micky1p00Member, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 3,594Arc User
edited December 2014
Looks to me like this discussion about replacing GS is not productive unless there is a viable alternative.
There is no way to differentiate skillful person and less skillful one, even the same person can sometimes play
really badly (half asleep, not in the mood, occupied with something) or do amazing things on the same char with the same build.
Even so, there are people I will rather play with, that don't have the standard build or less skilled than many others.
So, IMO, the system should have two things:
"premade":
A group should be able to enter content regardless of limitation, If I'm a group leader and want to take a gearless friend, go with less then 5 and such (solo, duo..).. it's our decision and i should be allowed to.
It will effect only my groups chance of success and it should be our decision to carry someone, just have a challenge or run however we want and fail or not to fail.
'public' queue, tiamat and such:
In instances that have sort of 'matchmaking' either automated, gated, or 'lfg'ed there should be some sort of measurement.
I think part of the whole lfg crazy GS inflation are a lot of not optimized builds, so the request went up and up for people to assure success.
Asking for 18k GS to do t2 is amazing (in a bad way) but also i believe getting people with 6k recovery, 0 ArP, and 2k power and fail run after run will bring only frustration and again those crazy requests.
The most practical thing i can think of is to run the GS through the same famous diminished return functions (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/3dqpvhuavj)
And split it to defensive (HP,defense, deflect, ls) and offensive stats. In this way a 6k recovery CW will significantly have less GS than a 3k power 2k ArP, And will promote more balanced builds (no more people with 4.5k crit i hope).
I do not know if it should be shown publicly or not, or what to do with weapon enchants the provide much more than 300points of gear.
I said a long time ago it would come to this. Gear score was fine when the gaps were smaller, now that the gaps widen more and more, it turns into the very problem that plagued WoW during Wotlk.
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jiubiizeekkMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 144Arc User
edited December 2014
The dev's have stated numerous times that Gear score isnt a 100% correct result. Yes 1000 CA might give you a 8% increase in damage Great. But in the first place you need other stats to give u that 8% in a decent amount. Thats why, once you get 2k a.pen, 2-3k Recovery, a relatively high crit chance, a decent amount of defense. Then u dump into power so that CA that you are worrying about will be usefull.
Gear score gives the relative effectivenes of where your class is in a whole. Honestly You can get a GWF with rank 6/7 enchants to 20k Gear score. And my class a power house, 9.7k power out of battle 11k-12k Power in battle. You also have to think of other people, Most like the run to go smoothly so they choose to aim for higher geared players. It might not be good but it gives the person looking a idea of where you are at.
Say, a 22k tr the other day in a dungeon run, 2nd boss, he hits the boss 2 times and takes down half his HP, Its not needed but its adored because its faster, compare that to a 15k Tr who doesn't quite have the same stuff and may be still working on some boons same weapon enchantment he may only take down 5% of the HP in 2 blows. Ok still good, because he can life steal and get some HP back when he attacks. Higher chance of survivalbility. Now a 10K TR attempting a t2 Dungeon with a few higher GS players. such as all 15k Ok, he's slightly under geared And of course a higher geared player might want to pull some, So this TR is going to getleft behind. Might even Die and start caling for help, then a player has to back track almost/actually getting himself killed trying to revive the fallen player. making the run take longer than it should have.
""but why pull everything???"" Because GWF/TR/CW/SW/DC/HR/GF all have AOE, AoE in a single spot with mass mobs will kill them all faster than stopping kill mob, move on pull mob stop kill them. Loosing stacks of damage and momentum.
Now u ask why we want to have a general idea of where the player who you are going to invite into your party is at? Its because we want to know if he/she can handle what we like to do.
All I can say is divide and conquer, these games do this well.
It's a well played out and manipulated microcosm of the real world, and players play to their specific roles well in this charade.
More specifically to this topic, Im fine with GS as a way to gate content (meaning higher GS is required for more difficult content). And that's all I use it for. If you meet the requirement, you are good to try; if you dont, get your GS up.
So Perfect Vorpal and Perfect Bronzewood would count the same?
