Is WoW Pay 2 Win?

[Lolites]

for some people it is p2w, for some it isnt, some dont know, some dont care...

it entirely depends on what you consider p2w as there is no universaly accepted clear definition, every "definition" is too ambiguous

[Maddoc]

Depends how you define winning. Could you buy a boost to a certain pvp ranking and then spend months getting gear for that pvp raiting by doing bgs and other shit? Sure. But that is not winning since gear means nothing and you are not good enough to play your character at that rating. Same goes for mythic raid boosting. Could you buy a boost to get mythic gear that means nothing? Sure. However you are not in a guild with a decent ranking nor will you have logs showing what you did during these raids making it all useless. So no, wow is not pay2win.

I fail to see the difference. The outcome is the same, you got the rank, you got the kill, the loot the achieve, with less in game effort. This isn't a topic about P2GetSkills. It's about winning.

[Ilookfly]

I fail to see the difference. The outcome is the same, you got the rank, you got the kill, the loot the achieve, with less in game effort. This isn't a topic about P2GetSkills. It's about winning.

What pay2win usually means is that with enough money you can be the best in the game. Ergo buying power. You cant do that in WoW unless you think it's sick to buy mythic boosts to flex in heroic raids or other low end content. But then again.. There is no market for whales and such. Gear is not winning.

[Maddoc]

What pay2win usually means is that with enough money you can be the best in the game. Ergo buying power. You cant do that in WoW unless you think it's sick to buy mythic boots to flex in heroic raids or other low end content.

What's the metric for being best in the game? As I said, you can buy top bracket rankings and mythic kills, there is no other way to be best than having that.

[Ilookfly]

What's the metric for being best in the game? As I said, you can buy top bracket rankings and mythic kills, there is no other way to be best than having that.

Guild rankings, io score, log rankings for pve and rank 1 for pvp. Buying rank 1 is not really a thing. You cant buy logs or guild rankings and its impossible to buy io high enough to be of note. Again, no one cares about an achivement or gear. Its about how well you did during the kill and when in time this kill took place.

[Maddoc]

Guild rankings, io score, log rankings for pve and rank 1 for pvp. Buying rank 1 is not really a thing. You cant buy logs or guild rankings and its impossible to buy io high enough to be of note. Again, no one cares about an achivement or gear. Its about how well you did during the kill and when in time this kill took place.

But this is beyond the scope of the game, and external material from other sources. I could as easily say that no one cares about those metrics either.

You CAN still buy the ranks and kills, which a lot of other players can't achieve.

[Ilookfly]

But this is beyond the scope of the game, and external material from other sources. I could as easily say that no one cares about those metrics either.

You CAN still buy the ranks and kills, which a lot of other players can't achieve.

What ranks can you buy? Any rank high enough to be of note is beyond purchase. Also, Jeff Bezos paid his way up in to space. This does not make him an astronaut and everyone knows that. Just cus you spend a massive amount of gold to see the sunlight for a moment does not mean you are now in the ecosystem. Its that simple. Wow has many flaws and its easy to bash the game. But calling it pay2win is really pushing it. If Wow is pay2win then literally every game on the planet is so aswell.

[Maddoc]

What ranks can you buy? Any rank high enough to be of note is beyond purchase. Also, Jeff Bezos paid his way up in to space. This does not make him an astronaut and everyone knows that. Just cus you spend a massive amount of gold to see the sunlight for a moment does not mean you are now in the ecosystem. Its that simple. Wow has many flaws and its easy to bash the game. But calling it pay2win is really pushing it. If Wow is pay2win then literally every game on the planet is so aswell.

Just one google search: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wo...the-game/78503

And you're going beyond the scope, now you're calling it Pay to get skilled. If that is the criteria, then literally every P2W-game isn't a P2W game, because you aren't good enough.

