I agree… The addon makers had good intentions, but it’s gone too far. Blizz should implement their own RIO of some sort that is less toxic than the addon, same as they did change gearscore to item level.
What would change if Blizz made an addon?
I don’t understand this train of thought.
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???
You could always see item level if you used addons, even in vanilla, long before gearscore was even a thing. They just made it visible without addons.
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It doesn’t matter what system replaces RIO in the future, the way that players use that information being factored in with other things like what the meta specs are will influence their decision on who they invite to their party.
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It does though, if they provide enough information to people. But then people would whine like hell. If I could be shown how much avoidable damage people take, I’d be very happy. If I could be shown how many times someone says “sum pls” as soon as they join a party, I’d be very happy. If I could be shown how many interrupts they pull off, I’d be very happy. If it showed their average dps, I’d be very happy too(Way too many players who can’t even outdamage me overall). How many times they die to avoidable mechanics. How many times they’ve pulled instead of the tank. Where they put the bosses if they’re tanks. If they’ve caused bosses to get bolstered. And a lot of other stuff.
It’s a very interesting conversation and topic, there is however a big problem in just discussing this.
The views and experience with it, is gonna depend so much on the extent at which you play the game, and most of all experience.
As someone who always makes his own groups and is in the top 1% scored people (not trying to flex, just stating it so you know where i am coming from), my experience with the addon is gonna be wildly different from yours, and i hope i can shed some light on why not everyone feels the same way and why the fix is not simple.
There is a definite connection between skill and score, but the lower the score, the higher the variance.
If you take a 1k player and compare them to a 1.5k player, then in all likelihood, the 1.5k player will be better. He might not be inherintly better, but maybe more experienced and therefore likeli to have a higher performance, is a better way to phrase that.
However if you compare a 1k player to a 3k player, and the 1k player has completed all dungeons, then i can guarantee you that in 99% of cases, which is lowballing it, the 3k player will be better.
You say that, but any player you have played with that you say “didn’t know any mechanic” will claim that they do. There are many levels to knowing mechanics.
I know more mechanics now than when i was 1.5k. Had you asked me at any threshold i have been in pre 2k, i would have said i know mechanics.
Now i am 3k and i know that i don’t know all mechanics. I learn new mechanics every once in a while still, it can be small things like something i can cancel, that is not recast, with dragon’s breath, to recently learning that the last boss TD targeted circles, give a random either knowback or dot, instead of being predetermined.
Trust me, you don’t know all mechanics in the game, and sometimes you stumble upon people that don’t know a specific mechanic, and you make the assumption that they know nothing, while in all likelihood, they know a mechanic or interaction, that you don’t.
absolutely irrelevant, i know players who have played since vanilla, that play classic today, that can barely time a +4.
Decent is subjective i guess. Decent is just another word for mediocre or somewhat average, so it depends on what you’re doing.
If you’re queueing for a +15, 463 is not decent.
I guess this is as good as any to bring it up, you’re only as good as you’re better than the competition.
There is no minimum ilvl or experience to get in. You can’t go “i have done a +15 in time, so i deserve an invite to any +15”, but fail to take into account how many others in queue also have done that, and there is a limited amount of spots.
As someone who makes his groups for a lot of my weeklies, i can tell you that if i put up a +15 key, then within 1 minute, i will have at least 10 people with better gear and more experience than you, so why would i ever take you, when there are significantly better people, playing better classes available?
Again i am not trying to flex or anything here, but i have 7 active characters, 6 of those are better geared than your main. Imagine how many other high rated players who have geared alts that they do weekly 15s on, they are gonna take so many spots.
Though i will admit, most of my dps spots do go to mains, because i can get 475 characters with +17 experience, but if a 470 alt from a 3k player queues, he gets in.
And this is no offence, but i would take a 465 alt of a 3k player over your main.
And you don’t need to. What people look for in a main for a weekly, is usually highest key done, amount of keys in highest key range and key level done for the dungeon they are doing.
