Guest Post: Vetting puggers -- beyond GearScore and achievements
by Jim Dalton 
Jul 17th 2010 at 8:00PM
How can you tell a good raider from a bad raider?
- GearScore? NO. Often times, people will rely on a numerical gear score, but this is not a good way to judge player quality. Very good players will have low gear scores when starting out, and very bad players who have been persistent or been carried can have very high scores. GearScore is not an indicator of goodness or badness; it's purely an indication of how much time and luck the person has had on that character.
- Achievements? NO. Some group leaders request, "Link achievement, please," but this is not a good method, either. All this indicates is that the person was in the raid when the boss died. You don't know if they were No. 1 DPS or died three seconds into the fight, the same as they do during every fight they've ever been in.
Qualities of a good player
Dedication This is illustrated well by a player's gems and enchants. Does he have all his gear enchanted with the top-end enchants? Is his epic gear gemmed with epic gems? (You can put rare gems in blue gear, but not in 251+ gear.) Also informative is whether the person has a secondary spec.
Experience One of the very cool new features of armory is that you can see how many times someone has killed a boss. If he's killed a boss 10+ times, then he probably understands the fight basics very well. Also, you can see which bosses he's killed. If someone has killed the Lich King 10+ times, it shows a reasonable experience with unforgiving fight mechanics. This even counts if the player has made these kills on a main character but are wanting to bring an alt. Generally, some of the most experienced players are those with several max-level characters.
Class knowledge General, open-ended questions to ask someone are, "What's your spell rotation?" or "Why did you choose those talents?" The answers provide a good basis on which to judge a player's knowledge, even if you don't know the class yourself. The worst answers are, "I dunno, just whatever" and "I copied these from someone else." People who understand their class generally have reasons for spells they choose and what talents they pick. Even if they haven't gone to Elitist Jerks and researched every rotation and talent point, they should at least have a rationale for the choices they've made.
Ability Judging ability outside a raid fight is generally impossible. This is because ability is so much more than just pressing buttons in the right order. It's situational awareness, moving correctly, watching threat and boss positioning and much, much more. However, it's reasonable to get an approximation of someone's ability by asking, "What's your expected average DPS (TPS/HPS) on such-and-such boss?"
Attitude When you get a whisper from someone wanting to join a PUG, attitude and general demeanor can tell you a lot. If someone starts complaining before you've indicated that they can join your raid, it's not reasonable to expect that joining the raid will suddenly make him happy and less disruptive. Another risk is that someone may quit the raid early, which can cause a chain reaction of quits. You should ask a potential pugger general questions such as, "How much time do you have to raid?" and "Are you committed to staying in the raid 'til we down the last boss?" Sometimes open-ended questions like "What fight do you like most in ICC?" will provide some insight. I had a guy actually tell me one time, "Saurfang I guess. I've never done any past him. I'm just here for Deathbringer's Will, so I always leave after he's down."
Pre-planning for the win
I currently use PUG Plug to build pre-planned PUG raids. PUG Plug has very cool, built-in vetting tools that build off the concepts of dedication and experience that we discussed above. When someone signs up for a raid, you'll see his WoW Heroes score as well as a clickable link to his WoW-Heroes page. From the WoW-Heroes page, you can see gem and enchants selections. On the PUG Plug site, you will also get an aggregate experience number with a pop-up showing the player's boss kills across all his registered alts.
This site has made vetting pugs hugely easier. It allows you to rate raid members after the raid, so you can mark up the people who did well that you'd like to reinvite again and mark down those who demonstrated poor performance or bad attitudes. This helps a good bit for building future raids.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
tk4426 Jul 17th 2010 8:13PM
Looks like I need to transfer to Emerald Dream. A puggers paradise!
Bluelightning Jul 17th 2010 10:02PM
I play on emerald dream and I absolutely love pugplug. The best thing about using that to build the raids is it seems only good raiders get told about this website. I can only recall having a really bad group one time fromthis site, but that was mostly bc so many raids are getting formed in there now we had to fill the raid with those trade chat noobs that love standing in fire and such
Urza Jul 18th 2010 12:01AM
Lol.. this article is out of the Emerald Dream!
Hëx Jul 18th 2010 10:51AM
Our guild has been working on open raid groups on Anetheron US Horde, right now we do ICC25s Saturday nights but we will be expanding, as we have built it around an open system. Visit http://www.hex.ms for complete info!
Another option is Leftovers Community Raiding on Silver Hand US, they have been doing open raids for five years. http://leftoversraiding.org This has been my inspiration for starting Obscure Raid Group.
Aykwa Jul 18th 2010 3:11PM
You can get all the fancy tools and sites you want. But in the end they are just as useful/useless as downloading GS and seeing their score and experience tabs. No tool other than your own brain raiding with a player is going to tell you how good a raider someone is, period. Sure, you can try to get a few indicators here or there, but in the end, until you're actually raiding, you'll never know if you've not played with them before.
The main reason that better gear is helpful, imo, is that better gear can help offset lack of raiding skill to some small degree. More stats will help the person survive longer, do more damage or healing, etc. And higher experience is certainly nice so that you can feel like they know the fight a little.
