Claeyt wrote:TruthTeller wrote:martinuzz wrote:I must agree the term is in itself somewhat misleading.
"Pay to win" is used to describe a situation in a game, where players can gain (non-cosmetical) advantage over other players by paying real life money.
League of Legends is pay-to-win for most of its playerbase.
What? LoL isn't that at all. If you spend billions on it you'll get the champions and other stuff faster but you can still get it all by just playing constantly. The cosmetic skins and the extra pages are the only things you can buy for real money that you can't get by just playing. The pages are handy but you can always change them up before the match if you have to.
To me, "Pay to Win" means that there is something in the game that is unattainable unless you "pay" for it. It would give the people that payed for it a clear advantage over those people who didn't want to pay for it. LoL and Salem make it so that you can pay to grow faster or level faster but they don't sell anything that is game breakingly obviously an advantage.
Sure, you can define in multiple ways "pay to win", but what is certain is that for most players having access to specific runepages and specific champions that counter enemy champions is of major importance for winning that particular game.
For instance, you see that enemy picks nidalee. If you don't own yasuo or tf with proper runepages due to your limited resources, then you are far worse off than a paying player that does own them. (edit: err forgot nidalee's rework XD, so is often played top nowadays. Before the rework this example was true. An example that works today is if enemy picks renekton, there are certain specific champions that hard-counter him in lane. Ryze is one of them)
Furthermore, "trading" in champion select to avoid your own mid and top being hard-countered, is only possible if both players own both champions. There will be a significant amount of situations where the non-paying can't do the trade due to lack of champions.