Yes it should. Ideally they should both be reasonably equally effective. GS isn't meant to be an accurate portrayal of effectiveness and you and the real elitists would be misusing it. It's only meant to be a basic guideline. It's up to us to ustilise it the way it was meant to be. For example, a lot of people may not have liked the gs drop of artifact weapons before the off hand came, but they'd still understand that it was more effective anyway.
Yes it should. Ideally they should both be reasonably equally effective. GS isn't meant to be an accurate portrayal of effectiveness and you and the real elitists would be misusing it. It's only meant to be a basic guideline. It's up to us to ustilise it the way it was meant to be. For example, a lot of people may not have liked the gs drop of artifact weapons before the off hand came, but they'd still understand that it was more effective anyway.
Haters gonna hate no matter what happens.
Agreed, indeed.
The label of gearscore is given more power than it actually is supposed to entail.
GS needs to go. Its only used by elitist pigs who like to boot players with a lower GS than them. I had a ranger with tier 3 black ice armor and was booted from VT with it. AS it stands if the devs stated its not accurate than it needs to go, or at least not be able to be seen by others. The need a GS to get into areas like Tiamat is fine.
you know, just block it from being seen by others on ALL players. Which would mean I cant see yours and you cant see mine.
GS needs to go. Its only used by elitist pigs who like to boot players with a lower GS than them. I had a ranger with tier 3 black ice armor and was booted from VT with it. AS it stands if the devs stated its not accurate than it needs to go, or at least not be able to be seen by others. The need a GS to get into areas like Tiamat is fine.
you know, just block it from being seen by others on ALL players. Which would mean I cant see yours and you cant see mine.
GS should stay, item inspection should stay. Getting rid of it actually makes things worse.
GS is flawed however it does give some idea of the level of gear, it doesn't give much but it does give something. If you got rid of it people would still try for inspections. Which as seen in the quote above me gets into even more gear prejudice situations as people boot people for "the wrong gear" which is what happened to the above ranger using a pvp armor in pve.
So the next argument is to get rid of inspection, which only sort of works as people can identify some armors from their visuals. (yes there are cosmetics which is why it only somewhat works that way.)
Here's the problem with that though. I played another mmo for many years. (not naming the game because of forum rules) The inspection feature in that game was via a webpage that was eventually shutdown leaving no way to inspect others other than visually. What happened at that point is the game became very very pug unfriendly and cliqueified. If you were a new player or an unknown player you had almost no chance of getting into a group for anything because people would be unsure if you could pull your weight. Pugs dried up and everything became guild and channel runs only. Guilds would only invite players they knew and so would channels. Because no one pugged anymore, they rarely got to know new players, new players couldn't find groups to play and they left the game. At this point there wasn't enough new players coming in and staying a while to counterbalance the small stream of vets that always leave as life happens. The server population went into a slow but steady decline.
Now while this is only one contributing cause to that games issues, but it didn't help things. So as flawed as this system is, it should stay. There is no way to balance the social problems removing it could cause that I have ever seen suggested that I think would work.
GS should stay, item inspection should stay. Getting rid of it actually makes things worse.
GS is flawed however it does give some idea of the level of gear, it doesn't give much but it does give something. If you got rid of it people would still try for inspections. Which as seen in the quote above me gets into even more gear prejudice situations as people boot people for "the wrong gear" which is what happened to the above ranger using a pvp armor in pve.
Maybe it's just me but I,d rather have people boot others for having the wrong gear than for not reaching a number that is more often than not, just reached by any means possible even if it's by doing god awful item decisions. At least, this way players would go towards the right item builds instead of going with whatever gives them the highest GS.
And don't worry, players would still kick others no matter what. If GS go away, then it will be by gear inspection (which is already a much better measurement than GS is). If gear inspection go away, then it will be with pain giver. If pain giver go away, people will just use dps meters!
Maybe it's just me but I,d rather have people boot others for having the wrong gear than for not reaching a number that is more often than not, just reached by any means possible even if it's by doing god awful item decisions. At least, this way players would go towards the right item builds instead of going with whatever gives them the highest GS.
