Group finder elitism

It’s absolutely about RDF. “Community” and “Social Interaction” was always the excuse to never implement RDF and instead keep this current system. Your community and social interaction is what enables them to treat you that way. if you had RDF it wouldn’t be a problem. Reap what you sow. Consequences of your actions.

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Refusing to carry people that are undergeared does not equal gate keeping.

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That’s a pretty ambitious outlook, given that the conversation is about people being lower geared than others may prefer.

This problem exists in a world both with RDF and without. This has nothing to do with RDF and everything to do with player’s attitudes. RDF doesn’t change this. It didn’t before and it certainly won’t again.

At the very least, the absence of RDF allows me to choose who I interact with. Some people use that for good and some for bad, but at least the choice is there. RDF takes that choice away. While the current system is actually better for us, it’s still irrelevant to the current issue, which is that just like it did the first time around (when we had RDF, lulz), player attitudes and abuse of gearscore information has gotten way out of hand.

Still, some impressive grudge holding you’ve got there!

I thought he was talking about rdf?

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You can do this with RDF. Invite who you want then queue for a random or specific dungeon.

Exactly, it’s not the systems it is 100% the attitudes.

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You know RDF doesn’t enable kicking till either 15 minutes pass or the first boss is dead right?

What you’re describing was never a thing in WotLK. It’s simply faster to just get the dungeon done than wait around.

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Not really, but I don’t think we need to get into it because…

… this is what we need to be focusing on here.

I appreciate your optimism!

It’s not optimism, it’s history.

Removing RDF and adding heroic+ set WotLKC down the exact same path WotLK was on before RDF was added.

People do their daily for extra badges and then log out for the day.

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It’s a very common misconception that it takes away agency when it does not. It’s not a “not really” situation it’s a you can go purely random or make a group and queue up.

However you are right it does boil down to player attitudes entirely regardless of systems.

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There are things you might be missing here but I don’t really want to get into it. If you’re interested in my reasoning for this, we could pick any of the other RDF threads to go over it in.

We don’t need this thread to be about RDF because…

Which is my point. That player attitude is going to be there, regardless of RDF. RDF doesn’t make it go away and players will find an outlet for that attitude no matter what. So what can we do about it?

For myself, I make an effort to ensure that when I run my own groups, I invite first come first served based on the relatively loose group needs I’ve set out and not focus on what someone’s gear score is. I’m one person though and this doesn’t seem to be catching on.

For Blizzard’s part, I feel like a game mechanics change is in order. Yet what can they do? Even if they blocked querying someone else’s gear from the API (which they should probably do anyway), they’d have to block the ability to inspect another person unless you’re in the same guild. Which seems way overboard since inspecting other players to see the cool stuff they’re wearing feels like a core pillar of World of Warcraft.

How many of us have had the experience of seeing someone wearing something awesome, inspecting them to figure out what it is, and then going and trying to get it ourselves?

Logically it’s unnecessary because as long as Blizzard enforces their own bar of readiness in game (ie, you can’t list in the group finder unless you meet Blizzard determined gear requirements for the content in question), groups should manage just fine. But it’s that illogical part of holding on to a part of the game that maybe doesn’t make sense anymore but you still love nonetheless that might make it harder.

I dunno… what do you think?

Fair, I am passionate about this debate though, so if we meet again in a more appropriate thread I would for sure enjoy discussing this topic.

I think it factors into rate of content consumption. Some players will post very high GS requirements for relatively easy content just to be done with it ASAP. Which is entirely fine as player choice is important and within the rights of the player making the group.

It’s a byproduct of the “gogogogo” mentality that is not unique to WoW retail or otherwise. A steady controlled pace is fine

The issue to me is people who see this happening and default to it as the normal for forming things like H+/T7 raids which perpetuates the high GS requirements we see.

Having a recommended ilvl posted for the H+ dungeons would be super helpful. I wouldn’t want a GS imposed by blizzard as that is a player made Addon and in later expansions there would use ilvl for their grouping tools.

Publishing directly a recommended ilvl wouldn’t stop the GS requirements but it may alleviate them over all. Most H+ dungeons can be done with a 3.8K GS, my only worry taking someone of that low a GS is their HP.

Everything is more elitist, these days.

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What an elitist thing to say tbh

:+1:

I too am passionate about it, but I’ve been deliberately trying to engage more sparingly lately :wink:

Yea I get that, and to an extent agree. I’m a big proponent of choice here. The problem is expectation though. Players think you need a super high gear score to finish the content when, in fact, you really don’t and you’ll still complete the content in almost the same amount of time.

This has been a common mentality in Classic. During Vanilla it even caused me to take a break. The things people are willing to do in order to shave even 30s off a clear time kind of baffled me. I’m fine with people doing their own thing, but in a lot of cases those expectations started to spill over to me.

From my perspective, it makes no difference if we clear a raid in 2 hours, or if we clear it in 1 hour and 45 minutes. It’s not that big a deal.

Interestingly, other games (even retail) just don’t seem to care. My theory is that it’s a product of a re-release… it’s known content so for some, it’s not enough to just clear the content, you have to speed run it too. While retail has it’s share of inflated rating requirements for M+ content, it’s more about a safety net than gogogo.

Yea I think ilvl is enough tbh. Gear score is an additional optimization on item level to differentiate between “good” items and “bad” items at the same level, but it’s just not really a big deal. Though even then I have concerns about GS’s implementation of that.

For example, as a bear tank, my BiS idol is some super low ilvl thing from that place in Grizzly Hills. That takes a fair notch out of both my average ilvl and my Gear Score. It would be pretty easy to misinterpret me wearing that I suspect. Still, as ilvl is a much smaller number, that’s not a bar I’m worried about, but it totally drops my gearscore by like 100 or something (not 100% sure on this) and that’s a more meaningful threshold to a lot of people.

All this to say, ilvl > gs as a barrier to entry, but that should be enforced by Blizzard and not by players.

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:man_facepalming:

I agree with this theory. Personally when I have already played a video game once that is where I take my time, once I have beaten the game once or twice that way I go for a “how fast can I do X” mentality. It can be fun and it’s players creating their own goals, hard modes, etc.
“can we one tank/heal this fight?”
“how fast can we clear this?”
However not everything needs to be approached this way in a PUG setting.

I delt with this a paladin more in TBC than I do now but yes, this is something that GS does not really account for totally. Some items will increase a GS based on spec/itemization but having some ilvl200 or even the healing trinket from normal CoS(ilvl 178 iirc?) can really skew the numbers imo. Though I will say I do not know how common these type of BiS items are for other classes.

Agree. Having a “we suggest…” next to dungeons or to use certain categories in the tool is a good idea. This however would require work to be done on the LFG tool and I am concerned that what we have is what we will keep having moving forward.

In all honesty just separating the listings for normal heroic and heroic+ could be a help to not only finding normal heroic groups but alleviate some annoyance on GS requirements as people will have more of an idea of what they need to queue and be successful with a stated ilvl prior to signing up.

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Its sarcasm my dude

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I just leveled a fresh alt to 80, and trying to find a regular H dungeon is painful. If I list myself under Heroic Dungeons, I get spammed with invites for H+. I can’t write a message specifying REGULAR H unless I give Blizz my phone number and download some malware on my phone.

H and H+ need separate sections!

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If the current system is better then why are you complaining about it :slight_smile: you want this system of choice so bad yet you complain when you find out that player choice means nobody is choosing you. Ironic.

Solution: Make your own group.