most of the pugs i’ve played with are fine.
but i’m a bit suspicious here… are you saying you’ve never grouped with somebody who swears they’re the best player you’ve ever seen, only to find they’re doing 30% the dps their gear suggests they should do, and they die to standing in swirls on every pull? never?
People are likely choosing the best option available to them 
If a group is 4/5 and 2 people app to the group one who should be doing the run and one who is probably just doing it for fun (say a 170 ilvl vs 223 ilvl) then the 223 is going to get picked
Dude you are a DPS.
There are 100 dps applying per group.
Play a tank.
I’m half here to point out how ridiculous we’ve gotten with it and half here to complain…not really to have anyone fix it for me or make me feel better…just to get our community talking about it, more or less…
Either way…goal achieved…discussion started…
With the influx of paid carries recently a person’s io score can’t reliably be believed anyway. I’ve encountered quite a few dps who have a “decent” io score but have no idea of what is really needed from them in keys.
For example last week my tank partner and I broke down the interrupts for the dungeon at the end and the tank had more than double the 3 dps combined. I don’t even have a dedicated interrupt (just leg sweep which isn’t counted in recorded interrupts) and I had used it more than one of the melee dps.
We had a dps in another key who took 4x the amount of damage the tank took bc he stood in everything. Including the acid lake during that annoying boss in Plague fall. Yet he had a near 1k io.
I’m all for tools to help making decisions on who to bring but io is now too easily faked.
Yep. That is exactly what I mean when I say “they’re wrong, but not lying”. This type of player is typically from a former social guild back in the day and everyone said how great they were. 
I always hate to break it to them, and it takes compassion and finesse (and sometimes a deep dive into comparison logs), but they just had no idea.
Edited to add: you see the same thing in the belt ranking system between dojos when you watch a meet. It can be heartbreaking.
100% agree. IO can be faked. Both by paid carries and pre-made groups that can cover for weaknesses.
But what other gauge of experience do you have? Do you just pick any applicant now?
I don’t see it as a problem.
When I’m picking strangers out of LFG, I’m going to pick the person most likely to help my group succeed. and if that means picking the 1500 shaman who is just queuing for a 14 for his vault over the 950 shaman who needs the 14 for io or loot… I’m picking the 1500 guy every time.
I’ll agree that listing a denathrius progression fight but requiring AOTC is silly.
but there’s nothing wrong in listing a denthrius farm group and requiring it. 
however, at the end of the day - he who makes the group makes the rules.
If you took the time to check the website itself instead of just the score and poked around, paid carries would probably be pretty evident.
It’s been like that since forever, it’s not a new thing the community is unaware of. GearScore, ilvl, AotC, RaiderIO and something new will probably come along in the future to replace RIO. As long as Blizz allows us to see achievements/data community gatekeeping will be a thing.
Def raiderio its super toxic, def wasn’t invited because of raiderio not because there were 10 other dps that also qued up, 100% raiderio so toxic blizzard please get rid of io its toxic so so so toxic.
And io isn’t even worth looking at since everyone just pays for there carries now, let me tell you at least two people in every pug I have run had def just paid for carries its crazy out there.
And io doesn’t measure skill or experience since 9 out of 10 people just pay for carries anyways.
Just so toxic toxic toxic toxic I repeat so toxic
Why look up a main when people can just link their main in IO?
It’s not meant to be rando-puggable. That’s why it’s premade only. Blizzard has no authority on what premade groups set as the “bar” for their groups, and I don’t think they should.
Really it’s just hit and miss. Generally we’ll decide what kind of comp we want and then look at io and whether or not they’ve completed at least the key level prior to the one we want to do. Sometimes we get amazing dps who are on point and sometimes we don’t.
My tank partner and I aren’t super concerned about pushing, my io is only 715 thus far with few 10s completed. We are taking our time climbing the keys. Mostly because I’ve been leveling an alt healer. I love MW but sometimes I don’t want to work harder for the same end result as other healer specs.
This topic is posted at least 3-4 times most days, you’re late to the party.
Keys literally get dozens of people lining up to join.
Idk about you, but I’d take the one with the highest IO every time.
Probably but I’m not a super serious key pusher so I don’t invest that much time into vetting players. Sometimes my partner and I take ppl picked at random with our eyes closed for fun. Some of those people have been amazing players with lower/no io scores.
All I’m saying is that io is easy to fake and not everyone wants to interview their potential group members like they’re applying for a national security job.
Exactly. I never understand those people on low io characters putting down “1600io main” or whatever. If they dont have enough brain capacity to link their alt to their main then I dont want them on my run anyway regardless of their main io
not really that hard to miss. Look up there key history. If they have that high IO score, generally the people who buys them would get 1 or 2 keys per week or do a everything dungeon in a week. They can easily be check by looking at group comp w/ rio. Example is there’s a healer who queue up for my group who has 1.2k io score. But when I him up. You can tell that he was a carry simply because the group he was with had 2 healers. And his ilvl was so subpar to what it could be to do the specific m+ difficulty compare to his group. (eg. he was 150 on a +10 when the group is 210+). Stuff like that are easy to check
I had a monk turn up to Necrotic Wake on a giant KSM death elemental. A fresh 60, in a normal, so obviously on an alt. They proceeded to not interrupt a single fear or necrotic bolt, or goresplatter, and died to meteor storm on the final boss. I don’t believe you get KSM without learning at least the basics of the encounters, even if you are playing an alt, so I’m guess they bought a carry for that mount.
Makes me wonder how much that costs, and who is benefitting from the carry culture we seem to have right now.