Blizzard needs to F**K right off with Cashshop Transmogs

[Verdugo]

Just because there's one more step after doesn't mean that's not exactly what it is. Denying this is what's dishonest.

Rray being dishonest corporate shill? Say it aint so...

[WowIsDead64]

That's not what "P2W" is. Pay to win is when you can buy a full set of Sylvanas Mythic-level gear from the in-game shop for a special reduced price, or an Infinity+1 sword that can instantly kill opposing players/monsters with ease.

Does extra "Buy gold and pay it to boosters" step make any difference at the end? Again, it's just illusion, that it's not Blizzard themselves, who sell them directly. Result is exactly the same. Blizzard get all money anyway, because players can't withdraw them (unless it's RMT), and players get gear.

[Azerate]

https://store.finalfantasyxiv.com/ffxivstore/en-us/

[Heladys]

Who fucking cares about mogs. You want high end gear do the work. You want to buy appearances fine pay the money.

[Krelivane]

Honestly who wants this?


These transmogs are way more visually striking and most likely will offer more particle effects and other enhancements than in game items. Honestly everyone needs to protest this crap before it gets out of control. These are new appearences that can be used for unique events like Mage Tower 2.0 or other game feats of strength.....


How are people ok with this?

It's fine.

[SinR]

Who fucking cares about mogs. You want high end gear do the work. You want to buy appearances fine pay the money.

Or like everyone else is arguing, buy a WoW token and get high end M+ / Mythic Raid gear to stomp your daily quests with.

and then get stomped into dust by anyone with 3/4 of a brain in Pee Vee Pee

[shadowmatrix]

Does extra "Buy gold and pay it to boosters" step make any difference at the end? Again, it's just illusion, that it's not Blizzard themselves, who sell them directly. Result is exactly the same. Blizzard get all money anyway, because players can't withdraw them (unless it's RMT), and players get gear.

If I buy a car and drive it away it is one step away from me stealing it but that step stops me from going to prison. Yes that extra step matters a lot.
If players buying things from other players is pay to win then MMOs were always pay to win so this entire debate is pointless.

[arkanon]

The problem is the word advantage, it doesn't matter how much money I threw at wow atm. My main could not gain an advantage with that money. There isn't power it could buy. So is the game only P2W for some people? Id argue 'advantage' in the P2W definition refers to power that players would not otherwise be able to obtain unless they pay for it whether it be strict power or acquisition rates of something that directly relate to power IE monster summoning scrolls in gacha games.

Again another error very common - it does NOT mean gaining an advantage over every single other player in the game, it means gaining an advantage over some people unwilling or unable to pay the fee.

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If I buy a car and drive it away it is one step away from me stealing it but that step stops me from going to prison. Yes that extra step matters a lot.
If players buying things from other players is pay to win then MMOs were always pay to win so this entire debate is pointless.

You say the steps matter, and then immediately remove a step from your "all mmos are p2w" - the step where you instantly exchange money for gold. MANY "p2w" games allow you to buy gems, stones, tokens, or other variations of currencies, which are then used to purchase items/power. This lines up with wow.

[Makaloff]

indeed, ignorance is a bliss
now that blizz is puting some filters up (bcs addon or whatnot are too high IQ to use for some people) it will seem like its less boosting again so they may rest again in piece, hopefuly
bcs its getting kinda annoying people complaining about it as if it wasnt part of the game since almost the begining... thinking about it, most of those complaining are probably in wow shorter than boosting/gold selling

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which, ironicaly, is more of a "predatory practice", yet somehow wow stil gets the blame and ff is fine

yea its a bit wierd but different community ideas i guess, personally i dont mind either shops, only downside with wows is that its fairly expensive for the stuff thats being put there and there barely is anything in the shop to begin with either

[Darth Vowrawn]

Does extra "Buy gold and pay it to boosters" step make any difference at the end? Again, it's just illusion, that it's not Blizzard themselves, who sell them directly. Result is exactly the same. Blizzard get all money anyway, because players can't withdraw them (unless it's RMT), and players get gear.