People that make groups for weekly 15s don’t care about your score if it’s below 2k, it’s a battle of who has the highest key done in time, and timed keys above 15. So no you don’t need to complete all dungeons.
Now it seems like you might not know about main score.
If you go to rio and make an account you can link characters, so that people can see your main character’s score, while you’re on an alt.
So when i queue for a dungeon on my alt hpala, which is like 1.4k, i still get invites to 16s, because it shows next to it, that my main is 3k, and they can see that i have timed a 16 on that character.
At the key level you’re at, score doesn’t mean much, but rather your raw experience.
I get that you’re exxagerating, but there is some truth to it. When i play 15 keys on my shaman, i tend to die less than our pugs and do comparable damage to people 20 ilvls above (comparable as in not terrible by comparison), because i have that experience, i know how to minimize damage taken and optimize damage done, and that comes from high key pushing, which shows through score.
It is not always true ofc, but sometimes it does hold.
This is probably the biggest miconception on this topic.
I myself am a booster in gallywix, and a good friend of mine was the co-owner and manager of pink panda for many years, and recently manager for the twillight boosting community, and we have talked about this quite a bit.
A vast vast majority of boosts are for gearing purposes, and usually alts.
We both agree that it’s at the very most, 10% of boosts sold in the 2 biggest communities, that are for score purposes, and that might even be way too high.
It’s not a common thing to do.
This is somewhat common.
I have friends that i carry in weekly 15s, that definitely aren’t as good as the average pug i can get for a 15.
Most of the time it’s on their alts, in which case it’s irrelevant, cause they have main experience, but i do have 1 mate who gets carried on his main, buuuuut he doesn’t play keys without me, so it’s not a problem.
But i will give you this does happen, but that’s why you look at the amount of timed 15s they have, because someone getting carried once a week, will have less than someone actually putting in time.
That is training grounds i believe they are called, and they are absolutely irrelevant.
What they show is that you know how to do training grounds, not that you know how to do dungeons.
It’s really funny how you say that you can’t trust rio because you don’t know if someone doesn’t knows the mechanics, but then go on to say that the solution is to have the do a training ground that does not include the mechanics of the dungeon?
I guess you like the solo aspect of it? The fact that you have to do it alone? but still training grounds have never meant in any way that you’re skilled, and they are completely useless.
An idea though could be to make solo scenarios of parts of dungeons you could complete that would show that you know the dungeons, but that would just be a massive waste of time for most, but there might be something there.
It’s not always cut and dry whose fault it is, and the game can’t always, or even rarely determine who messed it up.
Take tree boss in WM, let’s say i get rooted during fire, no one gets me out, is that my fault? probably not, but are you gonna give the fault to all other players? it’s impossible to say if the healer didn’t heal me enough, tank took it in fire with poor timing or dps was too slow. Then what if i was in a bad position (out of range), it’s impossible for the game to determine whose fault.
Let’s take another example. Say we’re playing a boss with oneshot potential, we’re on disc and healer calls he’ll external me, but i pop a defensive on top of it. Then the mechanic comes again and i have nothing, i die. That’s my fault, but the game could never determine that, no one could except the guys in the call.
Let’s take an even weirder example. I had this happen some months ago where i was playing last boss in shrine. Our rogue was just about to be hit by a tentacle, by priest reacts fast and grips him, however does not notice that he gripped him into another tentacle. The rogue would have died regardless, but the game would probably determine that the priest gripped him into a position that would result in his death, and therefore give the mistake there.
For the same reasons as above, it’s not always your fault when you die. RNG deaths are a thing, more common the higher you go. Sometimes the team as a whole makes a mistake and someone dies. 2 overlapping kicks can result in a death, then is the mistake on who took that death? no, but you can’t point to 1 of the kickers and say they made the mistake alone.
Healing is never a good measure as it’s a result of how good your team is at mechanics for the most part.
Have done 15s while healing for 30k or less overall and i have had keys where i had to heal for 50k or 60k, it’s too random to be a metric.