And don't worry, players would still kick others no matter what. If GS go away, then it will be by gear inspection (which is already a much better measurement than GS is). If gear inspection go away, then it will be with pain giver. If pain giver go away, people will just use dps meters!
That just proves my point though. It would fix nothing in the end. The problem is social. You don't fix social problems with tech changes. You have to work on the community. Fix the root cause not the symptoms. What needs to happen is a progression path. Tiamat destroyed the progression path and funneled everything into one spot. When you have a progression path the GS snobbery problems are reduced. ( you never eliminate them, you can't eliminate human nature ) Hopefully mod 6 fixes these problems.
That just proves my point though. It would fix nothing in the end. The problem is social. You don't fix social problems with tech changes. You have to work on the community. Fix the root cause not the symptoms. What needs to happen is a progression path. Tiamat destroyed the progression path and funneled everything into one spot. When you have a progression path the GS snobbery problems are reduced. ( you never eliminate them, you can't eliminate human nature ) Hopefully mod 6 fixes these problems.
It would fix one thing (albeit not the one this fix would be aimed at!)
And yes, the problem is a social one, no arguing there.
GS needs to go. Its only used by elitist pigs who like to boot players with a lower GS than them. I had a ranger with tier 3 black ice armor and was booted from VT with it. AS it stands if the devs stated its not accurate than it needs to go, or at least not be able to be seen by others. The need a GS to get into areas like Tiamat is fine.
you know, just block it from being seen by others on ALL players. Which would mean I cant see yours and you cant see mine.
BI T 3 gives a higher GS, than the PvE sets, so maybe they kicked you for using PvP equip in PvP, I dont know.
GS should stay. It is not really effectiv, to know how a unknown player is geared, BUT it is better than nothing. When I did CN farmruns, I went premade. For DK I went PuG most of the times. It was a farmrun for me. I want to complete a farmrun as often as possible in the given time, so I searched for players with similar gear.
You dont know, how often ppl lied to me, when they asked me to invite them or invited me, when they clearly did not met my asked requirements.
If you call ppl who ask for a certain gearscore elitist pigs, I could return the favour and say, that all low GS players are lazy ppl who think, that they are entiteled to get carried by other ppl., but I wont colour everyone with the same brush, as you do.
Voted gs is fine for a few reasons.
1) People are the problem, not the system. The system could probably do with tweaks though
Completely agree with this; it's the same growing pains within any community that experienced a Gear-score system to gate content;-it is primarily a human behavioral issue and it usually corrects itself over time.
The system isn't the problem, people are the problem. Fix the people causing the problem. *thumbs-up*
1. Weapon and armour enchantments don't increase GS.
2. Weapon damage doesn't increase GS.
3. Special effects like AP gain or Armour class don't increase GS.
Either fix these or create new system.
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The problem with GS is people yes, however, the GS system either needs to be either reworked or gotten rid of. In all honesty? I would rather be happy to see it gone and replaced by something that actually works, and not divides, the gaming community in Neverwinter so badly.
I am currently working on a weighted GS for my ratings tool and am pretty pleased with the early results. If possible that should be the way to go in the future in the game as well.
All the QQ about dividing the community is hyperbole though. You need a quick first separator while in /lfg and GS fits the bill.
I mean, applying some of the logic in this thread, you can easily argue that one shouldn't be able to inspect players whatsoever because PVP gear could be kicked out of PVE content and such.
1- artifacts give 0.5x GS
2- weapon/armour enchants give GS based on rank (perfect ench. would count as r10)
3- feats don't give GS
4- boons give GS whether it's an effect or stat bonus (like 20-50 GS per boon regardless)
5- If its on the tooltip it should affect GS.
you're welcome.
0
darthpotaterMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,259Arc User
edited January 2015
We should have another information of players experience, like time played number of dungeon runs, etc. And gs should be reworked.
Include pet stats, ca bonus, ap gain, armor and weapon enchants, weapon dmg, etc.
darkstarcrashMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 1,382Arc User
edited January 2015
Magenubbie's suggestion of zone gating by GS and/or dungeon experience is probably the most sensible.
