Power Leveling through BlizzardFollow

Not core raiding, core raiders - there's no such thing as core raiding outside of MC in the same way there's no such thing as 'core volunteering' but there are core volunteers. Core raiders are the core of a raiding guild (as you might expect) because they turn up reliably for progression, and already take one another seriously in that respect. No-one's going to stop taking you seriously because you rerolled a healer for the good of the guild but haven't got BIS cloak yet. That's the kind of BS requirement you throw at people you don't know for random raids/recruitment.

All the hardcore raiders you know have every class at level cap? That is not particularly usual, and perhaps owes itself to the unusually long content droughts the Chinese realms had in the past. None of the people I know who play now or in the past have every character at max level. Hell, I knew someone who had three druids at level cap, but no-one with every class. She still plays, btw, (Amberpaw @ Kazzak, 11/14 SoG) and when I asked about it she said that it would, of course, be an advantage to be able to class change and only worry about gearing up.



So you believe power is being bought, but that it's some amount of power less than that needed to guarantee victory (genuine question, not purely rhetorical)? Pay to win is generally employed as a disparaging bit of hyperbole to describe any game where power is bought, so it's unclear what private threshold you're using for the term and thus how much you think buying a level up matters.

I think it's not pay to win, because it doesn't affect people who want to grind through all the levels. I wouldn't call getting tangible results pay to win, I would only use that term when it affects other people negatively. If you want to level up, that's always available and your experience isn't diminished. I always consider pay to win as a competitive scenario. Clearly you have different criteria, but I would say with your criteria: who cares? If it doesn't affect me negatively, then I don't see the issue.

What kind of reasonable human being would read "it takes months" and assume I meant in-game playtime. Would you have EVER thought I was saying it takes months in-game if I had said "It takes 1.5 months to be endgame ready when hitting cap"? Of course not.

Stop being ridiculous.

The average person is going to take months and months to accrue 5d of playtime. Even if we assume 2 hours a day, every day, that's still 2 months. And the average player spends less time than that playing.



My issue with this definition of P2W is that it means it's fundamentally irrelevant to PVE. Your own gearing will never adversely affect another player in PVE. It might make you stronger than them, but PVE isn't a competitive PVP environment (obviously).

I can't endorse a P2W definition that's so narrowly defining "win" as only meaning "paying to obtain a superior position, competitively, against other players."

So I'm looking to define "pay to win" as "paying for a significant advantage relative to what is available without paying."

Yes, saving 5d of playtime only matters if you want to new character at cap and want it at cap to access endgame. Yes, someone can absolutely reach cap without paying.

But paying for direct access to endgame vs. having to spend 120 hours of your life reaching that same position is a pretty massive difference if you want another character at endgame.

Obviously it doesn't matter to you if you don't. But why the hell would that change anything?

Fair enough.

For starters, I care about the form of pay to win where failure to pay money significantly degrades my ability to play the game on a somewhat equal playing field. Taken to the level of the absurd, buying game time at a discount could be portrayed as gaining a gaming advantage by having access to more cash. I don't consider that a significant issue. The guy who can afford a nice computer that doesn't choke on some of the fights where the spell effects get a bit much and the bandwidth to go with it, he may have a different advantage but that falls under my idea of a somewhat equal playing field.

The thing that has tended to **** me off in WoW is the TCG. I used to play CCGs and I know the drill with buying boxes of cards. It always irked me that buying stuff for another game translated into the ability to muddy the line between dollars and WoW currency, and that much of that stuff had no other purpose in the TCG as far as I could tell. Sell Reins of the Swift Spectral Tiger just once and you'll have access to enough gold for some pretty nice stuff off the regular and black market auction houses. When the TCG folds up, I'll be happier but it doesn't quite cross the P2W line for me because I don't feel it is predictable enough to make it a requirement for better game play.

The boost to 90 doesn't break my threshold because it is a minor convenience and there are other ways to reach a similar effect that range from RAF to 300% XP potions, or even a helpful guild.



In fairness, what I actually said was that they have their full kit -- they have everything that they care to have. For some that means one of each, others have a preferred role or a class they simply hate to play. One of our healers would only heal, but she had one of every class that would allow her to heal and multiples of her favorite classes since she played more than one account. I'm a lightweight for our guild, I have one of each class except Paladin at 90. Because of multiple accounts I have multiples of some classes on the same faction, and more if I count cross faction. The more hardcore guys have multiple toons geared up for 25H SoO.

Sigh, I wanted the Jade Crane Chick on the account with my old toons, so I've absentmindedly leveled my third monk. That will give you some idea of why I don't take the 1-90 grind that seriously, I'm going to end up with a third monk just because I wanted a pet that isn't particularly hard to find on the AH. This one is special and different though, she's female and a red Pandaren.



You guys still do that? On a bad day, one of the DPS with a healing spec might respec. Before we have a good DPS from a class with no healing spec reroll, we recruit a new healer. We did that about halfway through MoP because our healer was in a near fatal car crash. As for BiS, well, the legendary cloak is something of an exception and if you're still playing you know that.

If you think the average WoW player is logging in for more than 2 hours a day, you REALLY need to spend less time in a gaming forum echo chambers. No, really.

And the biggest joke here is that you think we can narrow down the population for whom a boost service would be appealing to a very small niche group of hardcore players. That's what I'm most enjoying here.



The boost service is JUST as attractive to "I can only log in 3 times a week" guy as it is to "I log in every day" guy, since their playtime isn't a serious consideration when they're deciding whether or not they want to invest over a hundred hours doing something they don't really want to do just because they want a new class at cap.

And, again, why the hell are people trying to play a game of "well, to THIS population..."

If your argument depends on you narrowing your population down to a specific group, your argument sucks. No exceptions.

Um, no.

Burden of proof is always on the person making an argument.

I posited an if-then statement using a 2 hour mark. But as it was an if-then statement, and not a statement about the actual average playtime of players, I don't need to justify anything. It was always framed as an assumption, and it never needed to be true to return a true value to my statement (if-then statements only hold false if the antecedent is true but the consequent false).

YOU made a definitive statement about what average playtime was. Yeah, I doubt very much that it's over 2 hours a day. Doesn't matter, though. Burden isn't on me. I don't need to justify my disbelief in your statement, because you never offered a sound argument to its truth value in the first place.

Stop arguing like gbaji. It's unbecoming.

Well, 2hr/day average is what was meant, obviously. lol.

Was this linked yet? Pretty cute.

Think I've been around 7 days to cap usually, at 10 hours a week (or a bit more) or so that tended to put me at a good 3-4 months. Was never the most efficient leveler-type-person though. All that time play the AH never helped.