Damage done is also a bad metric. How the tank pulls, how his snap aggro is, how good people are at stops and kicks and even down to individual damage patterns in the group, affect how much damage you do.
Put my mage in a 15 freehold, where i can easily do 130k dps if the group does it right, and pull 1 pack at a time, do no kicks or stops and hold no aggro, and i will proably do 50k dps or less.
Problem with this metric is, that it is insanely reliable on the rest of the group, which is what you want to avoid in the first place.
Absolutely the most irrelevant metric in the game. Any achievement of note (feats) don’t usually give points.
The tank i have started playing with recently is 3.5k score and CE. He is a better player than you can even hope to ever become, and he has like 7k points.
It’s the dumbest metric of skill in the game, even worse than training grounds.
This is a whole other topic, and it has been discussed to death, but to summarize it.
Any implication of a system that does this, brings worse problems with them, like unfair punishment, dumb implications in higher keys, hostage situations and so on.
Don’t overinsentivise people to kick. Not only do people have different kick CDs, but kicking 100 useless abilities is way worse than kicking 1 key one in a 15 setting.
Take the shadow bolt volley in 1st boss room KR. Kick as many of the regular casts as you want, they don’t matter at all. All that matters, in a +15, is the shadowbolt volley.
Kick overlapping is also a problem for this metric.
Also implement this, and you’ll see 4 people blow their kick at once, and i don’t have to tell you that is a bad thing.
We do have an account-wide rating, which is main score, and if you’re pugging, then the only common factor in all your runs is you, so while every run is a team effort, you’re entire page gives a pretty good image of you.
Also kind of forgot to mention. The reason it doesn’t track all those things is because it can’t. All the information it has, it gets from your armory.
Only way to track those things are with logs, and blizzard is not about to log every single key done, as you need to do that yourself, but in the end, no one cares about that.
The problem becomes that it’s hard to make a system that works for this scenario, but isn’t abuse at the top.
Say you make it so keys don’t downgrade when someone leaves. Then top key players will just leave their key and try again, with no punishment for failing.
Say you make it so you can get others in if someone leaves. We had that for a very short time, and you can probably guess what happened. People would clear all the way till last boss, then kick the pugs, get in their friends for free loot.
Those are the 2 common fixes, and they have massive problems.
If there was an easy fix for all cases, then we would probably get it.
I don’t think you actually played M+ when this addon wasn’t a thing, or at least you didn’t push. Well okay the addon came pretty late, around 7.2 i think, but before that, we used to look people up. it’s been a thing since season one, though not since launch of season 1.
Before it was a thing, if you wanted to push keys with pugs, it was so much more random. People would link CE or mythic achievs and you would have to go largely by ilvl, and it was a whole mess. I remember when wowprogress started tracking this and gave a score, it was the greatest day.
I do agree, that to some players it does present a barrier, and it does have negative influence on some, but as a whole, it’s probably the single most useful tool for my playing.
As a side note, you do know that it just neatly organizes things that are already puplic right? If the addon was removed, then people would just look up your armory, and it would be the same just take way longer.
I hope i helped you see at least a different perspective on this problem. You don’t have to agree, but just understand that there are more perspectives to this.
edit: reading through some of your responses i noticed that you reply by just putting their name in your reply.
If you wanna reply to this and want me to see what you reply, then please click the reply or quote something in it, else i won’t get a notification that you have replied.
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ahh so its random, thought they cicled or something similar, so its really random then. cheers
plus, learning stuff on high keys is something really comon, in 15s and lower the tyranical/fortify is lower and thus many stuff u shrug off will be a major problem in 17 uppwards. for example rezan dot (learned the hard way how much it hurted on my first +19) and freehold first boss shots
Healing requirement is so dungeon, affix and group dependant, this is not at all a reliable way to argue.
My holy paladin healed a +15 2 chest easily with 448 equipped, which indicates gameplay>gear.
