Your scenario 2 is off a bit. It should be:

Scenario 2. (leader who stipulates must be xxxx score to participate) Invites the people who meet the criteria. Finds an obvious liar, replaces them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Discovers one player who, while sporting a high GearScore, has equipped gear that isn’t itemized even remortely properly for their class. Returns to Dalaran to replace said person. Everyone goes back to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, has no idea what they are doing and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement.

Personally I would support an addon that gives me a rough ilvl of their gear (or a score) IF it happened to let me know of any glaring gearing mistakes. Bonus points if it let me know about their spec too. I can’t tell you how many people I come across that are gearing extremely improperly for their spec. I’m not talking armor penetration on unholy death knights, I’m talking spell power on rogues and armor penetration on shadow priests.

Oddly enough, they go away with the mindset to actually do just that.

The downside is that quite a few give me regular bulletins as to how they are doing and I’m too nice to tell them to go away. However, they never seem to be able to get to that gearscore bar I set for them.

While this does occur, it seems to be more of an exception. Fortunately for us all, players can still be removed from the party or raid if they fail to perform their role adequately.

This is my biggest argument for folks that always spout off about gear =/= skill. While correct, it has nothing to do with the reason gear score type things are developed. These addons are developed because it alleviates, or at least partially so, one of the aspects of finding suitable players when you are putting a group together, the aspect of determining if a player has the appropriate gear to perform well in the encounter.

Scenario 1 (leader with no use for gearscore). Invites players who say “invite”. Checks everyone on the armory or inspects them all. Kicks the people who don’t understand what their gear is appropriate for. Finds new players. Checks them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, is a complete butthead and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement. Has to check them.

Scenario 2. (leader who stipulates must be xxxx score to participate) Invites the people who meet the criteria. Finds an obvious liar, replaces them. Gets everyone to the encounter. Finds out one player who, although geared, is a complete butthead and needs to be replaced. Finds a replacement.

Which scenario is shorter?

It’s never been about replacing skill expectations with the score. It’s about replacing repeated trips to the armory. Forgive me if I like to play the devil’s advocate here, but I still have a hard time riding on the gear score bandwagon of hatred. I still think if we named it “Gear Coefficient” people would complain a whole lot less.

This is why I’m ticked about the whole “free epix for every1 lol” that’s happened since 3.2. It makes it stupid easy for everyone to flex their e-peen because of their gearscores and still know nothing about how to play their class. I’ve seen dps with scores of 4500+ that do 1k dps. Or, and this is my favorite, tanks who are geared in full emblem gear but aren’t at def cap because they don’t know what it is. /facepalm

http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info14078-AvgItemLevel.html

Bimbo: helping newbs enchant their offset gloves since ’09.

Thanks again!

Check out my addon Bimbo, it’s basically what I feel be.imba should be doing with enchants and gems. I’ve not put in a avg ilevel/raid tier because, well, I never lead groups so I don’t need it.

Why don’t we just do this:

When you hover over a person, all you get is that little bar (ala wow heroes) that has the instance / raid icons and the green / yellow / red colors to indicate where they should be. Then, we add in the warnings from be.imba.hu and BAM!

We could also have an “average ilvl” magic number somewhere in there, however we have to be very careful not to call it “gearscore”.