If that's the standard, then every game that has a playerbase and cash shop is a P2W game. Boosting was a thing back in Vanilla, yet people like you didn't screech about WoW being "P2W" then.

[Dhrizzle]

So, let me get this straight.
You like it cause you can get gold off the whales and then buy shop items with it? Congratulations, your gold making scheme that sell win is exactly why the token is ruining the game.

Are you saying boost buyers are "having fun". Wow... the depths to which we came.

And this is all good for you huh? Well... with that atitude, there won't be many left to buy your boost service huh? Hope it's worth it.
I prefer my games with less P2W, not more though. But, you do you. It's working spectacularly.

Personally I think this is why the token system really isn't that bad. Sure Blizz are skimming odd the top but it makes it a largely player-driven economy where some of us can grind up the gold needed to get shop items without needing to pay any extra cash, and others can "profit" by having their subs, expansions and even other Blizz games paid for.

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Can't we just bully people who buy it? Kick them from groups drive them out of lfg that kinda thing?

Send a message?

I'd much rather play with someone who spends a few quid on a fancy video game hat than a petulant bully who want to destroy other people's enjoyment.

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I understand what you mean and it really has been a pay-to-win affair since the induction of the WoW token. In my mind it was never as egregious as outright procuring the means to win through money, simply because other players have to put in the extra effort to boost the player in the first place, but I have to admit that this is a very, very sugarcoated way of seeing things. Either way, it absolutely provides players with a way to obtain certain achievements thanks to the gold they've bought with their money and that can perceptively devalue the achievements of players who put a lot of effort into them on their own.

I think that incentivizing the purchase of WoW tokens is also one of the reasons the last two expansions had no way for players to easily acquire gold through mission tables as they did in WoD and Legion; it ran contrary to their business. Many players still bought lots of them, there's no doubt about it, but I would imagine that many also skipped doing so thanks to the mission tables.

The easy gold making probably worked better for Blizz as it made the gold-cost of things higher and drove down the price of tokens, so whales would have to buy more tokens to buy things in-game with Blizz taking more cuts on transactions.

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I really don't think you understand what P2W is, along with every single other person saying its P2W. Pay to win is playing a game like CoD and being able to spend 100 dollars on some super buffed OP weapon that absolutely destroys people who didn't buy it.

That's the most clear and obvious definition of pay-2-win but with an open game like Wow there's a bit of grey area.

So taking mounts as an example, I personally would never count a cash-only mount as "winning" but to a collector I can certainly see it as being an annoyance having some of your aims locked behind a paywall. Mounts are a poor example (along with the rest of WoW's shop) because it isn't that hard to get them through gold>tokens, but I hope you see my point.

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lol and if the forums were consolidated into those three topics they would never end as people went back and forth on whose meaning is right.
The "what's casual" camp seems to be just two sides: Time vs Content difficulty. Am I a casual if I play wow 15 hours a day every day but only pet battle? What if I only play 6 hours a week but I get CE every tier?

Personally I look at it as the opposite of casual being formal, so a casual player is one who plays how they want, when they want whereas a non-casual player will have agreed upon times to play certain activities with other players. This definition leaves room for hardcore-casuals who play 15 hours of pet battles a day or only want to unlock Explorer achievements on 50+ characters.

[rrayy]

Just because there's one more step after doesn't mean that's not exactly what it is. Denying this is what's dishonest.

Wrong. Blizzard isn't taking that step. Dishonest is claiming Blizzard is doing something that is actually player behavior. Stop lying and stop with the false claims.

[CalamityHeart]

My definition of pay-to-win used to be the all-encompassing, "If I can purchase a level of player power that's totally unobtainable in-game without spending real money, and is necessary to be competitive in said game." Thinking about it has made me tighten that definition a bit. Making it as black-and-white as that is giving it a little too much lenience. Because while I don't think that gold-selling is nearly as bad Blizzard could potentially make the concept of selling player power, it is selling a form of player power. Just having gold is player power; it's like potential energy.

