The Addon Junkie

So WoWVault has a poll running about gearscore and our opinions of it. The current winning vote is “WoW would be a better place without it.” I’m not sure that I 100% agree with this, but I’m going to take a stab at offering an honest and unbiased opinion that is both reasonable and fair.

In my eyes, GearScore  is just a tool. It’s like a spoon… Or a hammer. If I have a hammer, I can go to the hardware store and buy some other stuff to use the hammer on and I can build all kinds of things. Or I can run around with it breaking things. But whether I use the tool for its natural propensity to create or for its ability to wantonly destroy, the good or evil in those acts falls upon me. The hammer is just a hammer.

Let’s be realistic here: WoW has always had encounters with gear requirements. Back in the day those might have been a little more vague. Everyone needs X number of hit points or you won’t survive long enough to be useful. This encounter requires Y amount of nature resist. There have always been encounters that were DPS tests or healing tests. There were always bosses that hit the tank just a little harder than the others. There always have, and probably always will, be gear checks. They’re not going anywhere any time soon. GearScore provides a simple and easy method by which we can efficiently measure the quality of someone’s gear. It lacks the ability to measure the quality of the player, and even in some areas of its gear scoring system it has been found wanting, but for what it attempts to be it succeeds.

Where the failure starts is with the human element. Any of you that use GS, I’d like you to do something real quick. Go log in and type /gs. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Did you see it? The list of raids and the numbers next to them? That’s the suggested average score for each of those dungeons.  Let me go over those two words: “suggested” and “average.” Suggested means that the number is someone’s opinion. It’s not even necessarily a good opinion, and whether the opinion is accurate varies based on class, spec and player skill. Average means that if you add up your 25-man raid’s GearScores and then divide by 25, the number should be at or above the suggestion. It doesn’t mean that nobody with a lower number can participate, it means that you should be using the information provided to formulate an educated opinion and make a real choice. That’s where things fall apart: making real choices.

See, people don’t want to make choices because very often their choices end up being wrong. Nobody likes to fail, whether it’s just a game or not, and I understand that. So when you’re putting a group together, you’re trying hard to make it succeed. If you use addons like GearScore properly, they  can help you make good, informed decisions. But that’s not what most people do, is it? Most people demand that you have 5K+ to run 10-man Naxx for pete’s sake and that’s just ridiculous. These people are not using GearScore to make informed decisions, they’re using it to crush any chance of failure – and god forbid a 5k+ GS Naxx run should somehow fail, hey it’s not my fault, you all met the GS requirement. That’s the problem right there. By using GearScore as a bar to entry, the raid organizer gets to abandon all responsibility for failures that might legitimately be his fault. Hey, you met the requirements of a recognized trusted third party, so it can’t be my fault if you suck.

In the end, it turns out that the weighted iLevels of your gear really do mean more than GearScore’s most vehement opponents might suggest. A certain level of gear really is required for success in a lot of encounters. But it’s not nearly so important as knowing your role, your class and playing the game like 24 other people are depending on you. There’s also no SoulScore to say how nice of a guy you are, or how willing you’ll be to explain the strat to the newbies and work with them to help them succeed. Every raid is a team effort, and the first thing a raid organizer does when they disavow all responsibility using GS as a scapegoat is tell you that they have no interest in building or participating in a team.