In the end, a person can know everything about every class and every fight, have the best rotation and know why they have it, have a good attitude, be all gemmed and chanted out, have good dps/hps, and still be a crappy raider; but there is no tool that can measure the intangibles that make a good raider ("situational awareness, moving correctly, watching threat and boss positioning and much, much more"), they have to be observed in a raid.
Finding good PUG players is about taking the time and dedication to play with a lot of people and keeping your own pool (be it a database or a friend list or a mental list) of PUG players close at hand.
Just my $0.02.
bigdanrog Jul 17th 2010 8:15PM
Yes yes.....and yes.
Dan Jul 19th 2010 2:03PM
I concur also. Mostly with the "dedication" and "experience" parts. So much so it's the predominant factor in the be.imba-esqu site I wrote. (shameless plug at the end)
It's good to see (at least on my realm) GS is being looked down upon, and the good /2 pugs are dropping the gear score and achievement links and moving to an inspection at Dalaran fountain.
Of course it is a burden on the raid leaders but until there is a mechanism of commeting / rating a player in a public forum, it will still be possible for idiots with experience and decent enchants to join and basically mooch off of the others.
I guess this is what guilds are for :)
Oh and plug ahoy : http://www.recombobulator.com
Kingpsy Jul 17th 2010 8:17PM
I hope this will help some ppl understand that gs isn't everything I see alot of ppl bragging about there gs but when I see em in random heroics there at the bottom of the barrel on recount or have horrible manors to those who don't have there same *leet* status
Hades Jul 17th 2010 9:43PM
"Yes! But [GearScore] is not a measure of skill, ignorance, drunkeness, mother interference, screaming gf and all those lovely other events and states that render the average dungeoneer into a worthless pile of raid wiping sludge.
But then who really has time for a 2 hour interview just to figure out if someone is mentally capable enough to actually go to the instance in the first place?"
- Noobding
from the blog post "GearScore & You"
Hating GearScore because people use it in a way you don't like is as ridiculous as hating calculators because some people are bad at math.
Demi Jul 17th 2010 11:23PM
@Hades
True, but I've never heard of people not being let into a maths class because they couldn't use a calculator.
On top of that, calculators answers aren't really up for opinion. 2+2 will make 4 on anyones caculator. Whether someone with under 4.5k gs can beat 10m Anub'Rekhan is debateable to some people.
theRaptor Jul 18th 2010 3:21AM
People "hate" gear score because 90% of the time it is used to either exclude people from PuG's or as a epeen measurement. And that IS the tools fault because it distils down a players gear into a simple numerical score (an in most of its incarnations misses stuff like gems, enchants, PVP gear in PVE, etc) that makes the number dubious at best and useless outside of hardcore raiding where everyone can be expected to gear properly and be roughly equally skilled. In a PUG GS tells you nothing about performance, in most raiding guilds you should know who plays above/below their GS.
The only real value in GS is GS/Efficiency view in Recount which lets me laugh at idiots with high GS.
I use GS some times when I am lazy, but it tells me less than an inspection does.
Blizzard needs to put raid parses into armory, then we can exclude people based on documented performance.
theRaptor Jul 18th 2010 3:34AM
@Demi
My guilds random 10 man team beat Anub with sub-4k GS. My Shaman which I used at the time has a 4.7k gs and 4/5 TotGC-10 (quit before we got to anub) and regularly got in the top 5 for TotC-25.
I die a little inside every time I see a 5.5k gs minimum PuG for ToC when the normal mode was easier than Ulduar sans keepers.
Demi Jul 18th 2010 6:13AM
@raptor
Back in my day, people used to beat anub(rekhan) with a raid wearing blues. BLUES! Back when Naxx was a raid and not a joke. You kids these days have no idea how good you have it.
/end old man rant
I know people are always looking for an indicator, but there's no 1 way of determining if someone's a good player. The fact that the writer listed multiple ways to vet people is a positive. In the end though, the best way to find out if someone's a tard is to run with them. GS be damned.
meringue Jul 18th 2010 8:28AM
I love gearscore! It lets me know when I can safely ignore the people whispering me to see if they can get in my guild.
me: do you have experience in T10?
dude: I GOT 5.8K GS LOL
maxthehazy Jul 18th 2010 10:18AM
I use gearscore to weed out bad players in my PuGs. On the rare occasion that I put a PuG together I ask for "your stats and strat for xx boss that we will do". People who whisper me with something like their attack power or if they are hit capped and anything resembling a boss strat get invites, the ones who /w me with their GS and an achievement get ignored.
....need I say "it's super effective"?
Hades Jul 18th 2010 11:54AM
@ Demi
WTF are you talking about? That happens all the time. Knowledge of how to perform certain calculator functions is a pre-req for most college math classes.
These responses are a big pile of wet garbage...
...just a bunch of foolish folks stating "GS is bad", and then proceed to talk about how A PERSON did something they didn't like, as if these people are incapable of being a jerk in the absence of this addon.
"OMG Gearscore is MAKING people, who would otherwise be pleasant and rational, turn into inconsiderate monsters! AAAAAH!"
