Guild Wars 2

milo.6942:

VOLKON.1290:

Aeonblade.8709:

milo.6942:

There is so much convoluted and desperate definition shuffling here it’s just pathetic.

Firstly, how do you win in pve? What is the end goal of pve? I’m asking you. Tell me, how do you win pve? If you say pve can’t be won, then stop reading here. Gw2 is not p2w. If you think achieving or competing in any of the following would be considered “winning” or “endgame” then read on:

• Legendaries
• Ascended
• WvW
• Fractals

P2W does not refer exclusively to things that are bought with money with no alternatives. If you don’t agree, then stop reading. GW2 is not P2W for you. However, there are many games that would commonly be considered P2W that allow players the option to bypass large amounts of grind or time-gating by spending some money. In this sense GW2 is indisputably P2W, but probably fairly mild in comparison to other games.

TL;DR

1. P2W term generally includes games that bypass grind with $$$
2. GW2 allows you to bypass grind with $$$
3. GW2 is P2W (the degree is up to you to determine)

Concise and well worded. Great post +1

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

You can buy a legendary directly from the auction house.

Which just leads us back to the circle of everyone’s definition of P2W is going to be different.

VOLKON.1290:

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

Don’t forget something essential:
Pay to be equal a little more quickly AND without any need to play the game.
Makes a really big difference.
Get the same things as players that played the game but without playing it and quicker. If you are ok with this and don’t consider that you are buying the endgame then fine.
PVE is not about beating someone else, it is about beating the game( grinding it to death if necessary – and God knows I hate it) . Bypass this with money and you have a P2W.

Jski.6180:

Only with real life money?

Did you read my post? Broadly speaking, p2w encompasses games with the ability to earn rewards by play time as well as credit card.

VOLKON.1290:

milo.6942:

VOLKON.1290:

Aeonblade.8709:

milo.6942:

There is so much convoluted and desperate definition shuffling here it’s just pathetic.

Firstly, how do you win in pve? What is the end goal of pve? I’m asking you. Tell me, how do you win pve? If you say pve can’t be won, then stop reading here. Gw2 is not p2w. If you think achieving or competing in any of the following would be considered “winning” or “endgame” then read on:

• Legendaries
• Ascended
• WvW
• Fractals

P2W does not refer exclusively to things that are bought with money with no alternatives. If you don’t agree, then stop reading. GW2 is not P2W for you. However, there are many games that would commonly be considered P2W that allow players the option to bypass large amounts of grind or time-gating by spending some money. In this sense GW2 is indisputably P2W, but probably fairly mild in comparison to other games.

TL;DR

1. P2W term generally includes games that bypass grind with $$$
2. GW2 allows you to bypass grind with $$$
3. GW2 is P2W (the degree is up to you to determine)

Concise and well worded. Great post +1

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

You can buy a legendary directly from the auction house.

Which is equal in power to an ascended, both of which can be obtained more slowly in game.

Its power is irrelevant, it’s the grind time that is being bought.

To me, ‘pay to win’ is needing to buy items from the cashshop in order to progress in the game at any decency. With that in mind, GW2 is certainly not pay to win. The items in the store are nice to have, but they are by no means a necessity.

Would you rather drop in personal time or real money to get your legendary? As long as you don’t need a legendary to run dungeons you’re fine. This is a game where you can’t buy skill to succeed.

milo.6942:

Jski.6180:

Only with real life money?

Did you read my post? Broadly speaking, p2w encompasses games with the ability to earn rewards by play time as well as credit card.

VOLKON.1290:

milo.6942:

VOLKON.1290:

Aeonblade.8709:

milo.6942:

There is so much convoluted and desperate definition shuffling here it’s just pathetic.

Firstly, how do you win in pve? What is the end goal of pve? I’m asking you. Tell me, how do you win pve? If you say pve can’t be won, then stop reading here. Gw2 is not p2w. If you think achieving or competing in any of the following would be considered “winning” or “endgame” then read on:

• Legendaries
• Ascended
• WvW
• Fractals

P2W does not refer exclusively to things that are bought with money with no alternatives. If you don’t agree, then stop reading. GW2 is not P2W for you. However, there are many games that would commonly be considered P2W that allow players the option to bypass large amounts of grind or time-gating by spending some money. In this sense GW2 is indisputably P2W, but probably fairly mild in comparison to other games.

TL;DR

1. P2W term generally includes games that bypass grind with $$$
2. GW2 allows you to bypass grind with $$$
3. GW2 is P2W (the degree is up to you to determine)

Concise and well worded. Great post +1

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

You can buy a legendary directly from the auction house.

Which is equal in power to an ascended, both of which can be obtained more slowly in game.

Its power is irrelevant, it’s the grind time that is being bought.

