People never used the armory to judge others or exclude them from playing the game. Since rio came along, that’s what it has been primarily used for. It gathers far more precise statistics to the armory. Based on that, and the weapon it has become in WoW, it needs to be opt-out.
Let’s look at the options here, shall we?
Opt-in (current): Large amount of people annoyed, the others like it
Opt-out: Everybody can be happy.
Why would you ever consider the former?
They do. We have achievements in game, we’d look those up on the armory and sometimes have to when people fake them.
Plus it shows your raids, m plus etc all there.
But they did. Achievement linking, Gearscore - that was pretty much the Armory being used, people just didn’t need to tab out.
Its just your armory info tho, Its already being shared.
I do wonder if people are not aware that your raid experience, number of kills, best in time Mythic plus runs are all shown on your armory.
There are some very repulsive comments in this topic.
Or the good old «inspect at ironforge bank» 
This is to some extent untrue. We used to use achievements, but people would link them so you never had to go to the armory.
Also the armory display in the pre rio times was absolutely horrendous, but i can guarantee you, if rio was banned, players would just go to check armory profiles for M+.
Also this is a very weak counter argument. I said that the armory has the information that you want to hide, so you hiding it means nothing, but you then said that it’s okay because the information that is taken from the armory and displayed on another website is the one people judge by, even though it’s the same information, just with a nicer display.
This in of itself is a whole can of worms that i don’t feel like opening too much.
Are players getting excluded from playing with others? yes. Is there a good reason though? absolutely. Imagine going to a pick up basketball game wanting to play, but they won’t let you cause you don’t have any arms. Did you get excluded? yes, but it was more than fair that they didn’t wanna play with you.
That is kinda extreme, and missing arms is also not something you can do something about, so a better analogy is:
Imagine you go to a pick up basketball game. There’s room for 8 players, and 4 of them are already set cause they had the court. Now they need 4 more players to play a game, but there are 30 people at the court that wanna play. So they look around at people’s physique (inherent spec strength) and ask how much experience you have with pick up basketball (rio). Now imagine you say that it’s your first game (no rio) or that you played when you were younger (low key experience or last season), but most other players there are taller and have much more experience, why would they pick you? You did get excluded, but it’s completely understandable why.
There are always 2 sides of the coin. You see it as a tool to exclude players, i see it as a way to find the best fit for my group.
Yea so, what is it that you’re trying to hide? For the most part that is what i don’t understand in this. Why would you care if someone could look up what ilvl you were when you did the dungeon, or what build you were using? Why is it so bad?
You switched them around now, the system is currently opt-out, but anyways.
Also i don’t agree at all with your assesment. You say large amount of people annoyed, i have yet to this day, not met a single person that was annoyed by the fact that rio tracks information from a puplic API and displays it with a nice UI, so i would like to meet this “large amount of people”.
Also, a point to make here, if you are annoyed by it, you would have to know of it’s existence, meaning you can easily turn it off. That means that if you are unaware of rio, then it does not affect you on opt-out(currently). This is a key point to keep in mind for the next.
If you make the system opt-in, then a player that does not know of rio, will be severely punished, because their experience is not tracked, due to no fault of their own.
And you talked about how rio is used to judge and exclude players, but if you make it opt-in, then more players will have blank rios, strictly due to not knowing of it’s existence, which will get them excluded, cause people can’t see it.
It’s also kind of a ridiculous notion to have a ranking system be opt-in with account only on a 3rd party website. Imagine if arena rating was opt-in. I could play a ton of arena, but never have a rating or rank, because i didn’t go to arena.io, make an account and tell it to give me a rating. Instead it makes much more sense for it to track my rating, and if i don’t feel like sharing it with a wider audience than those that check my armory, then i go there and tell them to hide it for me, which is imagine is a vast vast minority who would choose to do so, which is another point.
Keypoint
If you want to take 1 thing away here, it is that:
If you have it opt-out default, then it only affects those who know about it, who can then do something about it. (if you don’t know about it, you can’t be annoyed by it)
If it’s opt-in default, then you’re punishing players who don’t know about, who then can’t do anything about it. (obviously because they don’t know how to)
Actually it does something wrong: it collects your data without players consent. So for example if i go to a M+ dungeon, but i don’t use RaiderIO, but the other players use, RaiderIO collects my “data” from that dungeon.
I consider this a violation of privacy and rights. If i don’t use their software (addon), why they collect my data?
It should collect data only from players who have the addon installed and are using it during that dungeon/raid. It should not collect data without players knowledge and consent.
Same thing with warcraftlogs also. They collect data, even if the player doesn’t use their app.
Bleh, raider io ruined Mythic+ for me.
I don’t want to join the ratrace of trying to improve my score just to be in the top 200 and actually get a score. I do Mythic+ for fun and gear, not to hit the leaderboards.
I haven’t had a single weekly chest since raider io launched because I refuse to download it.
So you have not done a mythic + since patch 7.2 Legion ?
Ratrace? Dont need to be in top 200 to get a score, all dungeons give u a score 
People assume that having 1k raider io stops you from doing dungeons.
There are a number of positive aspects of raider. These are:
There are, however, a number of negatives that need to be addressed:
I don’t mind it because I am in a guild where we often group together for dungeons and run them together. But I understand it can be a nightmare for players who want to find a group through the group finder tool.
How to professionally slack
Note that’s my raiderio name
This was my favourite page on your review
Love it!
It’s the only class/spec I’m remotely competent at lol 
I only like playing Ret, I feel you 
You were very busy in season 4 wowsers