Adjusting the Gear score to include weapon enchantments, weapon damage, other stats such as Combat Advantage, running algorithms for diminishing returns on stats,etc.: that would all make GS a better number, but would require much more work for the devs.
And it's pretty clear that if something doesn't make money for Cryptic/PW, there will not be development time for it. Which is not a criticism: this is a F2P game and money has to come from somewhere.
The problem with GS is twofold: GS snobs requiring ridiculous GS (16k for Karru, etc.), and Cryptic setting GS requirements too low for difficult content.
GS elitism is a social problem, and the only solution I know of is to join the Legit channel or a supportive guild. When I started the game, the chat posted in /LFG channel scared me off from running dungeons for a long time.
However, there is a need to assess players' ability to complete a particular dungeon/skirmish/Tiamat - and GS is the best metric we have for that right now. A fresh 60 with 20k hps, a blue weapon, rank 4 enchants and no armor pen will just not contribute his or her share to a time-sensitive fight like Tiamat. 13k gs will not guarantee that those problems are solved, but it's more likely than at 10k gs.
Gear score is NOT the best metric we have for judging a player capabilities (prior to running with the player). Inspecting the player is the best metric. People are just too lazy to do it.
GS gives a myopic view of the toon and the person behind it.
Dump GS as inspectable by others, and replace it with a "Renown" score that increases as a player completes quests, dungeons, campaigns, etc. It would be a much better gauge of player experience than GS. It shouldn't be too difficult to generate a list of accomplishments that could be inspected by other players - like letters of recommendation if you will.
The Renown score could progressively add small increases in power and abilities to the character - a true indicator of experience. GS could still be used internally by the engine.
Let GS snobbery go by the wayside, and let actual accomplishments be the true measure of a players mettle.
My problem is how it doesn't actually represent anything. You could have a horribly built TR with 19k, who would be absolutely useless in PVE or PVP, but they would still have 19k GS, so therefore, be 'up to the task'.
GS reflects actual gear, not capabilities of the character or player. It would seriously be nice to be able to tell, at a glance, that a DC is a DPS spec, vs a healing spec, without having to ask them, or go through trial and error. >_>
There is nothing wrong with gearscore as long as you are above a certain required cap for some dungeons or skirmishes and you know what you are doing. Many games are based on gs system so I don't see the problem here.
I like to watch gearscore of players - not because I have some amazing toon because I don't but just out of curiosity. To compare how different choices affect it and what is a difference in dmg between certain classes with the same gs.
Other than that if you see some offensive class with 11k gs outdamaging some other offensive class with 16 or 17k it's the easiest way to say that sth went wrong. Either the player is using his char badly or there is some broken feature giving some unfair advantage.
Just staring at someone without seeing his gs won't give you that information.
That, I think, is the bottom line: GS is but one way to have an immediate gauge of a player's ability, skewed or padded as it may be. People are impressed by an arbitrarily large number, without regard to how one came about said number. Remove GS and people will just find another way to make that snap, knee-jerk judgement of another player's ability.?
I'm a little late to the topic but just to argue a small point on terminology. GS doesn't really give much indication of a players ability, rather it gives an indication of a characters potential ability. Of course that misses the point of how players actually use GS, as you say bigger = better.
I sit back and watch with a level of ammusement every time I see a thread pop up about harder more challenging content. Most of what you see in game with the seeking of high GS suggests quite number of people just want an easy run to the reward. I wonder how much of this is just the nature of people vs their reaction being influenced by the design of the game. Sorry, random thoughts.
I'm a little late to the topic but just to argue a small point on terminology. GS doesn't really give much indication of a players ability, rather it gives an indication of a characters potential ability. Of course that misses the point of how players actually use GS, as you say bigger = better.
I sit back and watch with a level of ammusement every time I see a thread pop up about harder more challenging content. Most of what you see in game with the seeking of high GS suggests quite number of people just want an easy run to the reward. I wonder how much of this is just the nature of people vs their reaction being influenced by the design of the game. Sorry, random thoughts.