Your comply wrong about p2w the idea of p2w is using outside of the game money only to win a game. This is what you see in DLC from things like dead spaces 3 or 2 (not sure if it hard it but i think it did) these would content that would give you better items then other players could get in the game that is the win having strong items then players in game.
Now any game that lets you use in game money to buy these upgrades cant be p2w because the win is taken away from the cash only players there is no way to be better then in game money users only.

BeoErgon.9107:

VOLKON.1290:

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

Don’t forget something essential:
Pay to be equal a little more quickly AND without any need to play the game.
Makes a really big difference.
Get the same things as players that played the game but without playing it and quicker. If you are ok with this and don’t consider that you are buying the endgame then fine.
PVE is not about beating someone else, it is about beating the game( grinding it to death if necessary – and God knows I hate it) . Bypass this with money and you have a P2W.

That’s not pay to win either. That is more of a “pay to bypass the reason for buying the game in the first place.”

Arikyali.5804:

To me, ‘pay to win’ is needing to buy items from the cashshop in order to progress in the game at any decency. With that in mind, GW2 is certainly not pay to win. The items in the store are nice to have, but they are by no means a necessity.

Would you rather drop in personal time or real money to get your legendary? As long as you don’t need a legendary to run dungeons you’re fine. This is a game where you can’t buy skill to succeed.

You don’t need to run dungeons neither. You can pay for them.
Heck, you don’t NEED anything in PVE.

TChalla.7146:

BeoErgon.9107:

VOLKON.1290:

Concise, well worded, and wrong.

Pay to be equal a little more quickly is not pay to win.

Don’t forget something essential:
Pay to be equal a little more quickly AND without any need to play the game.
Makes a really big difference.
Get the same things as players that played the game but without playing it and quicker. If you are ok with this and don’t consider that you are buying the endgame then fine.
PVE is not about beating someone else, it is about beating the game( grinding it to death if necessary – and God knows I hate it) . Bypass this with money and you have a P2W.

That’s not pay to win either. That is more of a “pay to bypass the reason for buying the game in the first place.”

In a game with “no vertical progression” (heh), you are essentially making the P2W apply to cosmetics and time sinks rather than actual power. Winning in this game is getting legendaries and ascended items that make your character appear differently from others.

It’s simply the difference between a horizontal progression vs vertical. Not to mention in all actuality there is a vertical grind, albeit only 5% of an increase in stats.

So really, either way you look at it, by definition, the game is P2W.

Pay To Win

What is being won here?

Take only 1 example:

Legendaries might be considered an endgame objective

Can you pay to win a legendary?

The answer is yes.

Do you have to pay to win a legendary?

No.
But those that have can be said to have paid to win.

milo.6942:

Pay To Win

What is being won here?

Take only 1 example:

Legendaries might be considered an endgame objective

Can you pay to win a legendary?

The answer is yes.

Do you have to pay to win a legendary?

No.
But those that have can be said to have paid to win.

That not a win for a lot of ppl though the win though legendary is working to get it just to simply buy it is not going to be a win. Look at it this way the AP for a legendary is crafting it not just having one that is the indicator of the win.
What your doing is having one small hang up with one very small part of the game and trying to use that to prove every thing else in the game is p2w. Its a flawed argument and ppl point this out every time but ppl keep making these threads over and over. If you say it enofe will never make it true.

Please stop being so negative on these forums because throwing arone P2W in a game is a major thing to say about a game to the point of game destroying.

Well… I suppose I could keep coming back and explaining my view on whether or not this is a “pay to win” game or not, but it appears to be going nowhere fast.

For PvE, the idea of pay to win is silly anyway, and why should anyone care if someone spends real money to buy everything and not play the game? How does it negatively affect you overall in PvE? The only person I can see it affecting negatively is the person that actually spent the money, got everything they wanted, and then sat back and thought “hmmm… now what?”

To each his/her own.

Nuh. I buy stuff off the gem store all the the time and I’m not winning anything.

TChalla.7146:

Well… I suppose I could keep coming back and explaining my view on whether or not this is a “pay to win” game or not, but it appears to be going nowhere fast.

For PvE, the idea of pay to win is silly anyway, and why should anyone care if someone spends real money to buy everything and not play the game? How does it negatively affect you overall in PvE? The only person I can see it affecting negatively is the person that actually spent the money, got everything they wanted, and then sat back and thought “hmmm… now what?”

To each his/her own.

Its the same few ppl posting over and over the same views over and over the argument is and has been over for some time. Alone from the up votes the forum communally have showed that its not a real argument to make any more (at the time of posting the first post has no indicator of any up votes yet the counter augmenter has max up votes).

If you own a Legendary you haven’t won anything. There is no “own a legendary” contest.

If we’re going to subjectively create a set of assumptions to validate our arguments then the answer is almost any game, certainly any MMO, is pay 2 win because I could just buy an account.

