Cold Comfort

Guild Management and Leadership in WoW

Posts Tagged gearscore

Performance-Based Loot Systems

Dec 17

Posted by Karatheya in Best Practices, Guild Management, Raiding, Ranting | 2 Comments

STRONGMAN Performance Based Loot Systems

While browsing the US guild relations forum, I was struck by this post: PerLoot – a new Loot System

Not struck by the brilliance of the system, mind, but the process by which a reasonable goal (rewarding people who perform better) fell apart in the implementation.  What’s worse is that the original poster didn’t seem to realize how much things had fallen apart.

In summary, the poster proposed a loot system whose rewards were based upon performance in raids.  The better you perform, the more loot you get.  They proposed to measure performance by the meters – your DPS divided by your GearScore times the cubic root of the number of dispels or interrupts you perform.  The post made no allowance for how tanks would be handled, but did say that they would gauge Discipline priests differently “because they heal by prevention”.

The premise that gave birth to this loot system is attractive: ultimately, loot distribution should reward those who perform well.   I’m sure most people who generally perform above the average of their raid feel they should be rewarded for doing so.  But the loot system as proposed fails on so many levels.

(more) How Do You Fail Me?

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Inexperience and Weakness

Oct 29

Posted by Karatheya in Cold Comfort, Guild Management, Off-Topic, Ranting | 5 Comments

experience cos hc Inexperience and Weakness

In my last article, a comment led me to another blog post which in turn led me to a recently released addon called Experience.  The idea behind the addon is that when you target someone, it queries their character statistics to see how many times they have killed the bosses of each instance in the game, converting that to a measure of how much of the game they have experienced.

Like GearScore, this is just a tool to provide quick insight into another player.  The graphic above is of a 5-man group I ran CoS heroic with last night: as you can see, most of them were very inexperienced, but we breezed through the timed run only slightly slower than my personal best (5 minutes remaining instead of 8).  We then followed that up with a heroic Trial of the Champion run that featured none of the deaths or “stupid” moments that are a hallmark of PUG runs in that place.

On it’s own, this mod gives a useful but far from complete view of players.  It has a few rough edges:

  • outside of combat, the boxes above appear every time you target someone.  I really don’t care about seeing experience for people I’m not grouped with, so I use the LDB toggle to disable it except when I first join a group, but the LDB launcher defaults to “on” and doesn’t remember the setting from session to session.
  • the total experience value isn’t very useful for people who do 10 or 25 person raids exclusively.
  • the default setting is to require you to kill a boss 3 times to get 100% experience.  For example, I’ve only killed Malygos-25 once, so I get a 33.3% rating.  You can change this via a slider – I find 2 kills to be more useful.
  • it doesn’t appear to count Onyxia.  As the addon was only came out on Oct 20th I’m not sure if this is an oversight or intentional.
  • As Malevica pointed out, not having the statistics be account-wide doesn’t tell me anything about the player.  I doubt that all the members of the above group were new 80s based upon their performance.

GearScore No More

I’ve decided to ditch GearScore and use Experience for a few weeks to see if it gives me a better view of what to look out for when doing pickup groups.

Even just from testing it last night, there were some moments when the experience value didn’t match performance.  The member with 9.2% total experience was pushing 4.5k DPS on bosses, which is more than you might expect from someone who had only done heroics (and even then not all of them).  In his case, he had been farming both EoC and EoT gear since the last patch, as he was sporting mostly tier 8.5 / 9 gear and obviously knew his class well.

As a tool for guild recruiting, I would be more comfortable using either Experience on its own or in conjunction with Gearscore to set a minimum bar for applicants.  I would probably set the threshold to one, just to see which instances an applicant had run to completion rather than using the default of three.

I don’t want to spend this entire post talking about this addon.  What I really want to discuss is the concept of experience, not just in terms of the content you’ve completed but how experienced you are at WoW in general.
(more) How Inexperienced are You?...

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The Great Gearscore Debate of ‘09

Oct 26

Posted by Karatheya in Guild Management, Off-Topic, Ranting | 14 Comments

Is it that different?

Is it that different?

Chances are that you’ve had a run-in with gearscore if you’ve been joining PUG groups in the last few months.  Gearscore is an addon which calculates a number based upon the gear you’re wearing.  It displays this information in the tooltip, and can query other people using the addon for their gearscore, adding it to the LFG interface.

The problem is that on many servers, people are becoming gearscore snobs.  They refuse to invite someone to a PUG unless they have an unreasonably high gearscore.  This makes it hard for anyone who hasn’t upgraded their gear to around the tier 8.5 level to get into groups.

There has been the expected level of outrage on the forums, with Blizzard being asked to ban the addon (which only goes to show that people don’t understand what it’s doing under the hood).  Blizzard has acknowledged the problem, with Ghostcrawler even joking that they were going to put an easily obtainable epic shirt in the game with an item level of 300 just to poison the data this addon and others like it use.

Today, I’d like to talk about what GearScore is, what it isn’t, remind people of what the various scores correlate to in terms of content, and look at how useful GearScore is with regards to recruiting and other guild decisions.

The Addon

The GearScore addon can be downloaded here.  There’s also a “lite” version here.  The full version remembers the gearscore of people you mouseover or encounter, and so over time will take up more an more memory on your system.  It also communicates with people in LFG who have the addon, displaying their gearscore for you.  The lite version by comparison only does the calculation on mouseover and then forgets about it, trading higher CPU requirements for lower memory usage.  Which you use is up to you.

The Score

The thing to remember is that GearScore is just a calculation.  You feed numbers about each of your pieces of equipped gear, it adds them up and spits them out again.  There are a few changes to the calculation to account for things like Titan’s Grip warriors (it averages the two weapons rather than adding them together) and classes that prioritize a specific slot (like Hunters), but for the most part it’s just adding up the result of a function whose input is the item quality (green / blue /purple) and item level.

Gearscore does not:

  • consider gems / enchants
  • consider achivements
  • consider talents / glyphs

It’s just a measure of the item level of the gear you’re wearning.

What’s worse is that the GearScore addon does not use the same formula as some of the other armory-driven websites that list a gear score.  GearScore gives my paladin’s DPS gear a 4300 score, but WoW Heroes gives the same gear a score of 2240, even though it still calls the value a “Gear Score”.  Be Imba gives me 487.14, calling it a “PvE gear score”.

Just because GearScore gives bigger numbers doesn’t mean that it’s a better measure.  Psychologically, we like big numbers.  But the numbers only have meaning when placed in context.  If I tell you that a place is “about 5 away”, you don’t know if I’m talking in terms of miles, kilometers, minutes or hours.  Likewise, if I tell you that my gear scores 487.14 but you think I’m giving you the value from the GearScore addon, you’d expect me to be clad in level 45 quest greens.

When asking, giving or judging a gear score you have to know what measure you’re using.

(more) The Way We Used To Do It...

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