Whether or not it's a true indication of a player's ability, the playerbase tends to use it as such. As I've said previously, there's no guarantee that the 20k GS player knows exactly what they're doing any more than there's any guarantee that the 10k person doesn't. The 10k person may know how to play their class; less so on how to readily farm AD to purchase better gear or short on time to run dungeons to get the better gear. Whereas, the 20k player may have more money than game knowledge and just purchased ZEN to sell for AD and bought up the best gear they could find on the AH.
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No, a FEW items that give more GS are far worse. Let's not make the exceptions the rule
There are an extremely few armor sets that were released after beta that are better than t2. Extremely few. (for pve, black ice is good pvp) Some classes t1 sets are still better. GS doesn't beat a powerful 4pc set bonus.
Comments
There is no way to differentiate skillful person and less skillful one, even the same person can sometimes play
really badly (half asleep, not in the mood, occupied with something) or do amazing things on the same char with the same build.
Even so, there are people I will rather play with, that don't have the standard build or less skilled than many others.
So, IMO, the system should have two things:
"premade":
A group should be able to enter content regardless of limitation, If I'm a group leader and want to take a gearless friend, go with less then 5 and such (solo, duo..).. it's our decision and i should be allowed to.
It will effect only my groups chance of success and it should be our decision to carry someone, just have a challenge or run however we want and fail or not to fail.
'public' queue, tiamat and such:
In instances that have sort of 'matchmaking' either automated, gated, or 'lfg'ed there should be some sort of measurement.
I think part of the whole lfg crazy GS inflation are a lot of not optimized builds, so the request went up and up for people to assure success.
Asking for 18k GS to do t2 is amazing (in a bad way) but also i believe getting people with 6k recovery, 0 ArP, and 2k power and fail run after run will bring only frustration and again those crazy requests.
The most practical thing i can think of is to run the GS through the same famous diminished return functions (https://www.desmos.com/calculator/3dqpvhuavj)
And split it to defensive (HP,defense, deflect, ls) and offensive stats. In this way a 6k recovery CW will significantly have less GS than a 3k power 2k ArP, And will promote more balanced builds (no more people with 4.5k crit i hope).
I do not know if it should be shown publicly or not, or what to do with weapon enchants the provide much more than 300points of gear.
Gear score gives the relative effectivenes of where your class is in a whole. Honestly You can get a GWF with rank 6/7 enchants to 20k Gear score. And my class a power house, 9.7k power out of battle 11k-12k Power in battle. You also have to think of other people, Most like the run to go smoothly so they choose to aim for higher geared players. It might not be good but it gives the person looking a idea of where you are at.
Say, a 22k tr the other day in a dungeon run, 2nd boss, he hits the boss 2 times and takes down half his HP, Its not needed but its adored because its faster, compare that to a 15k Tr who doesn't quite have the same stuff and may be still working on some boons same weapon enchantment he may only take down 5% of the HP in 2 blows. Ok still good, because he can life steal and get some HP back when he attacks. Higher chance of survivalbility. Now a 10K TR attempting a t2 Dungeon with a few higher GS players. such as all 15k Ok, he's slightly under geared And of course a higher geared player might want to pull some, So this TR is going to getleft behind. Might even Die and start caling for help, then a player has to back track almost/actually getting himself killed trying to revive the fallen player. making the run take longer than it should have.
""but why pull everything???"" Because GWF/TR/CW/SW/DC/HR/GF all have AOE, AoE in a single spot with mass mobs will kill them all faster than stopping kill mob, move on pull mob stop kill them. Loosing stacks of damage and momentum.
Now u ask why we want to have a general idea of where the player who you are going to invite into your party is at? Its because we want to know if he/she can handle what we like to do.
It's a well played out and manipulated microcosm of the real world, and players play to their specific roles well in this charade.
More specifically to this topic, Im fine with GS as a way to gate content (meaning higher GS is required for more difficult content). And that's all I use it for. If you meet the requirement, you are good to try; if you dont, get your GS up.
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Yes it should. Ideally they should both be reasonably equally effective. GS isn't meant to be an accurate portrayal of effectiveness and you and the real elitists would be misusing it. It's only meant to be a basic guideline. It's up to us to ustilise it the way it was meant to be. For example, a lot of people may not have liked the gs drop of artifact weapons before the off hand came, but they'd still understand that it was more effective anyway.