Jski.6180:

TChalla.7146:

Well… I suppose I could keep coming back and explaining my view on whether or not this is a “pay to win” game or not, but it appears to be going nowhere fast.

For PvE, the idea of pay to win is silly anyway, and why should anyone care if someone spends real money to buy everything and not play the game? How does it negatively affect you overall in PvE? The only person I can see it affecting negatively is the person that actually spent the money, got everything they wanted, and then sat back and thought “hmmm… now what?”

To each his/her own.

Its the same few ppl posting over and over the same views over and over the argument is and has been over for some time. Alone from the up votes the forum communally have showed that its not a real argument to make any more (at the time of posting the first post has no indicator of any up votes yet the counter augmenter has max up votes).

Um. The OP and the first post both say they don’t believe the game is P2W. Which is fine. But your post here makes absolutely no sense, because the OP’s post agrees with the first post.

So….What?

As for “stop throwing around P2W because it damages games” Or what such was said, well, make it less P2W and it won’t even be up for debate

Aeonblade.8709:

Jski.6180:

TChalla.7146:

Well… I suppose I could keep coming back and explaining my view on whether or not this is a “pay to win” game or not, but it appears to be going nowhere fast.

For PvE, the idea of pay to win is silly anyway, and why should anyone care if someone spends real money to buy everything and not play the game? How does it negatively affect you overall in PvE? The only person I can see it affecting negatively is the person that actually spent the money, got everything they wanted, and then sat back and thought “hmmm… now what?”

To each his/her own.

Its the same few ppl posting over and over the same views over and over the argument is and has been over for some time. Alone from the up votes the forum communally have showed that its not a real argument to make any more (at the time of posting the first post has no indicator of any up votes yet the counter augmenter has max up votes).

Um. The OP and the first post both say they don’t believe the game is P2W. Which is fine. But your post here makes absolutely no sense, because the OP’s post agrees with the first post.

So….What?

As for “stop throwing around P2W because it damages games” Or what such was said, well, make it less P2W and it won’t even be up for debate

So at a point the debate must end and it has ended for this some time ago there has been countless post about it and most ppl know this game is not P2W. At best this is just ppl who are only on the forums bring up old things over and over.

I was talking about the ppl who are posting in here not the OP because it happens the same way a random person new to the game or forums post an idea that already been talked about ppl seeing it as an adages to post there point of views (not discussion) do so and then you have ppl who counter it etc… and then we get a monster like this that last for 2 days or so then die off. In about a week or 3 the cycle will happen all over and you will have the same ppl post the same point of view then you will get the same counters. The discussion ended about a year ago.

Jski.6180:

Aeonblade.8709:

Jski.6180:

TChalla.7146:

Well… I suppose I could keep coming back and explaining my view on whether or not this is a “pay to win” game or not, but it appears to be going nowhere fast.

For PvE, the idea of pay to win is silly anyway, and why should anyone care if someone spends real money to buy everything and not play the game? How does it negatively affect you overall in PvE? The only person I can see it affecting negatively is the person that actually spent the money, got everything they wanted, and then sat back and thought “hmmm… now what?”

To each his/her own.

Its the same few ppl posting over and over the same views over and over the argument is and has been over for some time. Alone from the up votes the forum communally have showed that its not a real argument to make any more (at the time of posting the first post has no indicator of any up votes yet the counter augmenter has max up votes).

Um. The OP and the first post both say they don’t believe the game is P2W. Which is fine. But your post here makes absolutely no sense, because the OP’s post agrees with the first post.

So….What?

As for “stop throwing around P2W because it damages games” Or what such was said, well, make it less P2W and it won’t even be up for debate

So at a point the debate must end and it has ended for this some time ago there has been countless post about it and most ppl know this game is not P2W. At best this is just ppl who are only on the forums bring up old things over and over.

I was talking about the ppl who are posting in here not the OP because it happens the same way a random person new to the game or forums post an idea that already been talked about ppl seeing it as an adages to post there point of views (not discussion) do so and then you have ppl who counter it etc… and then we get a monster like this that last for 2 days or so then die off. In about a week or 3 the cycle will happen all over and you will have the same ppl post the same point of view then you will get the same counters. The discussion ended about a year ago.

Ahem…
Can’t we deduce that posts like this appearing periodically means there is something wrong?
If there was just one and never again you could say that it was one person thinking about it, redundancy means that there is something to be discussed.

Is this discussion sterile? Maybe. Probably.

But be sure of something: as sure as you are about your opinion, as long as there is cash to gold conversion this thread will appear over and over again. Seems not ‘most’ people know this game is not P2W.

Discussions are healthy and serve to vent some anger. Better than keeping it to yourself.