Oh and btw, who are you to tell someone how to run their raid? Pretty arrogant imo. Do you know how incredibly easy it would be to get a pug together without any gearscore requirements? Truth is that you DO want GS requirements... for the other 24 people... just not for YOU.
The gear =/= skill argument is soooo tired out, mainly because it's regurgitated with this ridiculous undertone that every player with poor gear is some skilled diamond-in-the-rough.
ANSWER THIS:
If players have an equal chance at sucking regardless of their gearscore, then WHY WOULDN'T I take the 25 best-geared people I can get? To "help someone out"? That's what guilds are for dooood. Stop pugging everything and play the game how it was intended, and you won't have to worry about this crap. Your guild mates don't give a crap what your GS is b/c they already know that you can play. Expecting a PuG raid leader to know that much about you is insane. Oh, and if you don't like any of the guilds that exist, because "they are all meanies"... then start your own.
Gizmo Jul 18th 2010 2:09PM
@Hades
Your argument sounds like "I love GS because I'm geared from PUGs (5-, 10- and 25-man) and so I shouldn't have to worry about strat, or skill, or anything. I have the gear to prove it!" While I agree that, all players being equal, higher GS will be better, all players are not equal. When I see someone "LF20M ICC25, need [some ridiculous number]GS" I read it as "LF20 REALLY GEARED PEOPLE to carry me to Kingslayer"
And as for "Playing the game the way it was originally intended": Gearscore was not introduced until this expansion. Inspect wasn't even available (AFAIK) until after the first retail build. Addons in general weren't there at first, IIRC. So don't go on like you're better than us PUGgers because you have a raiding guild based on "It's how it was meant to be done" when you admit to using GS, and are in content that wasn't "intended" in the first place (Heroic mode anything).
robert Jul 18th 2010 4:06PM
@Hades.
GS is good. It may be used improperly by idiots but by people who use it as a first look style thing and then go through with looking up armory or whatever are far more correct in it's use. GS IS USEFUL all of this hate for it comes from idiots wanting 5.5k GS for ToC 10... People asking for 5.5k GS for Icc 10 going for hardmodes makes WAY more sense right? GS is useful if you are looking for people who have the level of gear needed for a high level raid. When you use it to find geared people for something super easy it just means "CARRY ME PLZ!!!!"
Finisher, GS is useful and is not a pile of poo, the people who use it stupidly make it a pile of poo.
Tai Jul 18th 2010 4:39PM
@Hades
Wrath was obviously spoiled you rotten. I can promise you, there are VERY few people that started playing during wrath that would have lasted long in classic or BC. I wanta take this time to break your posts apart.
"But then who really has time for a 2 hour interview just to figure out if someone is mentally capable enough to actually go to the instance in the first place?""
No pug in their right mind would make it a 2 hour interview. A simple armory check is all that is needed nowadays. Guess what though, back pre-BC we had to MANUALLY INSPECT 39 other people. Yeah, try that.
"Oh and btw, who are you to tell someone how to run their raid"
Someone that doesn't bring in the 5.8K GS mage that only does 5K dmg WITH the 25% buff, that's who.
" Do you know how incredibly easy it would be to get a pug together without any gearscore requirements"
I personally do yes, because you can be geared for ToC10 and still do dps to pass fester/rot in ICC10 with the buff. I've seen it happen.
"Truth is that you DO want GS requirements... for the other 24 people... just not for YOU."
See comment about checking armory vs gearscore.
"ridiculous undertone that every player with poor gear is some skilled diamond-in-the-rough."
And the way you talk, you are supporting Score vs Skill. Nice job shooting yourself in the foot.
And the answer to your question, because nine times out of ten especially on some servers, the best geared people are the suckest. This is a VERY common thing on RP servers especially. Once again, check armory. Does the best geared person have any kills for your progression pug bosses? chances are no unless they missed their guild run that week. Still, remember a simple armory check fixes ALL the issues. Are you gonna take the high GS guy that's never done LK, or the lower guy that has two kills on him? If you pick the high GS guy, then please leave the game.
Demi Jul 18th 2010 4:46PM
@Hades
You obviously missed the point of my response to you.
Gearscore is a number which has no set equivilancy in the pve or pvp world. It's a number based off the gear you have. However, people like to assign an equivilant based off their own standards, and how good they believe they are.
As such, you see ridiculous gs requirements for the simplest of tasks, all because people give gs their own value and equivilancy. There will be no meaningful conversion between gs and what can be done by a toon, because each person is different. I'm not saying that there are no times it will have some use, but with values assigned by each user behind a monitor the fluctuation is too great for it to be valued, as it is, for an accurate tool. I learnt how to get out of a fire in greens. :)
And to answer you, I do most raids in guild. If I'm looking for pugs, I do an inspection. Holy shit, that ret pallies wearing a leather wrist with +sp, not taking him(I'd probably ask why first as I'd rather find out why than just call someone a noob). I don't even respond when someone adds they have a gs requirement when making a pug. I play the game to have fun and not have a numerical value put on my head, or anyone elses.