[quote=@SleepingSilence]
Real text on a positive rated Lost Ark Review on reddit. (All about it not being pay to win.)

"To determine if Lost Ark is a Pay to Win game, you first need to know what Pay to Win is.

Pay to Win literally means you have to spend money to win.

If you spend money and lose, it is not Pay to Win."

[b][i]What a bunch of absolute horseshit.[/i][/b]

If I keep looking at people defending this game I might hate this game with a fiery passion. (Note, I didn't even actively look for this. It was just in my feed.)

[@Fabricant451] Is this one right too? <.<

Because my real question/point, is you're making two separate arguments. 1. It has no bad practices. 2. Others games with bad practices are worse. (You do understand why one doesn't fit the other, yes?)
[/quote]

Pay to Win literally just means you can pay money to get an unfair advantage over other players, be that in buying better gear, buying 5 star characters in whatever gacha bullshit people play, etc. If you can definitively buy your way to being better than someone on an otherwise level playing field, that's pay to win. World of Warcraft selling exclusive mounts for real money isn't pay to win but if it suddenly sold legendary gear that gave you an advantage in pvp and/or pve content that other players couldn't get, that's pay to win. A game lessening the grind doesn't make it pay to win. If Lost Ark started selling gear that was above BiS that utterly ruined game balance, then yeah it'd be pay to win. 

My argument isn't that Lost Ark has no bad practices and you'll not find me making that argument. My argument is that it's not, by definition, pay to win unless you change the definition of 'pay to win' to 'paying real money for anything in the game that is beneficial in any way'. Which is a slippery slope to outright saying 'all microtransactions are pay to win' instead of simply 'microtransactions are fucking bad' which is inarguable. 

Lost Ark can have bad monetization and other games can have [i]worse[/i] monetization without Lost Ark being pay to win. That's not contradictory. What Lost Ark is doing is what SWTOR does and other free to play MMO games do: incentivize players to essentially pay a monthly sub or equivalent. Is SWTOR pay to win if subscribed or preferred players get a mount at level 10 instead of level 25 or have access to more content or customization options? Is Lost Ark pay to win because you can purchase a recurring fee that makes teleports free and slight boost to exp? Because by that logic, FF14 is pay to win because you can buy a level skip to the current expansion and so is WoW because of character tokens. Even ESO does it and that's a buy to play game.

[quote=@SleepingSilence]

Lost Ark is actively being censored in the US, and they darkened many of the Asian characters skin for the US 'Muh Diversity' crowd.
[/quote]

Is this really the hill you want to die on, my guy