This discussion did not end one year ago for the simple reason that GW2 was not the same game one year ago. Have you noticed all the recent posts about the return of farm bots? The ridiculous amount of grind introduced lately has made selling gold worth it again I guess. (ok; ok; this is a far fetched guess… Because after all Anet is its own farmer able to provide cheap gold, why risk buying it to others?)

Anyways, time for me to stop. SAid all I had to say.
Bye all.

Jski.6180:

milo.6942:

Pay To Win

What is being won here?

Take only 1 example:

Legendaries might be considered an endgame objective

Can you pay to win a legendary?

The answer is yes.

Do you have to pay to win a legendary?

No.
But those that have can be said to have paid to win.

That not a win for a lot of ppl though the win though legendary is working to get it just to simply buy it is not going to be a win. Look at it this way the AP for a legendary is crafting it not just having one that is the indicator of the win.
What your doing is having one small hang up with one very small part of the game and trying to use that to prove every thing else in the game is p2w. Its a flawed argument and ppl point this out every time but ppl keep making these threads over and over. If you say it enofe will never make it true.

Please stop being so negative on these forums because throwing arone P2W in a game is a major thing to say about a game to the point of game destroying.

I only mentioned 1 thing to keep the example simple, but there are many things that are considered final objectives in this game that are all touched by the noodly appendage of godmode $$$ → gold. You can buy gold. With gold, you can buy (nearly) everything.

I like how people going nuts over this believe there’s a defined meaning to the term pay to win….there isn’t. There’s never been a clear consensus on what it means so maybe it’s time to stop being condescending and flat out rude to people who have a different view on it.

Everyone value things differently.

I dont’ care about gold, so it’s not p2w for me.

People who dont’ want to spend hundred of hours farming for fancy looking gear may think it is p2w.

So my conclusion is it is p2w. “But” it’s probably the least p2w cash shop mmorpg out there.

This topic is going nowhere.
I believe alot of the people arguing for the P2W have never actually played a true P2W scenario game, you can tell by what’s being argued as P2W for the sake of calling GW2 that. Its really not a matter of opinion, its a matter of having experienced it and you can tell who actually has. And those that haven’t can never be convinced what it actually is like unless they were to experience themselves.

^ I played a bunch of other mmorpg. GW2 is doing exactly the same thing other cash shop company is doing. It is Pay 2 Win.

But on a scale of 0-10. It only get a scale1. Since other game studio is much much worse.

If you can use real world money to get a competitive advantage (and yes, getting ascended gear is a competitive advantage, otherwise, why does it exist), then it’s pay to win. It’s not as bad as other pay to win games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s not a binary state, you can have super grindy pay to win games, and games like GW2, where you get a minor competitive advantage. When exotics were the best in class, this wasn’t a big deal, because exotics were cheap. But ascended gear is time-gated. But you can bypass the time gated part with gold. So, people who can afford to grind, or want to spend real world money to avoid grind can skip over the time gated part, and get a complete set of ascended gear on day one. And so, we ask: why is ascended gear time gated? The answer is: to drive people to buy gems to convert to gold so they can skip the time gated part. And thus, GW2 is pay to win. This is also why ascended gear is ugly as sin, so that people buy transmutation crystals.

Becka Williams.4978:

If you can use real world money to get a competitive advantage (and yes, getting ascended gear is a competitive advantage, otherwise, why does it exist), then it’s pay to win. It’s not as bad as other pay to win games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s not a binary state, you can have super grindy pay to win games, and games like GW2, where you get a minor competitive advantage. When exotics were the best in class, this wasn’t a big deal, because exotics were cheap. But ascended gear is time-gated. But you can bypass the time gated part with gold. So, people who can afford to grind, or want to spend real world money to avoid grind can skip over the time gated part, and get a complete set of ascended gear on day one. And so, we ask: why is ascended gear time gated? The answer is: to drive people to buy gems to convert to gold so they can skip the time gated part. And thus, GW2 is pay to win. This is also why ascended gear is ugly as sin, so that people buy transmutation crystals.

I believe where I, and others, disagree with this is that you are not FORCED to buy gems to convert to gold. That’s a fundamental thing with P2W. Wherein you either spend the money, or not have the gear. That’s including even if it’s attainable in-game, but would take a significant amount of time. I’m talking more than the 9 days that weapons timegate you…if you’re crafting it. You can easily skip the timegate by getting gold to buy the mats. Since gold is not a hard thing to get*, it negates the timegating argument.

Also, I’d like to point out that people need to stop altering definitions to suit their arguments. When the term P2W came out it was because games would sell the best gear in their shop. Or limit upgrades unless you bought the upgrade item from the shop. Or limit content, and thus the gear, if you did not spend money. This is what people mean when they say P2W is being forced to spend money to be competitive. Not this whole “Oh this person can spend money and get it faster!” nonsense.