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But they also adjusted everything to it properly
Yeah rio is a poor indicator. Had a druid healer with 2.4k+ rio and didn’t know about the dog mechanic in freehold… 
With the amount of boosts around, it’s losing grip every day.
This week alone, premade of 3 dps 3k+, they couldn’t down volkal totem the first time on a +18. 5 minute wasted.
The system clearly needs improvement.
People don’t buy boosts to get to 3k, it would cost too much. I don’t see someone spending millions of gold just to get 3k score.
I’m for RIO it does have pros and cons realistically and in alot of ways highly worth it. There is a problem though
If I paid gold for 5 +17 boosts on every dungeon id get my RIO with 0 effort and without fighting a single boss inside the dungeon.
And people generally reply with “there’s not many who do this” which imma say to you there’s a reason there are 10000s of boosters spamming every chat possible including the premade group finder for a reason.
ALOT of people are boosting their way through their RIO scores
Also RIO doesn’t record runs nearing the end of the week properly as it bases itself off top 100 runs, this means if you run 5 +15s at the end of a week it won’t total your score properly.
It lacks proper integration with your character,
As right now it’s pretty hard to distinguish boosted players from experienced m+ runners
To the OP:
Find a guild to do m+ with, pugs are a selfish area of the game where no one really cares who you are they’re inviting you to do their key. All they care about is what maximises their own reward
RIO has pros and cons, it’s creation is due to the fact blizzard offer the community 0 methods of looking at other players experience in the content.
Blizzard need to look at a way to allow this, as in alot of areas RIO is still a guessing game
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Oh, someone is definitely gonna get banned now for harassment. Some guy from the forum logging into game and messaging me to flame me, then logs to another character to circumvent the ignore system. Clear report to the GMs that is.
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Lets get something right off the bat,rio is an addon for the Pug scene.If you where in a guild/community had 4 more friends to play with you would not care for it.
But the thing is you said you dont have the time so you Pug,realistically speaking Rio is the best thing in the pug world.The game is nowdays filled with people who Lone wolf the game,veteran players who come back and forth to the game.
It is faster/better to be part of a heroic guild that does normal/alt runs sometime,the irony is that those guilds also “pug” players so they need an indicator on how expereinced a player is.Those semi guild pugs from my experience are the best(they will finish the raid,run) runs.
I consistently invite lower- ilvl alts of high rio players. It just works, everyone knows what to do and when, and the theoretical dps loss is eventually equalized
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My opinion on Raider io is different; I don’t personally use it, or care for it when I initiate pugs. I admit it can be frustrating, especially when you’re busy out of your mind with a long job to get denied just because you don’t run many keys at that level. But I don’t think the problem lies in Raider io. I’m relating this problem from the PoV of my friend explaining the add-on and how they use it.
The add-on, website, or whatever it might be is just a tracker of what you name it, is just a score that lets someone know how many keys you’ve completed and at what level. It’s not a problem in itself. It is, however, a measurer of how well your group was doing during that key (keep in mind that this is a 5 team game and it is impossible to rate 1 person’s performance individually by making a score that is equal to the success of the group as a whole). It just makes it more likely, as a statistic, that that person is better.
I feel the problem is with requirements: let’s say that you want to get into a M+15 in a dungeon, and you’ve done (successfully) a M+14 of said dungeon once, or several times. However, the leader might not invite you. Why? Because you’ve not done it on +15. It’s just like AOTC. “I need to do heroic raiding to get AOTC. But I won’t get invited to heroic raids because the requirement is AOTC.”.
The sad truth is that nobody really knows you personally unless they’re a friend and they don’t quite care that much about other people’s voice of reason. They care more to see the [Achivement] or the [score], because that gives them a higher % probability to get what they want (even if you got boosted and are clueless, it’s still a higher probability).
The solution to this I feel is just not pugging, but instead doing what you would otherwise do with raids as well: find a group of five or six (to account for 1 being offline) that would run keys at least one night a week: that’s what I’m doing. That way nobody can really judge you by some 3rd party score, and you have a more tight-knit group of friendos you can grow with and improve as a whole when playing. It’s the same as finding a raiding guild. 
