Your gearscore is a little . . . low

Recently I found this article from Slate outlining a brief history of hysteria over new communication methods. I’d summarize it but all my exposure to the internet has turned me into a drooling idiot barely capable of summoning even
the most fleeting cognitive spasm.

I lied. Actually I think all that internet exposure has made me snarkier, although I was pretty snarky to begin with. It’s also made me different in a few ways. For example, pre-internet I might spend an evening gathered with a few humans, snarking about some movie and eating food, with all of us in the same room. I still do that, except for the “same room” part, and due to my ongoing media diet I can only snark about old movies. Although Netflix is begging me to come back to their fold, which could change things if I take them up on it.

Anyway, pre-internet, these humans would all be local, so a lot of what we’d talk about would be things like where to get the best pizza. And all these humans would be about my age and share my approximate media tastes, which is likely how we became friends in the first place. So we might all agree that “terrible movie version of kiddie show from our era” is a superlative homage to the sentimental joys we once experienced, while “terrible movie version of kiddie show from our little brothers’/sisters’ era” is more proof that people Not Like Us are stupid.

But now it’s different. For one thing, locality had to go, because if I brought up a discussion of “where do you go for the best pizza?” among my gamer friends or my forum friends, things could easily get sidetracked to “where do you get the best poutine in Alberta?” Because we live all over the place. And not only that, but we come from different age groups and subcultures, so we can’t even talk about things like popular music (note to my fellow old people: remember when Everybody watched the same TV shows and listened to the same top 40 songs? Those days have ended. And don’t whine to me about it, I’m rather pleased with this development. However, you might be pleasantly surprised to find that sometimes, people way out of your demographic group like the same tunes and movies as you. That kid quoting Journey or Beatles lyrics might have learned them from a video game rather than a live performance, but he still likes them.)

Because of this fragmentation, people Not Like Us have become even harder to define.

And so gamer subculture has to devise its own. Currently, if you look at the WoW forums, there is a massive debate between the hardcores and the casuals, although hardly any posters fit into either category and prefer to call themselves a “casual hardcore” or a “former hardcore who is now a casual” or a “casual who still likes to raid.” The distinction is either how many hours one plays, or how seriously one takes the game, but there are no dividing lines. We also engage in our own homegrown forms of racism and bigotry, against gnomes, or night elf hunters, or death knights with unimaginative names. Plus now we have the gearscore mod to tell us what social class everybody is in.

The gearscore mod tabulates a point value representing everything a particular toon has equipped. So if they’ve been running around slaying the newest monsters, they might have a gearscore that shows up in formidable red (over 5500) rather than inferior purple (4000-ish) or noobish turquoise (about 3k). I believe the highest possible is around 5900, my main has an impressive 5700+ and all my level 80 alts are around 4800. While gearscore is not absolutely reliable, and you can probably get near 5k just piddling around in 5 person instances without ever going near an actual raid, it’s a good ballpark estimate of your capabilities.

And as such, has spawned a “skill matters more!” faction (consisting largely of people who don’t want to invest the time gearing up to do over 3k dps in a place where you need 4k to beat the timer, joined by a few high gearscore people claiming that they actually got their gear by having skill) and a “I refuse to have any dealings with low gearscore scum” faction (which often leads to people crying about being excluded from activities by people who refuse to invite people who haven’t already done them).

In my main guild, people Like Us all have high gearscores, from raiding all the time. Unfortunately, there are now quite a few unguilded people who got their high gearscores through hard work or luck. So the current fashion calls for gem snobbery. Much of that gear can be decorated with magic jewels that grant you various stat increases. A player who pays attention to sites like Elitist Jerks, or who socializes with high gearscore snobs, is usually well aware of which stats clash with their class and spec and playstyle, while someone who is just stabbing in the dark is likely to use jewels to make mages muscular, hunters smart and healers more capable of using deadly force. Which is counterproductive for people who play specialized roles in groups.

To be fair, it is very frustrating to encounter someone with great gear and lousy technique. Gear used to make several statements about the player owning it. I can conduct myself in a large group of people without drama. I have enough status in that group to demand a share of the spoils. I am probably used to discussing technique and accepting criticism, and won’t have a meltdown if someone tells me that putting strength gems on my mage is lame. I can do complicated video game things like shoot dragons while avoiding standing in the fire. I can play this game on “hard” setting.

There were always exceptions, like the main tank’s uncoordinated yet lovable girlfriend, the guy who illegally bought an account from someone else who did all the hard work, the kid who took over his brother’s toon after he got bored and quit. But they were few.