*I’m saying this as someone who does not play the TP, and gets most of my gold by doing things I enjoy. Like world bosses, or dungeons.

In my opinion it really comes down to what a person defines as a pay-to-win for himself. When considering if a game is p2w or not I ask myself the folowing questions.
-Does paying unlock areas or parts of the game others do not have access to? – No, this is not the case in GW2.
-Does a player who pays have access to better statistical equipment? -No, GW2 does not have this.
- Can the best statistical equipment be obtained via gameplay within a reasonable time period? – Time is subjective. Each person values his time differently and, as it stands, has to weigh the benefits of the time required to obtain it via gameplay or spending cash to speed up the process. As a practial example from the latest release is it worth upgrading my exotic armor (we all agree that at the moment exotics are fairly easy to get ) for a total of 14 power +9 precision and +1 Critical strike damage and more agony resistance (6 pieces of armor total) via playing or does it take too long for me. Lets assume, for the purpose of the argument, that I’m a fractals runner in an elite dedicated guild and ascended gear “locks” high end fractals for me(I NEED max agony resist) and it’s mandatory that I get it. In this case, yes, buying gems with money and converting it to gold will speed the process up and give me an edge if I’m going for a world first lvl 50 clear, but this is the one and only instance I can think of where this matters. Ascended gear can be obtained, in what I consider a timely fashion, by just playing and crafting it so lvl 40 fractals is still open for everyone and if someone has enough gold stored it makes the entire mentioned point obsolite. The pople who “don’t have enough time to farm” won’t be doing world first runs for anything.
- Has the existence of a cash shop in one form or another negatively impacted my game experience? – In GW2, for the most part, it has not. The continued need to buy addition transmutation crystals is the only instance where I feel the shop is actually an INconvenience due to the ever climbing gold/gems conversion rate. That aside, GW2 has to have stuff in the shop that players WANT to get. People who buy looks or convinience in the gem shop generate revenue for the game company and basically that allows the game to continue to grow and get better. People who farm and convert the gold, in general, play the game more, they populate the world, get experinced in it more and could offer better feedback on how it can be improved. Every MMO needs a substantial amount of people, otherwise ist just another singleplayer game. Speaking as a guy from a relatively poor country, an MMO with a sub fee can be considered pay to win, because if I can’t make the bill I have no options, I won’t be able to even log in (just ilustrating a point, I defintly don’t consider sub-fee = p2w, they have their positives).
Considering everything I’ve said, I do NOT consider GW2 a pay to win title.

ShadowAgent.6053:

Considering everything I’ve said, I do NOT consider GW2 a pay to win title.

Exactly so. “Paying,” provides the payer with nothing that I do not have without having paid.

I have some pretty significant concerns with GW2 and Anet in general, but pay to win is not one of them.

Becka Williams.4978:

If you can use real world money to get a competitive advantage (and yes, getting ascended gear is a competitive advantage, otherwise, why does it exist), then it’s pay to win. It’s not as bad as other pay to win games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s not a binary state, you can have super grindy pay to win games, and games like GW2, where you get a minor competitive advantage. When exotics were the best in class, this wasn’t a big deal, because exotics were cheap. But ascended gear is time-gated. But you can bypass the time gated part with gold. So, people who can afford to grind, or want to spend real world money to avoid grind can skip over the time gated part, and get a complete set of ascended gear on day one. And so, we ask: why is ascended gear time gated? The answer is: to drive people to buy gems to convert to gold so they can skip the time gated part. And thus, GW2 is pay to win. This is also why ascended gear is ugly as sin, so that people buy transmutation crystals.

Pay to win means you pay to have access to things that cannot be acquired by any means except real world money. I’ll accept “pay to skip the legendary grind” but you can’t buy ascended armor off the trading post. You can’t skip the time-gated parts of ascended armor because there are a number of ingredients that are account bound and cannot be purchased.

Also, to whomever said that there’s obviously an issue since p2w keeps coming up: No. There’s an issue with people understanding what it means to pay to win.

…Do people realize how expensive it is to buy gold and become ‘pay to win’ in this game?

Dropping a few dollars a month is fine. It’s not going to destroy gameplay. If you’re making so much money that your spending becomes gamebreaking, you’re probably already working a career that takes a chunk of your life and likely don’t have the time to ‘work’ up to those high end stuff anyway.

You can’t buy skill in this game. Boosts are nice but not necessary. Cosmetics are nice but not necessary. Anything in the gem store is nice to have, but NOT a necessity to advance gameplay. And if you’re going to argue about ‘buying gold’ to get gear you want, well…anyone who is just bad at gameplay will fail, no matter how many exotics and legendary weapons they buy. There is nothing exclusive with real money that cannot be obtained without money.

