I was speaking with Shintar* recently when she pointed out that I worry too much about gear.
/raises hand
Yes, that's me. I'm guilty.
But in that moment I realized something. I began playing WoW during Wrath, and if there was one hallmark of Wrath --outside of the destruction that raiding in Wrath caused to many guilds-- it was the omnipresent Gear Score.
Does anybody else remember the Trade Chat entries for ICC pugs to be something like "LFR ICC 10-man. GS 5000+ pst"? That magical 5000 Gear Score became a barrier to people getting into ICC and other raids, because it boiled down your gear, your skill, and your class to a mere number that people could point to and determine your raid worthiness. I seem to recall that 5000+ meant at least a full T9 set, and probably at least one or two T10 pieces, which really meant you were capable of grinding 5-man dailies over a period of a couple of months.
Skill? No.
Talent Spec? No.
Knowledge of the fights? No.
But you've got that gear, man.....
Blizzard indirectly encouraged the GS domination by having their own internal method of determining your "fitness" for entering the ICC 5-man instances via the LFG tool. Once you got past a certain point, and I think it was around the 3000+ GS, you could get into the Frozen Halls instances. I remember quite clearly when The Forge of Souls popped up for me, and I promptly freaked out. I was kind of expecting something more tame, such as Ajol-Nerub, but nope.
"WTF is this?" I remembered whispering Soul back then.
"It means that you've high enough gear score to get into the endgame instances," he replied. "Congrats!"
I wasn't that thrilled, as it was a whole new set of strats to learn, and I knew I was starting at the bottom once more.
And the flaws of LFG had already begun to rear their ugly head, as one of the players I'd ported in with promptly dropped group, and this was on an instance with endgame implications and gear designed to get you ICC ready.
That sort of behavior sticks with you, and you wonder what you did wrong.
***
I guess I'd completely buried those experiences in Wrath somewhere deep inside my psyche, but I can still see a direct correlation between those experiences pugging via LFG and my behavior today, both the good and the bad. Every time you'd get The Old Kingdom as an instance, there would be at least one person who would drop as they couldn't be bothered to deal with a "long" instance when all they wanted was their daily badges. And every time I saw that behavior, I'd resolve that I'd never be "that guy" who put themselves over the group.
But it also does explain my obsession with making sure my gear is "good enough", because I was once on the receiving end of being judged purely based on what I carried with me into a fight, not how well I performed in the fight.
It's kind of bizarre when you think about it, because this is simply the same "judging" behavior from middle school and high school, picked up and transferred wholesale into an MMO. But with numbers to back it up.
***
Maybe I ought to re-evaluate Wrath some day, without the rose colored glasses that I have for my first exposure to MMOs. I'm not so sure I'll like what I see, but I believe being honest with yourself is one way to take a critical eye toward the assumptions you make whenever you play.
But trying to make me stop worrying about gear? Well, that's a topic for another time.
*Owner of several blogs, most notably Going Commando (SWTOR Blog), Priest With a Cause (WoW Classic Blog), and Neverwinter Thoughts (Neverwinter Blog). And yes, I can trust her to get at the root of a problem. She knows me way too well.
I'm really not all that familiar with WoW's LFG system. I was actually playing WotLK when it was introduced. I was just about to quit (Mrs Bhagpuss had already gone back to EQII) but I hung on for a couple more weeks just to try this new and at the time unprecedented automated group matching thing. I ran a few dungeons in the mid-levels, as a healer and as DPS, decided it wasn't for me and quit WoW for good (well, not as it turned out but apart from Classic I've never played the game "seriously" since).
ReplyDeleteOne thing I can't remember is whether you can choose which dungeons you queue up for. Is it totally random (apart from the algorithm that decides what's appropriate for your character's gear/level etc) or can you set parameters? It seems to me that it would make more sense to let people self-select their preferences *before* the system matches them up, rather than have them roll the dice and hope to get something they want, then have to quit and re-join if they don't.
Okay, my last experience with WoW retail was in Mists, but how LFG worked was that yes, you could select which dungeons you could choose from, but in order to get the badges upon dungeon completion you had to select the "random" option. So that pushed people into queuing for instances they may not have wanted to. Hence the constant drops from The Old Kingdom, because it was one of the longest 5-man instances in Wrath. However, there was only a minimal penalty for dropping and requeuing (15 min debuff, I believe), so if you saw something you didn't like (the dungeon itself or the GearScore or the composition of the group) you could drop. It also became much easier to vote kick to remove people you didn't like as well, rather than giving people a chance.
DeleteWhat it did was remove the human element to the group forming process, and that had the unfortunate effect of allowing people to be assholes without any real consequences.
I remember a big discussion on this in Righteous Orbs when it first came out, and I was on the side off "hey, you can get a group together the old way, nothing is stopping you, but this is nicer for people who play in off hours". In the long run, I see that the damage that LFG did to the game outweighed the convenience factor.
It's always a bit funny to me to hear about the impact GearScore had on so many people's play experience because to me it was pretty much non-existent. I don't think I was pugging raids back then, which certainly would have been a factor as I hear that this was one area where people got very hung up about it in particular. I of course saw lots of people wordlessly dropping from dungeon groups, but always just chucked that up to them not liking what they got.
ReplyDeleteYeah, if you ever pugged you learned that GS was the biggest hangup people had, particularly when pugging ICC. The easiest way to start a fight in Trade Chat was to put down an opinion on GS, because there was always someone willing to take the bait.
DeletePeople dropped group for a lot of reasons, but the ones that people were most vocal about were that they wanted "easy" badges and the GS of the group wasn't good enough. I remember one nasty fight in Trade Chat arguing about people dropping group after scanning GS weren't factoring in skill. It was memorable in that it lasted well over an hour without descending into sexist/racist rants, which was definitely unusual in the Wrath era.
DeleteYep, same here. In WotLK my guild was pretty active and tight-knit and when we did "PUG" raids we were the ones organizing them and mostly brought alts and friends and just a few real pugs and I remember we never actually gave a damn about GS. Probably more like if "3000 is needed for Heroics, then 3000 should be fine", ignoring people in greens who absolutely shouldn't raid and that's that.
DeleteI am reminded of Gevlon Goblin's "blue-gear" raids, where he endeavored with some interesting success to prove that gear score was pointless -- what mattered was good quality play. Gear had to be nothing but blues to go, and was a pick-up-group. The opposite pole from both forms of elitism.
ReplyDeleteI remember those posts all those years ago, and as I remember he was one of the most vocal about how stupid the GS was. Being on the receiving end of the GS snobbery, it was one of those times that I actually cheered Gevlon on.
DeleteThe problem with Gevlon is that he fought elitism with more elitism --as you mentioned-- and was frequently blind as to the concept that not acting like an ass actually got more people on your side.
But that's Gevlon for you.
That reminds me, Kungen runs a guild called "Greenilum" on my Classic server that does everything in greens. :D
DeleteThat's hilarious!
DeleteI've seen Troll only guilds and even Gnome only guilds, but green loot only? That's great!
Yep, that's one of the better things he did, but I wouldn't strictly call it a typical PUG. It was a self-selected group of folks and I'm pretty sure a few of those deliberately rolled a new toon on his server for this project.
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