Now they’re all over the place. Proudly sporting epic gear they got from pugs. Misleading you into assumptions like “hmm, that guy has 5200, he probably knows better than to stand in the toxic green clouds.”

While at the same time, there are players who constantly insist that their gearscore is low because they have a fabulous life/a lack of patience with Blizzard’s dumb gearing procedure/amazing eye-hand coordination and excluding them is sheer bigotry. They point out that top guilds can bring down the hard bosses while wearing swimsuits and ballet slippers (without noting that the players in these guilds have already invested lots of hours in being able to coordinate at that level). And they accuse people who rely on gearscore of being mainly interested in “e-peen stroking” (aka vanity).

A few anecdotal experiences.

I went on a raid with my druid guild, in ICC 10. We had gearscore from about 4500 to 5200. The main tank was one of the mid-forties. Everyone there was skilled, but not with this particular fight. So people had trouble positioning themselves, and that mid-forties tank could take about one and a half hits where a more geared tank could take two or three. This would not be a problem if the choreography was precise, but since we were also doing a lot of re-positioning, we wiped a few times before calling it off.

I went on the same raid with my hunter, different server and guild. This guild is a serious progression guild. My gearscore was probably around 4600, and there were a few others in that range, but the tank was well over 5000, and not only that, they were very used to working together. I don’t raid with them often, but I’m used to raiding. We got the beastie down on the first attempt.

I landed in a random instance where everyone’s gearscore was bright red. Should be a piece of cake, right? Wrong. All three of the dps managed to run straight into the arms of danger right at the start, and the tank and I kept it afloat by ourselves for a minute before quitting in disgust. And many times I’ve landed in an instance with people with low gear scores who are actually alts of raiders and know very well how to conduct themselves, yet have an attitude because people like these three dps have insulted them.

In the meantime, I get to listen to my guildies say things like “omg, that warrior has a crit gem in his T10 chest, which is different from the strength gem in my T10 chest! I think I’m going to vomit!”

As you may have guessed, I not only have gearscore installed, I use it. Not really to disparage people, unless they’re people from my first WoW guild, who will never catch up to me, ever, because they are lame. I use it to make snap judgments. Such as “you guys are biting off more than you can chew, so it’s time for me to log out and make more coffee.” Or “my tank is 4800 and yours is at 5100, so you’re main tank for this fight and I’ll stand over here and intercept the large bugs.” Or “sorry, you can’t join my group because your gearscore indicates your dps is around 2k, and we already have too many people in the 2k range and not enough people in the 8k range, and unless we throw an average of 5k at the monster it will go berserk and kill us all.”

And I use it to do a ballpark estimate of how awake I’ll have to be through an instance run. If everyone’s rocking a low gearscore but me, I’ll be clicking a lot more buttons.

And sometimes I’ll just show off. I have this crazy staff that comes from Deathwhisper, one of the bosses in ICC. It’s pretty terrible as far as gear goes, and has a silly bonus that makes a flying valkyrie appear to smite your enemies. For a long time it was dropping every week and several of us got them and then had a little competition to see who could put the worst, most ineffective gems on them. I chose a stat that Blizzard has confirmed doesn’t really do anything and will soon be phased out. However, the staff has a really high gearscore, and by parading it around, my numbers go dark red and I instantly become one of the most powerful toons on the server – if you’re going strictly by gearscore, anyway.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been gearing my hunter and my death knight at roughly the same pace. Both have been carried through a few raids, and both have done major amounts of instance running in order to get full suits of gear (right now they both need new shoes, but are otherwise raid-worthy). And both were doing about the same amount of damage at equivalent gearscore levels. It’s a reasonably good benchmark. I’ve also seen encounters change from almost impossible to boring once enough players acquire another hundred points of gearscore.
And I’ve seen this whole videogame scenario before too. Eventually the more dedicated players become undefeatable juggernauts, and the game company then introduces nerfs, expansions and adjustments to try to keep things challenging for most. Sort of like when they significantly neutered Illidan just before Wrath came out. Or when my SWG jedi was running around soloing the toughest baddies.

They keep moving the finish line, and we keep putting artificial ones in to separate the winners from the losers.

From all this, I conclude that humans have a really hard time correlating proficiency and social status. I doubt if that problem will be solved any time soon.

Oh, and one final note: my comments have been invaded by bots that post stupid comments which include links. I’m pretty sure the links will take you to evil places full of keyloggers and malware. And that the people who thought of this marketing tactic are probably running around with spell pen gems in their low-number gear, or the RL equivalent (I’m not quite sure what that would be – ten year old fashions? Designer knockoffs? Fleece parkas in the summer?).