And if you wanted to, you can buy gems with ingame gold! the gemstore is not exclusive to paying customers!

Arikyali.5804:

…Do people realize how expensive it is to buy gold and become ‘pay to win’ in this game?

Dropping a few dollars a month is fine. It’s not going to destroy gameplay. If you’re making so much money that your spending becomes gamebreaking, you’re probably already working a career that takes a chunk of your life and likely don’t have the time to ‘work’ up to those high end stuff anyway.

You can’t buy skill in this game. Boosts are nice but not necessary. Cosmetics are nice but not necessary. Anything in the gem store is nice to have, but NOT a necessity to advance gameplay. And if you’re going to argue about ‘buying gold’ to get gear you want, well…anyone who is just bad at gameplay will fail, no matter how many exotics and legendary weapons they buy. There is nothing exclusive with real money that cannot be obtained without money.

And if you wanted to, you can buy gems with ingame gold! the gemstore is not exclusive to paying customers!

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

That’s called power leveling and it was a legitimate problem in WoW. Gold farmers are basically the same thing. Some poor sap is sitting at a computer all day in a 3rd world country making less than $1 a day farming gold.

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Well, I can buy gems to get gold to get legendaries, to get the dungeon master title via path sellers, to get carried through fractals, to get wvw commanders to carry me to all the poi in wvw for map completion, etc….just saying.

Protoavis.9107:

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Well, I can buy gems to get gold to get legendaries, to get the dungeon master title via path sellers, to get carried through fractals, to get wvw commanders to carry me to all the poi in wvw for map completion, etc….just saying.

You can also do that using gold you make in game. None of those things require gems first.

when identifying whether a game is pay2win, we need to actually understand the meaning of pay2win.

first of all the wordings itself, pay to win. win against what ? the common sense is that when we talk about pay to win, it is usually win against other player, i.e. in pvp, in GW2 case sPvP or WvW.

now, name an item in the game that you can buy from the gemstore, and not available in-game, that give you an advantage over other player if you have it in pvp. i don’t think i can name any, therefore GW2 is not a pay2win game.

if you pay-to-win beauty contest.. well that surely is… lol

azizul.8469:

when identifying whether a game is pay2win, we need to actually understand the meaning of pay2win.

first of all the wordings itself, pay to win. win against what ? the common sense is that when we talk about pay to win, it is usually win against other player, i.e. in pvp, in GW2 case sPvP or WvW.

now, name an item in the game that you can buy from the gemstore, and not available in-game, that give you an advantage over other player if you have it in pvp. i don’t think i can name any, therefore GW2 is not a pay2win game.

if you pay-to-win beauty contest.. well that surely is… lol

In P2W games I’ve seen you can still technically get the gated content/rewards without paying it just takes an absurd amount of time. I’m sure people have actual examples that they remember, but I can’t think of the game names atm.

play Runes of Magic and you’ll see what pay-to-win means…….

Protoavis.9107:

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Well, I can buy gems to get gold to get legendaries, to get the dungeon master title via path sellers, to get carried through fractals, to get wvw commanders to carry me to all the poi in wvw for map completion, etc….just saying.

And yet you can’t pay $ in the cash shop to gain 100% extra power (not talking about the stat, literally dealig 100% extra damage), go into wvw with said power and completely tear up roaming. And even less so in structured PvP. And someone who spend nothing in the cash shop and only a small amount of effort in game will be on equal footing…how is this pw2 exactly?

A person with the money to buy gems and convert to gold could have had a legendary and a full set of ascended armor the day the Dec 10 patch hit. If they had time under their belt beforehand, they could have easily had ascended or better items in every slot.

Now you have a player with something like 10-15% better stats in both offense and defense until everyone else caught up because they dropped a wad of cash on the game.

This wouldn’t be possible if every ascended material was account bound.

It’s certainly less of a problem for heavy classes, since you could stockpile deldrimor ingots, though this demonstrates an unfortunate preference for the aforementioned classes, since light and medium armor classes had to start from scratch.

Valistrix.4079:

I’ve seen the term thrown around a fair bit on this forum and it confuses me. I don’t see and have never seen any items in the gem store that will give me an edge when competing against the game’s PvE or PvP content.

The popular argument seems to be that cosmetics are the endgame and thus the ability to purchase some cosmetic items is an example of P2W. This strikes me as asinine. A player can be just as good at the game than another player who’s decked in the flamekissed armour or the Grenth hood, etc. Cosmetics have no bearing on skill or your capability to complete the game’s content. I’ve bought a couple of cosmetic items from the gem store in the past but they in no way allowed me to finish a dungeon or participate in WvW any more effectively than someone who hasn’t invested a penny in gems; a currency that may be bought with in-game gold.

