GearScore and You

Category: Scribe's Corner

Last Updated on Thursday, 04 August 2011 21:18

Written by IceRazor

Anyone who’s ever played World of Warcraft in the past few years is bound to have bumped into GearScore at some point in their play. This add-on to the game has been one of the most contentious issues in any MMO. We’re going to break down exactly what GearScore is, why it’s so controversial, and how it could impact your gameplay in TOR.

What is GearScore?

When a raid leader is looking for additional players in their raid, they often know nothing about the players offering to join the raid. So how can a raid leader differentiate potential candidates?

Pre-GearScore: "What's your strength? What's your stamina? ARE YOU HIT-CAPPED?"

 There was a point in the game’s life when the only way a raid leader could find out about these candidates was to physically travel to them, and inspect their gear manually. Either that, or interrogate those players with a long list of questions about their stats, and hope that they tell the truth. GearScore was a player-made add-on that was created to alleviate this problem.

As the name implies, the GearScore add-on assigns a numerical score to each piece of gear. Note that this score is not arbitrary, it depends on the item level of the piece of gear, which is a number stored internally in the game. The GearScore assigns these scores to each piece of gear that the player is wearing, and adds them up into one nice, neat number. Additionally, the add-on does the same process for any player that comes into contact with the GearScore user, and stores them into a database. Therefore, a raid leader can easily compare the gear of potential raiders without having to go through a large hassle.

Arguments Against GearScore

There are a lot of people that hate GearScore for a number of reasons. These problems fall mainly into two categories: problems with the system, and problems with how it is used.

Padding in the crotch - similar to inflating your GearScore.

The people that criticize how GearScore works have some valid points. GearScore is, at its core, just a blunt instrument. It gives a general idea of how strong a player’s gear is. There are cases when a player’s useful stats will actually be higher with an item that has a lower GearScore. In addition, it’s possible to artificially inflate one’s GearScore by equipping items that aren’t designed for that player’s role. However, people that inflate their scores like this are very easy to spot, and are usually kicked from any raid very quickly. For the job that it does, GearScore is not a perfect system, but it is an effective tool.

People that criticize the usage of GearScore have much more interesting, relevant concerns. A common argument made is that a player’s overall value cannot be quantified solely by looking at their gear, because they feel that skill is more important. This argument has merit, but when a raid leader is looking at two different players whom he/she has never grouped with before, how is the raid leader supposed to measure their relative “skill”? There is no “SkillScore” add-on, so while it’s true that the lesser-geared player may outplay their stronger-geared counterpart, the raid leader can have no way of knowing if that will occur.

"Stop looking at my gear. My skill makes up for it, I swear!"

Another criticism is that GearScore fosters an elitist attitude. They claim that those who use it do so with the purpose of excluding players that should be capable of joining the raid. The trouble with this argument is that people had elitist attitudes before GearScore as well. All they had to do was inspect a player and do the exact same thing. People who want to be elitist are going to be elitist, regardless of what tools are or aren’t available to them.

GearScore in TOR?

We’ve discussed a lot of what GearScore is, and the arguments both for and against it. The question is: will there be a GearScore equivalent in TOR? We know that TOR will not have any macros or add-ons at launch, but that’s likely to change post-launch. In addition, a GearScore function can be created without add-on support by using a web-based program out of game.

Coming out of E3, our good friends at Darth Hater caught this screenshot here from one of the gameplay demos. If you look closely, you’ll notice that each piece of armor has a stat called “Rating”. Weapons were also shown to have these ratings. Speculation is that these ratings are analogous to the item level discussed earlier - the basis for GearScore in WoW. Georg Zoeller had two responses to this on the forums that you can read here and here, but neither of these comments were a denial of the abounding speculation. You can decide for yourself, but it seems to me that the basis for a GearScore analog in TOR has been built into the game, and I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing.

Do you hate/love GearScore? Do you want to see it in TOR?
 

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