No you do not. How would anyone get that gear in the first place if it were true?
There are learning/prog raids in the groupfinder all the time. They aren’t going to require excessive gear or they’d never fill.
The ‘quick clear’ groups are going to expect much higher gear, because they’ve already gone through the wiping and learning and gearing process. Do not try to join those if you haven’t. They don’t want to backslide and re-teach half the group on every boss and shouldn’t have to.
People want to group with others who are roughly their skill level. That’s entirely normal and needs to be facilitated.
You tend to contradict yourself. You say you have done ‘high end raiding, pushed high keys, got Gladiator’ (all of which I’m assuming you did without being carried??). Yet then you say that it is somehow an elitist mindset to require people to achieve those things.
Which is exactly what I said. Yes, the activities are available to do for everyone. There is no entry requirement (other than to be at level cap and be able to log onto the game). The idea is to start at Mythic 0 and work your way up for as far as your skills and personal limitations allow. It should never be the case - in my opinion - that anyone is entitled to receive benefits beyond that point if they cannot get beyond that point.
If you continue to believe otherwise, our conversation has reached an end, because we will have reached an impasse. I will always fight to keep challenge and personal achievement in this game as opposed to just handing things over like some kindergarten participation award.
I got mostly everything back in Wrath cleared with PuGs, because I had friends in different guilds.
You along with every liar who claims as such. Or were you just counting dungeon content which went up to Halls of Reflection, which is akin to entry level heroic dungeons?
Or maybe the old mythic +2?
It’s available at any time, and I don’t care about bricking keys. Wider key availability too. Plenty of incentives.
I mean you just have to look at games like OW, where people buy accounts that are sitting at a high rank. Due to them thinking that they have the skill to play at that level, it’s just “factors out of their control” as to why they aren’t. So their logic is “well if I just buy this account, then I can skip to where I should be!”. Yet reality is much harsher than that, and so you get the players that I’ve described that are waaaaaaaay out of their depth.
Yet again, their logic to them is it’s everyone else as to why their not succeeding. Which is why they swipe the card to buy carries and so forth, and I say this as someone who was once upon a time like this. When I first started digging into end game content, this was my logic for a bit of time. Now I’ve learned and developed a lot of skills that have allowed me to push to where I am now, yet initially I fell into that trap of it’s not me but everyone else. I know my limits, and I know what I am capable of, I know when I mess up and when someone else does because I have put that time in.
Yet that takes a lot of effort and dedication to do, which some people feel like they also can’t be bothered to do. Which adds to the logic of the above and further entices them to buy runs.
My IRL friends and I would clear Naxx, Ulduar, ICC, ToGC just like we’d do Karazhan the expansion prior.
Just the truth that I PuG’d basically everything, my guild had their own raid roster and I wasn’t a part of it for most of the time- played a Hunter and they rarely needed an extra one.
The guild was PvP-centric and I had brothers in it, so I stayed for that.
That’s great, but it takes so long to get into groups, I often just play something else instead.
Not gonna spend my time waiting for hours and hours to get started on a M+, as a tank no less.
At least PvP queues pop regularly and I can just jump into those. If M+ had a queue system, I’m sure I’d play it more. Even if the results are bad.
Just getting started, is hell. Declined constantly for not having established score.
You either invited them, or agreed to run with them. I’m a mostly pug player myself and part of playing the game that way is accepting that runs aren’t always going to go well with random players.
It’s the end of the season and the majority of good players are taking a break until S2. This means a large portion of the player pool still playing are the one who failed upwards. Unfortunately this means a higher ratio of failed runs compared early or mid season.
Not much can be done besides taking your time to vet your groups more stringently.
Those paid runs are for two things. Gear, and for “credentials” to sneak into other runs for free. It’s why people are able to sell so many AOTC raid runs, it’s one of the achievements that usually ends up being bare minimum for screening invites to not paid groups.
It’s why fake credentials in the real world are such a prolific menace. Get fake credentials. Sneak in. Try to fake it until you make it, or get found out.
Keys not depleting enables and exacerbates failing upwards and score inflation. There’s a reason why pugging higher keys gets harder towards the end of the season because the pool gets diluted with players who aren’t ready for them.
Keys depleting serves a very important function. If they remove depletions then they should remove all rewards for untimed runs.
Hard pushing keys at the very tail end of a season generally isn’t a great time. You run into the new, the desperate and those running alts and don’t care in the slightest if a key dies.
Ultimately, though, it’s up to the key holder to vet their group if they’re pugging if the intent is to push and not ‘lol let’s just run it and see what happens’. It’s a player problem, and requires a player solution.
Wouldn’t work because ELO/MMR is a completely different system where you give and take points from other players. It would also not work because each key level of each dungeon would need it’s own rating because someone farming +2s and getting high ELO from that isn’t going to be prepared for a +10.
Where ELO/MMR is supposed to represent skill amongst peers, IO/Score doesn’t aim to do that. They serve different purposes.