So my general definition for pay-to-win now, as far as it concerns games like WoW, is more along the lines of "If I can purchase player power that I would've had to earn as an objective reward elsewhere." Because that's what "winning" boils down to in the gameplay loop of an MMO, putting forth an in-game effort, receiving a reward in either stats or currency, and using that reward on either more stats and/or currency, to keep the treadmill going, or other fun miscellanea outside of that basic treadmill.

That "other fun miscellanea" can be a reward without being player power. Stuff like transmog and mounts. Emotes, if they go that far. Even so far as to put unique character creation attributes on the store if Blizzard wants to go even further beyond, like if the Night Warrior traits or these incoming new allied race customizations were on the shop. That's not player power, and selling it on the shop isn't pay-to-win.

Gold and gear with stats on it. That's about where the pay-to-win starts and ends. Again, having gold is a form of player power. Gaining more gold is an increase in player power just getting a piece of gear with better stats is. I don't think selling gold would be on the same level as selling gear would be, but to say that selling gold is simply not pay-to-win is giving it a pass that it really doesn't deserve, regardless of whether or not you have a personal problem with it. Selling gear with stats on it is clearer cut, I think. And the stats don't even have to be absolutely better than everything else. They just have to be significant enough to the level of current content to be worth paying money for. So probably about the level of a full set of normal raid gear for the newest tier, I'd probably say. Again, probably not as bad as selling stuff like bottomless flasks, or flasks that are better than the shit you can make in-game, or taking it all the way to its illogical conclusion of selling gear that's straight up better than or equal to Mythic raid gear. But it would be selling player power. And in a game that's all about walking on an endless treadmill of growing in player power, not calling that pay-to-win (or some other magical term that sits somewhere in the limbo between pay-to-win and not pay-to-win that you can use when you want to nicely turn your head and obfuscate the fact that it's some degree of pay-to-win; the term I remember using back when I was one of the people who would do that is 'scam'.) just seems... disingenuous.

[Salacari]

Can't we just bully people who buy it? Kick them from groups drive them out of lfg that kinda thing?

Send a message?

You are a horrible person, go back watching asmon. Geez

If you want to send a message stop playing the game. If you abuse people or just advocating abuse because they bought an item then you just are scum.

[sandlurp]

Honestly who wants this?


These transmogs are way more visually striking and most likely will offer more particle effects and other enhancements than in game items. Honestly everyone needs to protest this crap before it gets out of control. These are new appearences that can be used for unique events like Mage Tower 2.0 or other game feats of strength.....


How are people ok with this?

Congratulations you just created a 21-page thread socially engaging people with blizzard. You basically just rewarded them for this move.

[Moozart]

Honestly who wants this?


These transmogs are way more visually striking and most likely will offer more particle effects and other enhancements than in game items. Honestly everyone needs to protest this crap before it gets out of control. These are new appearences that can be used for unique events like Mage Tower 2.0 or other game feats of strength.....


How are people ok with this?

The people that buy them will want it. Not sure how that's a hard concept.

[Anelya]

Can anyone link me what we're talking about?

Seems I've been out of the loop for too long

[Sinx]

Don't get why people bother to work up a heart attack over cosmetic stuff in the store. There's no player power in them, so it doesn't make any difference what so ever on the game play or progression. And anyone can get them, with a huge amount of people running around with it, which makes them common and boring. There's a case to be made about the token, but even removing that would likely do little but make a lot of gold farmers/sellers extremely happy. I mean you see the bot hell that is TBC. Sure, there are bots and spam on retail too, but the amount would explode if the token was removed.

[Kuvanet]

I don’t mind the cash shop if the in game rewards were on the same level of detail. But when a in game item is giving a recolor and cash shop item is giving unique looks. That’s when it feels bad. Looking at you 100 reputations achievement.

[Moozart]

Don't get why people bother to work up a heart attack over cosmetic stuff in the store. There's no player power in them, so it doesn't make any difference what so ever on the game play or progression. And anyone can get them, with a huge amount of people running around with it, which makes them common and boring. There's a case to be made about the token, but even removing that would likely do little but make a lot of gold farmers/sellers extremely happy. I mean you see the bot hell that is TBC. Sure, there are bots and spam on retail too, but the amount would explode if the token was removed.

Its just brokes being brokes