And sure, Jeff is not a trained astronaut, but he has been to space. Beats the majority of the worlds populace. Did he get there by skill, training, knowledge of space? No, he payed to WIN. Thanks for just proving my point tho.

[Loveliest]

You are wasting your calories by typing, these guys are clueless and defaulted opinions that everything is P2W, because WoW apparently has a win nowdays

I think you don't understand what pay to win in regards to a non pvp game means. Reaching a goal is what is considered "win".
If your goal is to kill Mythic Sylvanas while it is considered "relevant", the intended path of doing it is by being part of a guild doing progression on previous bosses, gearing up and eventually killing her after a number of wipes. When you kill her it is a "win".
In a pve game there is nothing like a clear pvp win, but there are objectives, scores, leaderboards, achis, all marking different wins.
If you shell out cash to do none of that, to skip ahead and get a kill with no gear and basically no progression, it's what you call pay to win.

See, here is the deal. Pay to win does not strictly mean something that is way more overpowered than existing stuff. It also means doing things faster than intended, paying to skip time and effort you would have to put towards an objective.

And tbh you can also buy wins in pvp, and that is pretty clear cut. Doable with friends as well, sure, but you dont pay for it, which makes the whole difference. Befriending ppl in an mmo to reach objectives together is intended, buying people to get you stuff you want is not.

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But to make it clearer. Can you, for example, kill Mythic Sylvanas while relevant while ALL of the things below are true?
1. Without having any wipes on her
2. Without having friends of any sort
3. Without having gear
4. Without doing anything (dying at pull)
I think no.

But can you tick all of the above and PAY to get It?
I think yes.
And this is what pay to win means. You can do something with paying you would not be able to without. YOU, the one who is in this situation. Not others who are in a different situation, have more time, have friends etc.

[Dhrizzle]

What's the metric for being best in the game? As I said, you can buy top bracket rankings and mythic kills, there is no other way to be best than having that.

Exactly, all people paying cash can do is try to be on par with people playing normally or paying for carries purely with gold. There's no special gear or buffs you can pay cash for to elevate you above the best non-paying players like p2w games have.

[callipygoustp]

The only way that WoW is NOT P2W is if you redefine, or narrowly define(what most people do in this thread), what P2W is.

[Soon-TM]

Its so weird when you think about it, none of us players really benefit from it, its stuff purely added to make more money for blizzard with less work and we ALL suffer for it by getting a worse game, so i don't get why people here would go through such lengths trying to defend it and all come up with their own definitions that always seem to be *insert everything except stuff in wow* and then failing miserably because its impossible to do because other games exist that are called p2w by the same people that share the same mechanics...

Two words: Stockholm syndrome.

[Dzonathan]

Progress in WoW has never been measured by how much money you can throw it. It's about how much and time and effort you throw at it. If you believe that the people who are at the top of this "natural order" are there because they spent money buying WoW tokens, you're delusional. If anything, the type of player who spends money on tokens sits near the bottom of the "natural order" while those at the top of "natural order" are the ones supplying the gold for the token market.

Yes it was. You make more gold, you afford more BoE/crafted gear, your character becomes more powerful, your team becomes more powerful as a result. The winning conditions are more in your favour. It's as simple as that.

That is an outright lie. You do not have to pay money to obtain the gold needed to buy any of this stuff. The fact that the gold bought by those who do pay comes from players who don't pay proves this. This would, of course, be very different if Blizzard sold gold directly to players without the other end of the transaction and the player paying gold for their tokens.

Source of gold is not relevant. What is relevant that you can buy gold and be ahead of someone who cant buy gold. You buy gold, you buy BoE/crafted gear and you are ahead. It's simple as that.

The manner in which tokens work proves you wrong. If the gold that you can buy with tokens was as difficult to make in game as you indicate, then no one would be using their gold to buy tokens. The supply demand mechanism guarantees that the amount of gold you will get when you buy a token is trivial to make in game.