To those of you that consider Guild Wars 2 to be pay-to-win, what has made you feel this way and what would you like to see change?

Yes it is about 7 out of 10 on the pay to win scale.

It’s P2W but it’s not.

Principally this game can’t be P2W because you can theoretically with enough grind play the entire game without ever needing gem cards. In fact it’s not theoretical, it’s fact (Save for some things, like the Mr Sparkles mini which actually requires you to pay to get it.).

What you have to keep on mind is that this game will be jumping between P2W for as long as Gem-Gold is interchangeable. The day they make it Gems→Gold only will be the closest thing to P2W, if nothing else. Or if they make certain things require payments (Like, Gaia for example has an achievement, which has the highest amount of points granted, but that requires you to use their special payment method subscription thing for two months), because then Rez orbs and such which are exceptionally strong items if used right will be available to cash users mostly, save for the occasional daily.

wow some people here really want to make gw2 look like it’s pay to win.

If you don’t know what pay to win looks like clearly you haven’t played/seen Diablo 3.. where you can literally use your credit card to become the most powerful being in the game while in gw2 even if you buy all your armor all your legendary weapons all your +30 AR whatever I will probably still be better than you with 10 AR just saying~

Protoavis.9107:

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Well, I can buy gems to get gold to get legendaries, to get the dungeon master title via path sellers, to get carried through fractals, to get wvw commanders to carry me to all the poi in wvw for map completion, etc….just saying.

Do it then.. lol noone will stop you… and at the end of the day I will be there laughing at you after you spent all that money and I’ve done the same thing without spending a dime

NO, x player pumps $10k into the game and what does he win over me? does looking good = win?

even then he might be colourblind and he looks like crap but wields a legendary. big deal.

furthermore. If I group with him in a dungeon its win/win for both of us.

OR does it give you an advantage in WvW? clearly paying for better gear if you also the superior strategy – maybe not.

clearly the answer is NO.

Grim Jr.8946:

Protoavis.9107:

Shockwave.1230:

If you really wanted to make the game pay to win, you could pay someone to play the game for you!

Game over

Well, I can buy gems to get gold to get legendaries, to get the dungeon master title via path sellers, to get carried through fractals, to get wvw commanders to carry me to all the poi in wvw for map completion, etc….just saying.

Do it then.. lol noone will stop you… and at the end of the day I will be there laughing at you after you spent all that money and I’ve done the same thing without spending a dime

Was just pointing the flaw in the original comment as you can at the moment pretty much pay someone else to do all the hard content for you with real world dollars which that poster said would mean pay to win….I dunno why that wasn’t obvious to people. I dunno some peoples reading comprehension seems pretty low, education system is failing.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Ashen.2907:

You don’t need to pay money to get any of the things you mention. If you don’t have to pay for the item it is not pay to win. If I could not reasonably get those items without spending real world currency you would be right.

By your logic low level basic white gear is pay to win because I can choose to buy gems, convert to gold, and buy said gear if I wanted to, even though I can get it through game play.

It’s like i’m a wizard or something… I point out how the game is P2W and how people will justify it by any means possible and then this happens.

Based on this definition GW2 can never be P2W, even Anet can’t make their own game P2W with this definition as long as gold->gems is in the game.

Even if they put armor in the gem store that gives +1,000,000,000 stats it still isn’t P2W because hey… “GOLD TO GEMS I DON”T NEED THE GEM STORE"

Just keep moving that line…

That isn’t entirely true. What distinguishes a Pay to Win Game from a game like ours, is that if Guild Wars were truly a Pay to Win Game, the only way to get Globs of Ectoplasm, Mystic Coins, Bloodstone Dust, and almost every other material that is required to create either Legendary or Ascended Equipment is from the Gem Store. They would not drop off of monsters anymore.

However, they would no longer be account bound in the case of the Ascended Materials. This means that in order to create an Ascended or Legendary Weapon, someone, somewhere along the line would have to spend money in order to buy them off of the Gem Store. And I mean real money, because simply spending in game currency would not be efficient to getting the amounts required for these Legendary and Ascended Items. Plus no one would turn a profit on them anymore if no one bought them with real cash.

These items would then be sold on the Trading Post for exceedingly higher amounts of gold than they currently are, because the gate to entry is no longer simply how long it takes to farm them, it is how much a person is required to spend on them to get them.

Then all Legendary, and Ascended Items would automatically be soulbound on acquire making it impossible for someone to make a profit on them. This means that the only profit to be made would be on Precursor Weapons and Materials.

This is what being a Pay to Win game would do to Guild Wars 2.

Tell me where you have to pay real money to win something.

You can pay to not play the game all you want but no amount of gear can make up for being bad. Someone could pay for his level 80 and all its gear then go to a dungeon and get kicked 5 minutes later for constantly dying, go to wvw and be 100% rallybait or go to spvp and find out you can’t buy a thing in there.