No one wants to lose their progress and their time because a stranger decided to just screw them over; that’s why raider io is in place. If there wasn’t a raider io, then you would only find out about a pug-person’s skill by armory checking, tediously so. So either the system improves, or you just find some friends to play; it’s way more fun than being alone.
I hate when people use this excuse. As someone who also has these things why do you expect the dame treatment as the people who put in 4 times your hours. I progress slower than others, I dont aim for the insta clear farm groups, and I have several alts. I have successfully done up to +12 and 5 heroic bosses and will be pushing more when get time again.
Rio is for people to weed out players who have no idea what they are doing in dungeons. Snd from the people ive seen, this is 100٪ justified. I played a 10 waycrest manor yesterdsy that nobody knew where to go or how the final boss worked. If people want to not deal with these people thats fine by me.
Edit: Also, i didnt read the post. Am going back to read it now
Edit2: why did you even mention irl and job. You have several high geared characters. You have the time to run older dungeons quickly for score, or to create your own groups. Yes it sucks to not be invited due to score but whispering them your main usually does a good job of fixing that
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Urthol, I mentioned irl and job because since I do not have a main character, building a high Rio score for everyone of them would take me some time. Even building a high score for only one of them I would supposedly claim to be my main character. Years ago I decided I would play them all once in a while, as it sounds funnier to me than playing one most of the time. I am not suggesting that people who have a high Rio score have no life, only speaking about my problem while I went for playing every character I have once in a while.
Alumage, thanks for your comment. My point is, I’m confident in Blizzard to make a better system than Raider IO, as they are in charge of the Armory and have an interest in solving people’s issues.
Obviously I do not try to go in +15 with my 465 ilvl alts, only with the two top ones which are 471 and 473. Done a few in the past and it went okay, as a damage dealer I did not have to blush. Of course I don’t know every mechanics or every dungeon around, I only apply to groups doing a dungeon I think I know really well.
I still think the training grounds option is a better one as it is about player himself instead of rating a whole team. Sure it has nothing to do with dungeon mechanics but it is about your gameplay, awareness of what is going on during the fight and so on. Of course they would require a massive update and that is my point. Say you have a +15 key and someone comes over with a bad Rio score but a huge “training grounds” one, I think it would make a difference, telling that player may be quite good.
As for statistics Blizz could make use of, such as deaths and everything, nothing is perfect of course but it would still add some information. I would not pick someone who died 25 times in a dungeon he nonetheless performed in time, or who never interrupted anything, or did really weak damage as a DD, making me suspect he was carried over, purposedly or not. To me, these would be more relevant information than knowing he made a few ones in time without knowing any details. Blizz could come up with something based on armory or at least make it easily accessible from the game, instead of having to open a page and type the player’s character name in it, which requires some effort to many (much than looking at an unacurrate Rio score at least). This addon popularity is related to something Blizz missed out creating and updating the game, something people need to know while Blizz does not provides that info easily, as an in-game implementation. I don’t think the armory’s purpose was to be looked-at during the game, switching from wow to your web browser constantly.
And what makes you so sure that something will change? Sure Blizz can take over rio and put their “Blizzard TM” name on it. But like any filtering system there will be people who got filtered out and left “on the street”. And do you think they will self-evaluate them selfs and improve on their weakness to get better?
Haha…no. They will whine.
Evil Rio is preventing me from getting into m+.
Ok Blizzard creates their own official “rio”.
Big bad ActiBlizz is preventing me from getting into m+ !
Ok. Lets create a new addon and call it “Lynlia’s awesomeness meter” 
Dumb Lynlia’a addon is preventing me from getting into m+ CRYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!
It’s a never ending cycle. What ever system we have in place. Party leaders for m+ will use it to vet and filter out people whom he thinks are not good enough.
And some of those people who got left out, will whine their lungs out on every forum and blame what ever system or addon the party leader used…
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