It’s an attempt at providing a solution that ends up creating a problem in and of itself. Possibly a bigger problem.
This is a common sentiment but it only sounds reasonable, in reality it is just a cop out. The moment you accept “well, befriend someone or join a guild” as a solution, whatever the subject was about stops being a competition / test of skill and starts being a competition / test of who has better friends.
I mean, there’s a place for such things, eg, we have likes and various reality TV shows where people are getting kicked out every episode or so based on how others rate them, etc, and it’s all fine. It’s known territory. But we shouldn’t fool ourselves and think that the effect of things like raider io are somehow something else. The effect is just making dungeon runs less about in-game performance and more about having friends. That’s it.
I’m a lucky one who plays within a pool of m±interested people. In addition I dont care things like the meta - I care about the human behind the toon and helping everywhere like pushing alts for the weekly chest.
And at the actual season we’ve found some days to do several m’s in a row cause RL allowed it.
To have that been said: I was lazy in S1, but S2 entertains me with the new seasonal affix.
I would rather quit than playing in pugs perpetually.
Can you define such problem? There is a need of a system that when making M+ groups like for +10 Waycrest or Shrine of Storms will tell key owner if given individual knows the dungeon, depending on class/role can and does uses interrupts, knows what to kite, what to tank. Raider IO rose to power as there was and is a need for such system - people don’t really want to spent 2h in a M+ run or downgrade a key because group disbanded due to inability in doing first boss. ilvl visible in the group finder is meaningless in this case as it doesn’t really say anything about feasibility of given player to run given dungeon in a timed challenge mode.
Guilds or pre-made groups have advantage of better communication and cooperation (often with voice comm) and don’t need to rely on a third party skill score.
So, you don’t play M+, yet expect people who are far more experienced than you, to carry you. You know, I have a better solution. Instead of whining about a very useful, to the majority of players, addon, you want a carry - pay for it. It is what 200-250k gold? I’m sure you can figure it out.
Putting a big artificial barrier to entry, decimating the pool of potential players.
I understand why raider io is there. But in trying to solve one issue it creates another. In reality, it is the method that is flawed. The real solution is automated matchmaking.
What I dislike is the elitism it can cause, and the artificial block it causes for players.
It’s similar to the joke about “curve” in Raiding. That you need to raid to get curve, but you need curve to raid.
Worse still is the feeling that your worth, skill and access to gameplay is judged and restricted by someone who is not Blizzard and has no authority over the game
There are many people who can do high M+ well enough but can’t get groups cos of some contrived score that someone else has generated.
The core issue here is that people feel that they are excluded from content that they want to do. Some of them get hung up on raider io, thinking it’s a gatekeeper, focusing intensely on it while ignoring the other viable options to do this content. Making own groups and building up a social network are two of them.
I understand that they aren’t as appealing as pressing a button, spending 35 minutes in a dungeon and collecting the mythic +10 chest come Wednesday, but that doesn’t invalidate them.
Making friends or acquaintances doesn’t have to be a popularity contest, and in my experience it really isn’t. It’s more about giving and taking. You help people, they help you. It sometimes require a proactive approach where you have to engage socially with people (instead of waiting for them to come to you), and I know that isn’t equally easy for everyone.
I don’t agree that things would be better without raider io. People would instead armory an applicant, with the same result. Raider io simply expresses a character’s experience in form of a simple number. The same information can be obtained differently, it just takes longer. If I ran my own +10 key, and there was nobody around I know, I would take someone who has done a lot of those keys in BFA already, and not someone like me who just started playing again and has barely done any BFA mythics (and none of them went particularly well, either).
What alternatives to a tool like raider io would you propose for running higher (or any) keys with players you don’t know and can’t evaluate?
It’s bigger than just feeling. The moment ratings are being judged by participants of the activity, you know what the end result is going to be - it is not going to reward skill, it is going to reward connections. As I said before, this all is known territory. We have such systems running in other areas. We all know what the ins and outs are.
You do M+ by solo-queuing for a specific difficulty. You get partners according to your rating. The system might include various restrictions, in that in order to queue for M+6 you have to complete M+5 N times and / or have ilvl X. There might be all kinds of provisions made for the setup: no doubles of specs, no spec X if there is already spec Y (eg, armor classes), etc.
Group queue might continue to exist with whatever ratings they want to use. But it’s the solo queue with automated matchmaking that will have 90%+ of the players and that will actually provide life to content like this.
Though I wouldn’t mind obtaining a rating or score built into the game rather than someone who has no right to curb my potential experience.
PvP rating is a fair example. It’s set forth by the game owners and is earned by the player. Raider IO score is just like those kids who’d charge the younger kids for using the play equipment at the free community park.
I feel this would be just fine as an additional option. I feel somewhat strongly about players being able to build their own groups if they desire, but I have no issue with automated systems as long as they are optional (I think LFR was a great addition, for example).
I’m not necessarily sure that match-making of that type would work well for higher keys, because you would probably want specific specs (not just classes) and group setups there. I also feel that mythics without voice chat can be pretty difficult if they are challenging still for the group (that last boss from the last raid in LFR seems to illustrate that concern), but that leads me back to my preference of playing with people I know or that I’m getting to know.
You want to join their groups. They have every right to chose their own experience if they use their own keys. You are not prohibited from leveling up your own keys and set your own requirements.
I am talking about the creators of Raider IO. People can by all means refuse to invite 391 Ret Paladin to the group if they do not want one, but I shouldn’t be labelled crap by some third-party and have that restrict my potential to get into groups.
Do you get me? It’s like going for a job interview but your chances are lowered because you have a bad “Shed Score” generated by Dilan Belchworth (damn, thought I could get away with that one, Profanity Filter ) of Snobshire Road, Kent. Someone who has no right and no official sanction to be affecting judgement against you.
Yes and no. It may be surprising but doing +10 for a weekly with a PUG isn’t a guaranteed part of the game. Through most of early Legion I barely did any M+ and had little knowledge about the dungeons, but then gradually through guild runs and low PUG runs I got better up to 2,592 RIO score in 7.3.2 season - while starting playing WoW for the first time in Legion pre-patch. In BfA season 1 I didn’t played much. Few weeklies, some guild runs. Didn’t even had every dungeon on M+ done - score 688. With second week of season 2 I already have score of 918 and every dungeon run and constantly improved. Not like I can get to whatever group I want but over time it’s gradually improving. And even most of my guild is gone (so limited raiding possible) there are still people left doing M+ which is another source of “high” M+ runs (if lucky to get recorded on RiO while being on a popular realm).
Putting exact requirements from raider IO to an automated system that will automatically exclude players? Plus automated matchmaking is hard to make correctly.
You want exclusion, that’s not the issue. The issue is in how you do it. Automated exclusion is unbiased. That’s all that’s needed from it (as long as we are talking about sane things and not stupidities like having an automated system ban shamans just because they are shamans and the developer coding the system had a shaman stole his wife and hates them ever since).
Automated matchmaking is hard to make correctly only in terms of quantifying performance accurately. With M+ there already is a natural scale - difficulty mode. You can try to create a finer scale, but this is plenty good enough already.
It’s hard to grade tactics like interrupts, kiting, pulls and so on. You may wipe constantly on a boss and the algorithm may decide you are not good enough while it was a missing interrupt or bad composition, a death run or something else like last boss of Motherlode positioning by the tank. There is a lot of intricacies and they didn’t even got HoTS match making “right” where things are much simpler.
) of Snobshire Road, Kent. Someone who has no right and no official sanction to be affecting judgement against you.
Plus automated matchmaking is hard to make correctly.