What exactly has this hypothetical person won, exactly? Sounds more like he paid to lose.

Evelynddra.9265:

Also handy list of P2W games. Runes of Magic, LOTR, PWI, D3, Shayia, Aion (to an extent), I think Rift is not too, and basically any f2p Korean MMO.

I think you mean “any f2p Chinese MMO” because the most prominent of the games you just listed (Perfect World International) was actually designed and produced in China, not Korea.

That said, Aion and Guild Wars 2 are both owned by NC Soft, though Guild Wars 2 was developed by NC Soft’s division known as “Arena Net.” What this means is that Guild Wars 2 was developed by a company that is based in South Korea. That said, South Korea is a democratic state, just like the United States of America. Which means it is much more free than China or North Korea. So you really need to be careful when generalizing about games made in Korea, because you need to be specific about whether you are referring to games made in South Korea, or games made in North Korea. Because what is true of one, may not be true of the other.

Guhracie.3419:

Becka Williams.4978:

If you can use real world money to get a competitive advantage (and yes, getting ascended gear is a competitive advantage, otherwise, why does it exist), then it’s pay to win. It’s not as bad as other pay to win games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s not a binary state, you can have super grindy pay to win games, and games like GW2, where you get a minor competitive advantage. When exotics were the best in class, this wasn’t a big deal, because exotics were cheap. But ascended gear is time-gated. But you can bypass the time gated part with gold. So, people who can afford to grind, or want to spend real world money to avoid grind can skip over the time gated part, and get a complete set of ascended gear on day one. And so, we ask: why is ascended gear time gated? The answer is: to drive people to buy gems to convert to gold so they can skip the time gated part. And thus, GW2 is pay to win. This is also why ascended gear is ugly as sin, so that people buy transmutation crystals.

Pay to win means you pay to have access to things that cannot be acquired by any means except real world money. I’ll accept “pay to skip the legendary grind” but you can’t buy ascended armor off the trading post. You can’t skip the time-gated parts of ascended armor because there are a number of ingredients that are account bound and cannot be purchased.

Also, to whomever said that there’s obviously an issue since p2w keeps coming up: No. There’s an issue with people understanding what it means to pay to win.

You absolutely can skip the time gated part of ascended gear. You can buy the final form of the mat that requires the time gated mat off the trading post. Bolt of Damask, which needs the time gated silk string is absolutely available on the trading post. Your point is moot.

Becka Williams.4978:

Guhracie.3419:

Becka Williams.4978:

If you can use real world money to get a competitive advantage (and yes, getting ascended gear is a competitive advantage, otherwise, why does it exist), then it’s pay to win. It’s not as bad as other pay to win games, but that doesn’t mean it’s not. It’s not a binary state, you can have super grindy pay to win games, and games like GW2, where you get a minor competitive advantage. When exotics were the best in class, this wasn’t a big deal, because exotics were cheap. But ascended gear is time-gated. But you can bypass the time gated part with gold. So, people who can afford to grind, or want to spend real world money to avoid grind can skip over the time gated part, and get a complete set of ascended gear on day one. And so, we ask: why is ascended gear time gated? The answer is: to drive people to buy gems to convert to gold so they can skip the time gated part. And thus, GW2 is pay to win. This is also why ascended gear is ugly as sin, so that people buy transmutation crystals.

Pay to win means you pay to have access to things that cannot be acquired by any means except real world money. I’ll accept “pay to skip the legendary grind” but you can’t buy ascended armor off the trading post. You can’t skip the time-gated parts of ascended armor because there are a number of ingredients that are account bound and cannot be purchased.

Also, to whomever said that there’s obviously an issue since p2w keeps coming up: No. There’s an issue with people understanding what it means to pay to win.

You absolutely can skip the time gated part of ascended gear. You can buy the final form of the mat that requires the time gated mat off the trading post. Bolt of Damask, which needs the time gated silk string is absolutely available on the trading post. Your point is moot.

Until you realize that you still need to do the time gated stuff to level up your crafting skills high enough to actually make the ascended equipment in the first place. Whether or not you can purchase the time gated mats off of the trading post you still have to get a crafting skill to a high enough level to actually make the ascended gear. And since the Ascended Gear is bound to you, you can’t simply have someone else craft it for you.

pay 2 win means using real money to gain an advantage.

NOTHING IN THE GEM SHOP GIVES YOU AN ADVANTAGE OVER PLAYERS NOT BUYING/TRADING GOLD FOR GEMS.

In essence gw2 is not pay 2 win.

You can get everything in this game that would give you an “advantage” by buying it for the most part (ascended sort of excluded because you can’t by ascended pieces but the materials for it and because of the trinkets).

Seriously people need to learn what p2w means again.