How about we turn this around. Do you believe that the average player is unable to get boosted because of tokens?
The fact is that boosting is an activity practiced by only a small fraction of the playerbase. You have no evidence that it is only, or even mostly people buying gold with tokens that are getting boosted. I have little doubt that some players buy gold with tokens in order to get boosted. But I also know for a fact that many people who get boosted do so without tokens being involved. In fact these people spend some of their gold to buy tokens for gametime.
The fact is that the gold to buy boosts exists with or without tokens. Boosts would therefore happen with or without tokens. For the average player it makes zero difference who is buying those boosts.
As for your assertion about the explosion of boosting services, I think, firstly, that you need to get off your high horse. WoW is an MMO game. The ability to help and be helped by others is an integral part of the game. Boosting is not a crime and never was. So get over it. Yes, I can agree that advertising spam is annoying, but that is a side issue.
Secondly, I don't believe it is fair to 'blame' tokens for boosting. You're simply observing a correlation with no insights into the causation. For a start, boosting has always existed, but the content that people wanted to boosted in was far more limited. It was M+, a relatively new feature that really drove the demand for boosting. Another thing that had a noticeable effect was when Blizzard clarified that boosting for gold was totally ok, a position they were quiet on for many years.
That is, at best, speculation on your part, but more likely just plain old BS. Back in BfA while waiting for one of the rare spawns, a bunch of people mounted up on our brutosaurs. Speaking to those guys, only 1 of about 15 of us used tokens to buy it.
Furthermore, of the 8 or so in my guild, I know that all were bought by players who made their money in game. The very idea of spending around $400 for a single mount was just ludicrous to most of us.
Lastly, if you looked at the token price around the time of the brutosaur, there was little indication that it had any significant effect on the sale of tokens.
You cannot just make a claim like that without providing evidence. You would have to know how the token has affected the spending habits, not only of those buying gold, but of those selling gold too. You would also need to know what percentage of the market these players constitute.
I reckon that the vast majority of trade going on between players has absolutely nothing to do with tokens. While I have little doubt that the token has been enabler for some players to participate in the market (which is a
good thing), there is zero reason to believe that it has had any kind of significant effect on the market. Raiders have always spent gold on buying consumables and materials. The existence of the token is not going to change that. Maybe some would stopped bothering with making the gold themselves and reverted to tokens, but their spending habits would have been unchanged.
The kind of effects you want to believe the token has on the game are what would happen if Blizzard started selling gold directly into the game. The token does not do that. It simply facilitates the transfer of gold already in the game between players without adding any new gold to the world.
And you can keep repeating this rhetoric as long as you want, but until you can provide a properly reasoned argument, backed up by actual facts that are relevant to the argument, you're just talking nonsense.
False. The fact that gold is transferred between players is precisely the reason why tokens don't affect the game badly at all.
What is sad is that some people choose to attack a system that is actually good for everyone because they're too ignorant to know better, and too stubborn to listen to good sense.
- - - Updated - - -
Can you give any examples of actual players who, by virtue of tokens, have more gold than the AH barons on any given realm? I thought not.
Your efforts to oversimplify this discussion is why you're not seeing the reality of it. The simple reality that you fail to acknowledge is that all of the richest (as in gold) players in this game acquired their gold in-game without tokens. I have never met someone in this game who got rich (in gold) from selling tokens.
You see, asking me if I am out of my god damn mind for stating *reality* simply demonstrates how out of touch
you are and why you lack the basic grounding to be participating in the discussion.
Let me be clear. If 300K was as difficult to make as you would have us believe, then no one would be spending that much gold to buy them. The price of tokens is probably the best indicator of how difficult gold is to make in the game because it is literally determined by the price people are prepared to both buy and sell it at.
Stop throwing down these retarded challenges as if they actually mean something. The fact that people are spending 300K on tokens, for a measly $13 of currency usable only on Blizzard products, is the most honest indication of how easy/hard it is to make gold in this gold. Stop acting as if tokens are the only way in which any player can ever hope to get enough gold to do anything of meaning in this game.
Dude, my assertion was in respect of where players who are boosted got their gold, not whether boosting happens. Again, you're not answering to what I am saying because you lack an actual argument.
And if you play the game normally you're ahead of those who buy tokens. What is your point? That tokens allow you to get ahead of the worst players in WoW, who are only in that position because they simply can't be bothered to try? Who the hell cares? They are utterly irrelevant.
p2w is when paying becomes mandatory in order to compete. And that is certainly not the case in WoW.
That is an entirely inadequate and unsatisfactory qualifier for determining if the feature is p2w.
For a feature to qualify as p2w there must exist an inextricable association between paying and winning. Now you are welcome to define "winning" however you want, but unless paying is
necessary to achieve that achieve that, at least without
significant effort, then the feature can not be called p2w.
And in so long as that the gold obtained via tokens remains linked to another player who is selling that gold, tokens can never become a requirement of achieving anything in this game. This is dictated by 2 factors:
1) There will always be other players who have managed to acquire
at least that amount of gold (and realistically a lot more) to be able to buy the token off the AH.
2) Only a small portion of the of the playerbase will ever be able to use tokens as a means of acquiring gold - because at the other end you need players to supply the gold. And the more people try to buy gold with tokens, the less gold they will get.
It's "simple" as that.
That is a non-argument. We have no evidence that they do either. Again I'll say it: Resorting to that level of argumentation says a lot about the weakness of your argument.
Look, obviously if it came out that Blizzard were selling more tokens than they were putting onto the AH, then I would agree that this is p2w. But it should be pretty clear that my argument applies to tokens operating as advertised.
- - - Updated - - -
NO. That is what YOU are guilty of.
Where are you getting your definition from anyway? I got mine by looking at sites like the Urban dictionary and by reading up on the history of pay 2 win. It seems however that everyone on MMO Champion believes it is their prerogative to come up with their own definitions that have no relation or grounding in the practice as used in the gaming industry at all.
Oh I could say plenty of negative things about WoW. In fact it seems that you just refuse to say anything positive about the game.
Nothing in my argument has anything to even do with my views or feelings on the game. That is
your bias, not mine. My argument is clearly grounded in a strict and accurate understanding of what p2w means and then trying to assess whether the token in WoW meets that definition. Your argument on the other hand seems entirely about panel-beating the definition of p2w to fit the token.
I have said this before in the "is WoW p2w" debate that I believe a lot of people want to try and argue that WoW is p2w because of the perception that p2w is bad. And yet they will then proceed to come up with a definition for p2w that is lacking in all the attributes that makes being p2w bad in the first place. It's pretty disingenuous tbh