A ratings system has a kind of genius to it, actually ... players in this game take pride in achieving just about every other metric (gear score, achievement points, all that), so why not take pride in being a "provably" good pugger?

Of course, steps would need to be taken to make "gaming" the system non-trivial. Otherwise you'd just have ninjas grouping up with their friends and voting each other up.

Player-driven rating systems would be _fraught_ with problems. Trolls downranking everyone, every single time. People with grudges organizing others to downrank one person to oblivion. Conspiring with friends or possibly even purchasing support to raise your own rating.

That's the last place Blizz would want to go. Just look at the BG Report AFK feature. People use it all the time to troll or harass, or just use it wrong because they're stupid.

Maybe there could be some official stats kept on you, like successes vs. attempts, and average time per instance, stuff like that.

I think the rating system could work but to prevent trolls and ninjas ranking eachother up, it would be smart to limit it to cross-server players being able to rate you. I.e. Your guildie couldn't rate you up or down and the troll from your server that you hate couldn't rate you either. There would still be some fault to the system but it would eliminate most grudges and such.

Keeping stats on people would be a good idea too but I don't think avg time/run etc. would be accurate measures. Blizzard integrated an Omen-like feature into WoW, why not integrate a Recount-like feature? It could keep stats like average tps, dps, and hps for certain players (and possibly just tracked for bosses). Of course this would have to have a limit also like only keeping track of the last 15 runs or so to try and throw out leveling/gear change effects.

Actually I think you could kind of get around that by making those ratings only apply to you personally. No one elses ratings for that person would matter - yes it would be painful the first time because you dont get that heads up from other players but you then know you can at least trust the rating.

I like the official system- blizz can probably hack together a formula that takes gear, successful runs etc... into account. There would be ways to circumvent that however- but such issues would be minor. Combine the ratings from wow-heroes or something like that with an achievement checker or pug-checker to see how well the individual players will function. The most important part by far in figuring out how good they are would be their death ratio as compared to other players in their groups, that way noobs who are skilled are less likely to have bad scores due to having crap for gear...

There was an add-on called Karma that did something like this, let you keep your own personal notes and ratings on players.

I wouldn't mind getting something similar so that I could have my own personal "black book" to keep track of pugs and friends.

City of Heroes/Villains has a personal rating system. You can assign a character 1 to 5 stars, then add a comment to them. The rating will show up on all their alts on the same account, and since it's only on your computer they don't even have to know that you've rated them one star for their blatant Batman ripoff.

Not a perfect solution, obviously, but Blizz has got your back (taken from the patch notes, User Interface section):

A Player will not be placed in a group with people on his or her Ignore list.

Ignore List: The amount of characters a person can ignore has been increased to 50. In addition, players on other realms can be placed on the Ignore list.

@curtisrutland

A very simple solution is to only make the ratings option available to people who have been randomly selected by the LFG to group with you. Problem solved. Just like how on eBay you can only give a person feedback if you've transacted with them.

Either have it be an option when you right-click a portrait, or have it pop up when you leave the group or something.

This prevents friends from ranking you up, and also prevents trolls from ranking you down.

It doesn't, however, prevent people from leaving bitter feedback if they're in a sour mood, or if you won the loot they wanted, or if they just plain feel like being an ass. But it does prevent the two main problems, and simply making it so anyone can see the feedback a person has left others (again, like eBay) would help immensely.

I don't really see a feedback system working, but if they were going to implement it, that would be the way to go about it, I think.

I don't know if this change is the answer, but at present when I have to PUG it makes me wonder why I play this game at all.

The typical PUGer just wants the damn run over as soon as possible. Usually everyone in the group is completely silent apart from the odd "faster plz" and "more dps". As the general level of kit has escalated, heroics are generally easymode. Hence every and any death is met with "ffs", " and wtf?!!??" comments, flinging blame around to all corners. Often this seems to come from people gearing alts who have forgotten that this is supposed to be a challenge (and fun because of it) as they are so used to facerolling with their main who probably vastly out gears all heroics. Free epics plox, now, and heaven help us if the team that doesn't out gear the instance by a mile - where people might have to, you know, think, or not stand in the fire, or help the tank out by hitting the skull.

Personally, I miss the old BC days when heroic instances were pretty hard and it was unusual (noteworthy) to go through a run without any deaths at all. Everyone _had_ to work together - you couldnt just dps flat out as the tank was spreading their threat around 5-6 mobs and you would likely pull then get one/two shoted. You had to focus fire, follow the tank, cc, help the healer by moving... Now its just a remorseless pursuit of badges in the least possible amount of time with some added shouting.

My personal solution has been to give up PUGing unless its absolutely necessary. I have 5 RL friends in my guild and will run stuff when they're on - we often 3 man heroics without a problem, although it takes a while. And you know what, its actually FUN because its hard.

Having just re-read what I've written, I actually doubt i'll ever use this new system - PUGing is just too unpleasant and the increased anonymity will just encourage even more vile conduct. Until there is some mechanism for dealing with this in game, i'll ignore the MMO side of the game as much as possible and stick with my guildies.