the price of tokens on EU and US realms on 2 November 2019. This co-incided with the announcement of Classic Phase 2. Clearly quite a few people bought tokens with gold to buy gametime.
Then we have the announcement of the the Brutosaur becoming obsolete on November 21/22. There is actually a noticeable dip on Chinese realms, indicating that the Chinese were buying gold to buy the mount. There is a smallish glitch on the US market, indicating some activity. On the EU market basically nothing.
I know there was a talk about how this was all just a big plot by Blizzard to get people to buy tokens. Yet I don't see any evidence of the kind of behaviour that indicates more than a handful of players on EU, and possibly a few more than that on US servers. And while a lot of players, both on the forums and in game complained about their belief that lots of players would be buying gold with $$, it was always people complaining about other people who might.
I've never actually heard first hand of anyone using tokens to buy something expensive like a brutosaur. And frankly, it doesn't surprise me. While it is an option open to anyone, the reality is that it is actually pretty exclusionary on the basis of cost. I earn a decent salary, but I honestly balk at the prospect of forking out 500 Euro to buy a Brutosaur. And I cannot imagine that any significant number of players in the game is earning the kind of money that they wouldn't blink twice. Consider that to qualify for the top 1% of income earners, you need to earn $33K, $750 for a brutosaur is around 25% of their monthy salary. So I would argue that considerably less than 1% of the global population would consider spending $$ to buy a brutosaur as feasible. So I'd say, certainly a lot less than 3% of the WoW population would consider it.
The brutosaur is the sort of the thing that you buy if you're very good at making a lot of gold in the game, or if you're in the top 0.1% of the global wealth.
Only if the two people are deficient at making gold without tokens. It's like going to a professional footballer (soccer) who already earns $100M a year and claiming that the fact that they get free shoes in the deal gives them some sort of competitive advantage.
Having a lot of gold is an advantage. Being able to buy that gold with money is only an advantage if attaining that gold through other means would put you at a disadvantage. And in WoW, it does not.
I agree with your assertion that all those things can be made easier for an average player. But that doesn't qualify as p2w as far as I am concerned, because those things were perfectly attainable without the need to resorting to tokens.
As I have said in other posts, there is a reason why the term p2w carries such negative connotations. And it's not because p2w is about being able to gain some arbitrary advantage in the game. It's because when something is pay to win, the implication is that not paying guarantees that you can't win. And that is problematic because the parameters of the game shift from issues like skill and commitment to whether you're prepared to spend money, which in turn compels people who take the game seriously to pull out their credit cards.
So while I'll agree that the general ability to buy some sort of leg up for an average player has some of the elements of p2w, it critically does not include any of the traits that make p2w disagreeable. By all means, let the guys in the other hc guild spend $200 each to get an advantage over me. That isn't going to make me and my guild feel inclined even in the slightest to go out and do the same.
As a debater who did very well at it, it's a lot easier for things to come across as intended when you're actually speaking, because the way in which speak carries a lot of meaning. That is all lost in the written word, making the reader susceptible to misinterpretation.
I never said it was as impactful. I said it was impactful. You're complaining that being able to buy the BoEs is pay to win...that's literally what you're doing in this thread lmao. Just because you don't think it's bitching, doesn't mean it isn't. GL this week on Heroic Wrathion. I believe in you.
first of all, blizz is not selling gold, other players are, same with the BoE gear on AH, sure blizzard make it possible but that doesnt change the FACT that it was always possible to buy gold/gear/boosts from other players...
i dont wanna accomplish anything, im just saying it always was possible...
and btw, its still against ToS to buy gold from "outside sources", yet the bussiness is still thriving, people are going against ToS to save couple bucks, so you can be sure they did go against ToS when "outside sources" were the only option...
not really you could go for months without getting a tier 3 corruption or not even get all the items that go together that give a massive damage boost, so you cant reasonably get everything ingame as its completely by chance, the players who would pay for boosts are usually the ones who dont really make gold ingame, the percentage of players that are able to earn millions of gold is not that much.
STAR-J4R9-YYK4 use this for 5000 credits in star citizen
It's still more of a damage increase, regardless of how unreliable it might be, than the guy made it out to be.
Damage has always varied on minor RNG situational stats, as per mentioned on the OP video - but one has to be daft to say that the situation hasn't gotten worse (or claim it's a minor increase only) with Corruption.
Quick reply while waiting in the LASIK office(might be my last until my eyes heal).
I know there has been a lot of discussion about the definition of P2W. For me it comes down to this: Are you paying real world money to bypass or skip the normal gameplay?
WoW is a progression-based game. Whether it's leveling or grinding or gathering. "Winning" in this definition is completing or moving forward in progression, since WoW is not a game you can finish by traditional definitions. This why character boosts, but not server transfers, also fall under P2W(albeit marginally).
The token lets you pay money to skip the normal process of acquiring gold, which is a normal part of progress within the game. That gold can then be used for all manner of gear or carries that you otherwise would have had to play the game to acquire, whether through playing the AH or farming the gold yourself through various means. All the other considerations, at least in my opinion, are secondary to that.
The token is a necessary evil to combat black market gold selling. That doesn't mean it's perfect, or that some players aren't against it. Nor does it mean Blizzard shouldn't take extra steps to avoid the token increasing the P2W aspects of the gameplay dynamic.
Last edited by SirCowdog; 2020-02-27 at 10:20 PM.
you cant just easily earn millions of gold otherwise everyone would have way more and then things would cost 10s of millions instead, only a small percentage of players have more than a million gold let alone more to spend on boosts and such, you need to put in time an some effort to make a million gold or get so lucky with a boe drop from hc or mythic raiding that has the right corruption.
STAR-J4R9-YYK4 use this for 5000 credits in star citizen
Oh, the sheer variance is indeed frustrating. Feeling like a lot of your performance is tied to an RNG proc that you have 0 control over isn't great. Essences were much better at that, given that they were abilities so them contributing a lot to your DPS was natural and good. No arguments here.
But still, I've seen wild claims in this thread, saying corruption accounts for 30 or even 50% of your DPS or whatever. That literally only happens on Hivemind if you have godly TD procs. Which, as I said, isn't a good thing, but corruption isn't THAT much of a dealbreaker. Top guilds chased it like they chase any and every advantage, for most everyone else it's a nice bonus and hardly mandatory.