Haters gonna hate no matter what happens.
Agreed, indeed.
The label of gearscore is given more power than it actually is supposed to entail.
you know, just block it from being seen by others on ALL players. Which would mean I cant see yours and you cant see mine.
GS should stay, item inspection should stay. Getting rid of it actually makes things worse.
GS is flawed however it does give some idea of the level of gear, it doesn't give much but it does give something. If you got rid of it people would still try for inspections. Which as seen in the quote above me gets into even more gear prejudice situations as people boot people for "the wrong gear" which is what happened to the above ranger using a pvp armor in pve.
So the next argument is to get rid of inspection, which only sort of works as people can identify some armors from their visuals. (yes there are cosmetics which is why it only somewhat works that way.)
Here's the problem with that though. I played another mmo for many years. (not naming the game because of forum rules) The inspection feature in that game was via a webpage that was eventually shutdown leaving no way to inspect others other than visually. What happened at that point is the game became very very pug unfriendly and cliqueified. If you were a new player or an unknown player you had almost no chance of getting into a group for anything because people would be unsure if you could pull your weight. Pugs dried up and everything became guild and channel runs only. Guilds would only invite players they knew and so would channels. Because no one pugged anymore, they rarely got to know new players, new players couldn't find groups to play and they left the game. At this point there wasn't enough new players coming in and staying a while to counterbalance the small stream of vets that always leave as life happens. The server population went into a slow but steady decline.
Now while this is only one contributing cause to that games issues, but it didn't help things. So as flawed as this system is, it should stay. There is no way to balance the social problems removing it could cause that I have ever seen suggested that I think would work.
Maybe it's just me but I,d rather have people boot others for having the wrong gear than for not reaching a number that is more often than not, just reached by any means possible even if it's by doing god awful item decisions. At least, this way players would go towards the right item builds instead of going with whatever gives them the highest GS.
And don't worry, players would still kick others no matter what. If GS go away, then it will be by gear inspection (which is already a much better measurement than GS is). If gear inspection go away, then it will be with pain giver. If pain giver go away, people will just use dps meters!
That just proves my point though. It would fix nothing in the end. The problem is social. You don't fix social problems with tech changes. You have to work on the community. Fix the root cause not the symptoms. What needs to happen is a progression path. Tiamat destroyed the progression path and funneled everything into one spot. When you have a progression path the GS snobbery problems are reduced. ( you never eliminate them, you can't eliminate human nature ) Hopefully mod 6 fixes these problems.
It would fix one thing (albeit not the one this fix would be aimed at!)
And yes, the problem is a social one, no arguing there.
BI T 3 gives a higher GS, than the PvE sets, so maybe they kicked you for using PvP equip in PvP, I dont know.
GS should stay. It is not really effectiv, to know how a unknown player is geared, BUT it is better than nothing. When I did CN farmruns, I went premade. For DK I went PuG most of the times. It was a farmrun for me. I want to complete a farmrun as often as possible in the given time, so I searched for players with similar gear.
You dont know, how often ppl lied to me, when they asked me to invite them or invited me, when they clearly did not met my asked requirements.
If you call ppl who ask for a certain gearscore elitist pigs, I could return the favour and say, that all low GS players are lazy ppl who think, that they are entiteled to get carried by other ppl., but I wont colour everyone with the same brush, as you do.
Completely agree with this; it's the same growing pains within any community that experienced a Gear-score system to gate content;-it is primarily a human behavioral issue and it usually corrects itself over time.
The system isn't the problem, people are the problem. Fix the people causing the problem. *thumbs-up*
1. Weapon and armour enchantments don't increase GS.
2. Weapon damage doesn't increase GS.
3. Special effects like AP gain or Armour class don't increase GS.
Either fix these or create new system.
All the QQ about dividing the community is hyperbole though. You need a quick first separator while in /lfg and GS fits the bill.
