Empowered Fire

Hot and Bothered – Gearscore

Let’s get something straight here – Gearscore sucks.

Both the mod and the whole gearscore “trend” are frankly the two biggest blights on servers that I’ve seen recently. I will not mince words because I feel that they really are a huge detriment to the pool of PUG/casual PVE groups that exist in a server’s community.

I didn’t even know what gearscoring was until a couple weeks ago when I ventured into trade for a little bit to try and look for some deals. People all over the place were asking “Need tank for Heroic TOC, must have gearscore +2300″ and “DPS for Ulduar 10, 2500 gearscore.” And then the wails arose from Elitist Jerks IRC about how horrifically stupid this whole thing was that was infecting other people’s trade chats as well. If my little roleplaying server was having this bad, I couldn’t imagine what it was like on giant PVP servers like Mal’ganis.

Hint: If gearscores piss off elitist raiders, you might be doing something wrong.

What is Gearscore?!

Gearscore, for those fortunate enough not to know, is an equation put forth by such sites as WoW-Heroes and the Gearscore mod that calculates your gear’s  item levels and gem choices and distills it into a “helpful” number. What’s wrong with this, you ask? None of these numbers across the different services even add up to the same thing or indicate what gear the i-lvls are coming from. So not only do we not have a consistent score between the different things people might use to determine gearscore, but we also have no indication that the ilvl 219 or 226 gear people are wearing is even something applicable for their class.

In short – the numbers are not really indicative of anything other than a rough summation of how many purples you have draped on your body. They do not show anything about your skill, your spec, your ability to understand core concepts of you class or anything you might actually want to know about a player before taking a chance on them in a PUG group, or especially a raid.

This is bad, folks.

I’ve already had people jumping on my butt crying about how it can be used as a rough, quick evaluation tool. I really don’t think that’s the case. Unless you’re exceptionally keen and know what level of gear someone falls into with most of their ilvls, these numbers are like Greek. And honestly? How do you know where they got their 226 gear from? Was it from Heroic TOC or was it from Ulduar? This number doesn’t say anything about actual experience.

To me, it just seems like pure laziness and ignorance masquerading as elitism. This is strange coming from myself – a pretty elitist person. I do recruitment for my raid team. I’ve had to sit down in front of people’s armories (hint: VALUABLE DATA HERE) and scan very quickly to see if someone was even worth our time with an interview. I got very good at picking out the difference between a “gear thing” and a “doesn’t understand their class” thing. Gearscore has done nothing but drive people to be overly fussy and demand over-gearing for simple things like heroics (which I have personally done in blues and t6 gear.) A little knowledge is dangerous, as they say.

But Ais, I want to PUG! I don’t have time to check an Armory, I don’t want to know about their class, I just want something easy!

Gearscore is not easy – it’s a number that tells you precious little other than what color their gear is. If you’re doing a heroic, someone does not need all 219 epics. Hell, if you have a pulse and aren’t a tank below defense cap, you should be fine in a lot of cases. So the insistence to use Gearscore does nothing for both learning how to play an instance with a wide range of gear (which can actually improve your awareness/skill) and learning what gear is appropriate for what dungeon you’re trotting into.

I firmly believe it’s the ease of which people have been able to gain epics at lower skill levels that has raised the noses of many of those same people who do not understand the relative value of gear and therefore given them the idea that all epics mean something. Good players, reliable players know what can be done out of what gear they have, understand their class, understand their abilities, rather than waltzing around in Heroic TOC 226 gear and doing 1K DPS as a hunter. (I shit you not.) Gearscore basically takes the whole problem with gear inflation and creates a subset of players who have good gear but none of the indicators of being a bad player and rests it’s entire basis for “value” or “worth” on something that doesn’t show much of it at all.

Okay, so Gearscore requirements for heroics = bad! What if I just use the Gearscore mod to help me inspect people?

Unlike my good friend Matticus, I believe the mod is just as bad as the gearscore phenomenon, if not worse. Why is Gearscore the mod so horrifically bad? Let’s talk about how mods work.

Mods send data traffic over channels – hidden to you or I, unless you have a mod that displays it, like AddonSpamFu. Guild is a channel, raid is a channel, battlegrounds have channels. They are the little highways that all the little mod cars go zooming back and forth with data. Normally, this is good – mods work, everyone’s happy. But if a mod is written poorly, it can get quite spammy. This means lots and lots of data traffic is being sent over hidden channels. Even if you don’t have a mod that interacts with this data, if you’re part of the channels the mod is spamming, it can affect you quite a bit if you’re on a weak internet connection.

Ever zone into Dalaran and get DCed? Or a raid boss? Besides Dalaran being a horrifically built city, it could also be people’s mod traffic shoving you off your connection to the servers. One person having a mod spamming you might not be bad, but 30 people in your guild? 15 people in your raid? It does add up. Carbonite and (SURPRISE!) Gearscore are some of the WORST offenders of add-on spam. What Gearscore is constantly doing is asking/telling other players for data. Later versions of Gearscore have ramped down the spamminess but given that it still is a high amount of traffic, both the mod and the culture of Gearscoring have chapped my ass quite a bit. I’m one of those people who does get DCed a lot.

Oh, so what do I do if I want to PUG and make sure people are good?

First, learn what kind of gear is appropriate for the level of dungeon you are doing, and in relation to your gear. A couple overgeared people can suffer someone with slightly weaker gear. Secondly, use fairly decent tools available to you:

- WoW Armory
WoW Armory is the mecca of all things informational. When I look over someone for a raid, I glance at their gear first (weak slots, bad gem choices). Then I pass over their spec (Cookie cutter or alternative, smart talent choices?). After that, I take a glance at their raid achievements to see what they’ve actually seen.

This is great if you have a lot of time but I know that most PUGs just want to get up and go.

- Pugchecker
This is a fairly invaluable site for the on-the-go PUG grouper/raid leader. It shows at a glance a person’s gear/spec and raid/heroic experience. It is pulled from Armory data, which does lead to some inconsistences but overall is pretty reliable for seeing what someone has done. (For instance, it says I haven’t done Koralon in the last month when I go every week with my raid. STRANGE!)

- Experience mod
You’ve probably never heard of this because it just came out. It was written by Antiarc (author of Omen, Chatter, and SexyMap), as a way to combat Gearscore and other mods of its ilk. It’s a low resource, easy to use mod that simply puts a person’s raid experience (pulled from their statistics data) in a context box on your screen when you click on them. You can set the threshold for how many kills of a boss a person should have seen to be “experienced” and it then generates a percentage score for all the instances they’ve done.

This is not a foolproof check, as it does require you to be in range of someone, and people can be carried through instances, but it does weight heavier on later bosses in an instance so that you can get a rough idea how many harder fights a person may have been a part of. I have used it a little and it is interesting, to say the least.

So What Now?

All in all, at the end of the day, PUGs have a chance to suck. But making people’s lives miserable trying to PUG a heroic because of their low “gearscore” just doesn’t do anyone good. We all had to start somewhere and going to heroics is still a viable way to get geared up. Being a smart, capable player and bringing that to the table should be everyone’s priority, regardless of what gear they have on. I wish people wouldn’t lose sight of that. There’s definitely people in blues that have done more DPS than people in epics. Keep your Critical Thinking Cap on, be a well-informed party member and PUGs will go pretty smoothly if you let them.

Seriously, just get rid of Gearscore already people. PLEASE. Link this in trade if you have to.

Tags: epics, experience-mod, gearscore, gearscore-is-stupid, gearscore-mod, gearscoring, heroics, i-level, pick-up-groups, pug-raids, pugging, pugs, raids, wow-armory