Are you out of your god damn mind? 300k is NOT a trivial amount of gold to make. If it were THEN no one would buy tokens.
Go ahead and prove me without a shadow of a doubt that you can make 300k on any day, any server, any faction, on any class.

You're making a "theoretical" claim based on a (massively flawed) set of assumptions that suits your argument, but has zero grounding in what actually happens in game.

Get on Silvermoon-EU, join Oblivion Boosting Community discord and ask them how many Mythic CN clears they sold. It's real.

Firstly, boosting is not exclusively available to, nor exclusively used by players who buy gold with tokens. In fact I would argue that far more boostees do so using gold obtained in-game than through tokens.

Doesn't matter. You buy gold and be ahead of someone who cant buy gold. You buy gold, you buy boosts and you are ahead. It's simple as that.

Secondly, by definition, if you're getting boosted, you are already not in the top echelon of players, because those in the top echelon are those providing the boost. So again, your argument fails.

Doesn't matter. You buy gold and be ahead of someone who cant buy gold. You buy gold, you buy boosts and you are ahead. It's simple as that.

That is conspiracy theory talk. But hardly surprising that you would resort to this type of bottom-of-the-barrel style of argumentation.

And before you try to strawman me, no, I don't approve of Blizzard's crimes against their female staff, or many other egregious things they have done/continue to do. But that is patently not evidence that they are messing with token supply and demand. And if you actually have a clue and look at how the token price fluctuates, this gives us every reason to believe that tokens are traded as advertised.

We also have no evidence that they do not mess with token supply.

[Darkeon]

If its "still" pay-2-win since the last time *you* decided it was pay-2-win, then it has ALWAYS been pay-2-win.

I didn't implement the boost, nor legalized gold buying. So I didn't decide anything.

[epigramx]

Some people in this thread effectively support Blizzard's bad practices by misdirecting the readers to completely unimportant facts that everyone knows anyway. E.g. of course it was technically "pay to win" with the TCG game but anyone that actually remembers how it was back then knows that it was almost exclusively the realm of a minority of world-first-tier guilds that were doing it a lot (and that to buy consumables and BOEs and not to have others play for them) or of course you could pay illegally to get gold but that was again limited because it was ...blatantly illegal (especially since the gold sellers don't pay taxes) or (and most importantly) very few people cared to even get gold since back then it didn't buy all other Activision Blizzard games too on the shop and plenty of other products there.

Hell if the misdirectors wanted to push that position further they could claim everything in life is "pay to win" since you could pay anyone to play for you but that extreme but very doable example proves how moot their argument is; nobody should care what can be stretched to be technically "pay to win"; the point is that since it's with the Blizzard's blessing now and the shop has a mountain of products: it's rampant.

[kaminaris]

E.g. of course it was technically "pay to win" with the TCG game but anyone that was actually an adult back then knows that

Translation: I was ignorant back then, didn't see it so it didn't exist

Meanwhile I knew a guy with bags full of spectral tigers back in MoP.

[Alexeht]

no, wow is play 2 lose

[epigramx]

ignorant

Nice strawman. Nobody told you that it was not pay to win in part; the entire point of my post was it was pay to win in part.

But it's very unhelpful to misdirect users against the fact that's it's extremely rampant now because of the shop's products.

[Indigenously Abled]

We sold Realm First! Challenge Conqueror Gold on dead realms as far back as MOP, for absolutely repulsive amounts of gold (even by today's standards) and there's almost no way someone wasn't either mega-botting or paying RL dongs for that amount of cheddar.

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no, wow is play 2 lose

This is the most salient point made in the last 130 pages.

[epigramx]

no way someone wasn't either mega-botting or paying RL dongs for that amount of cheddar.

No. Many people with a mountain of gold have a hobby to play the auction house; they have multiple accounts; they know how to control or half-control entire realms' economies.

And MoP is nothing; I could control a medium size realm's economy in Cata and I knew others that did it for years before that; though I never bought any player service in my life.