I mean, applying some of the logic in this thread, you can easily argue that one shouldn't be able to inspect players whatsoever because PVP gear could be kicked out of PVE content and such.
Nonsense...
1- artifacts give 0.5x GS
2- weapon/armour enchants give GS based on rank (perfect ench. would count as r10)
3- feats don't give GS
4- boons give GS whether it's an effect or stat bonus (like 20-50 GS per boon regardless)
5- If its on the tooltip it should affect GS.
you're welcome.
Include pet stats, ca bonus, ap gain, armor and weapon enchants, weapon dmg, etc.
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Adjusting the Gear score to include weapon enchantments, weapon damage, other stats such as Combat Advantage, running algorithms for diminishing returns on stats,etc.: that would all make GS a better number, but would require much more work for the devs.
And it's pretty clear that if something doesn't make money for Cryptic/PW, there will not be development time for it. Which is not a criticism: this is a F2P game and money has to come from somewhere.
The problem with GS is twofold: GS snobs requiring ridiculous GS (16k for Karru, etc.), and Cryptic setting GS requirements too low for difficult content.
GS elitism is a social problem, and the only solution I know of is to join the Legit channel or a supportive guild. When I started the game, the chat posted in /LFG channel scared me off from running dungeons for a long time.
However, there is a need to assess players' ability to complete a particular dungeon/skirmish/Tiamat - and GS is the best metric we have for that right now. A fresh 60 with 20k hps, a blue weapon, rank 4 enchants and no armor pen will just not contribute his or her share to a time-sensitive fight like Tiamat. 13k gs will not guarantee that those problems are solved, but it's more likely than at 10k gs.
Dump GS as inspectable by others, and replace it with a "Renown" score that increases as a player completes quests, dungeons, campaigns, etc. It would be a much better gauge of player experience than GS. It shouldn't be too difficult to generate a list of accomplishments that could be inspected by other players - like letters of recommendation if you will.
The Renown score could progressively add small increases in power and abilities to the character - a true indicator of experience. GS could still be used internally by the engine.
Let GS snobbery go by the wayside, and let actual accomplishments be the true measure of a players mettle.
GS reflects actual gear, not capabilities of the character or player. It would seriously be nice to be able to tell, at a glance, that a DC is a DPS spec, vs a healing spec, without having to ask them, or go through trial and error. >_>
I like to watch gearscore of players - not because I have some amazing toon because I don't but just out of curiosity. To compare how different choices affect it and what is a difference in dmg between certain classes with the same gs.
Other than that if you see some offensive class with 11k gs outdamaging some other offensive class with 16 or 17k it's the easiest way to say that sth went wrong. Either the player is using his char badly or there is some broken feature giving some unfair advantage.
Just staring at someone without seeing his gs won't give you that information.
I'm a little late to the topic but just to argue a small point on terminology. GS doesn't really give much indication of a players ability, rather it gives an indication of a characters potential ability. Of course that misses the point of how players actually use GS, as you say bigger = better.
I sit back and watch with a level of ammusement every time I see a thread pop up about harder more challenging content. Most of what you see in game with the seeking of high GS suggests quite number of people just want an easy run to the reward. I wonder how much of this is just the nature of people vs their reaction being influenced by the design of the game. Sorry, random thoughts.
Whether or not it's a true indication of a player's ability, the playerbase tends to use it as such. As I've said previously, there's no guarantee that the 20k GS player knows exactly what they're doing any more than there's any guarantee that the 10k person doesn't. The 10k person may know how to play their class; less so on how to readily farm AD to purchase better gear or short on time to run dungeons to get the better gear. Whereas, the 20k player may have more money than game knowledge and just purchased ZEN to sell for AD and bought up the best gear they could find on the AH.
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Gearscore right now is just a way for the devs to gate some content
It doesn't even work because a LOT of items that give more GS than others are far worse than the lower GS item.
No, a FEW items that give more GS are far worse. Let's not make the exceptions the rule
There are an extremely few armor sets that were released after beta that are better than t2. Extremely few. (for pve, black ice is good pvp) Some classes t1 sets are still better. GS doesn't beat a powerful 4pc set bonus.