Originally Posted by
raspberry jam
You would be right, if the game ends when you hit the level cap. But it doesn't. You will always gain something by getting there faster, especially if you are not doing anything else different. It's not about you getting to 80 in 9 days and someone else getting there in 10. It's about you getting there in 9 days or you getting there in 10 days. Both the "or" instead of "and", and "you" instead of "someone else" are crucially important here. It's a personal choice, both for PvE pay2savetime and for PvP pay2win.
You are comparing it to a good meal. That is wrong, because you can still keep eating after you hit 80. You don't miss anything by getting there sooner. Yes, I know about the GW2G thread, but they mean that they don't want to focus on getting xp. With the boosts, you don't need to do that. You will get more xp regardless of how you play, so why not just play as you normally would, except with a boosted xp rate?
An on top of that, we could discuss how people see leveling from 60 to 80 when led by confirmation bias compared to when they are actually doing it. You will see person after person agree that they hate grind, then see the very same people turn around and not only say that it's required but that they enjoy it.
Additionally, of course, no one has yet played from 60 to 80. Players are talking about their preconceptions, how they think it will be. Not how it actually will be. Of course, I can't say how it will be either. Except to say that some people will feel pressured to buy boosts to make it go faster.
As for the 90/100, 100/110 thing. See it this way. Back during Prophecies, you could be competitive in PvP using Prophecies-only skills. Then Factions was released. Using Proph only skills was now competitive for a handful of personal builds and for basically no teams. The new baseline included Factions skills. That was the new 100%. It was not 180%, it was 100%, and Prophecies-only was 60% or something.
And buying boosts is baseline too because it affects basically everything you do, combat-wise at least.
No, pay2win items do not guarantee a win. I know what you mean when you say "all other things being equal", but they never are. Also, that definition does not handle cases where one side should win but the other one wins due to pay2win. You could define pay2win your way of course, but a much better definition (and one which also matches the way that the word is actually used) is: a purchase which increases your efficiency and thus the chance that you will win. Buying a 20% damage boost would definitely be considered pay2win, but it does things that fall outside of your description.
(Imagine a simple game where you do damage to your opponent and the first one to run out of health loses. If both sides do 100 DPS, has 1000 health each, and one has the 20% boost, your definition matches. But if one side does 100 DPS while the other does 90, it does not. Yet the side that does 90 DPS can, with the boost, win, by becoming more efficient.)
You can't "win" PvE, you can just achieve goals, and one major goal is getting to level 80. However, winning a PvP match is also just another goal. Both pay2win and pay2savetime makes you more efficient at achieving those goals, respectively.
I've restated this throughout the 260+ posts thread because so far, no one manages to refute this simple point. All they come up with is either "we're just cutting off the pinkie finger, not the entire arm, so it's all good" or "we're not cutting off your toes so it's not actual mutilation".
(I know that kill xp is relatively little; i used the large numbers for illustrative purposes. They don't have to be large though: consider that in the early days of GW1, people would pay considerably more for a 20/20 sundering mod than what they would for a 19/20, despite the difference basically not being noticeable)
== 
