Raiders and pug leaders may wish to use Elitist Group instead of Gearscore for evaluating players. This was brought to my attention several weeks ago on Twitter and has been mentioned recently on MMO Champion as well.
When coming up with a score for players, Elitist Group summarizes important information about a player allowing leaders to make snap judgments. It includes details such as their:
- Gear
- Augments (Enchants, gems, etc.)
- Spec
- Completed instances and achievements within them
It even keeps a record of players that you have run with in the past.
Notes can be made about players. You can assign them a rating out of 5 when you finish an instance and include a comment about how they have performed.
Keep in mind when using this that it isn’t entirely indicative of player skill. It only displays what achievements they have earned, bosses they have killed (along with the amount of kills) and the gear they are wearing. For a healer like me who doesn’t know every stat that’s important for other classes, a simple mouseover will show what role an item or augment is best suited for. If I see a Ret Paladin wearing a hybrid set of DPS and healing gear, then he’s probably going to be passed over.
Even though the items themselves are scored, ilevel 200 blues are scored differently compared to ilevel 200 epics. There is a gear score at the bottom, but it represents the level of content that the player is ready for.
While it’s still not the best or most ideal way to score a player, it certainly offers more tools and information for you to make the decisions.
Found a cool addon? Want to share a UI tip? In the mood to contribute a guest post? Have some ideas for future posts? Feel free to 
[...] I wrote about this on No Stock UI this morning, but I wanted to mention the usefulness of this tool to raid leaders and what type of information I’d glean by looking at this. [...]
Yeah, I read about that one last week, and even d/l’ed it.
There were several things I liked about it, like ‘As of v1.5, you can even sync your mains experience so other Elitist Group users can see that despite the fact that your alt hasn’t done a dungeon yet, your main has.’ (From the WoWInterface page) and the option to sync between players. The next option on the page is what made me down load it in the first place, ‘Communications can be completely disabled, or you can choose to not listen to communications from certain channels to restrict who is allowed to request data. No communications are sent while in combat, they will be queued to prevent any noticeable effect on game play.’
However, if it ever becomes anywhere near as ubiquitous as GearScore, I can just see no one checking the options and disabling sync, and thus sending me huge chunks of data that, frankly, I don’t need. In fact, if I see someone in our raids running GearScore while we are zoned in, I tell them how many megs they have sent me and could they please disable it.
Now, it’s probably a much better addon, with an eye for memory management, but as I am the one in the back hurling magic missiles at the bosses and prefer to follow, not lead, this isn’t really on my todo list, at the moment.
When I get my warrior to 80, we’ll see.
Just to correct you on something Tebla, but the majority of the communications are user initiated. It’s not like Gearscore was where it syncs users data automatically and without asking both parties.
The two parts that are automated are the note requests when joining a new dungeon (only happens once per zone in, can be disabled) and people sending a request for your main data (hard throttled at once/hour so people won’t spam you with requests).
Pretty much everything is sent over whisper channels so you’ll see very little data that you aren’t directly involved in either sending, or somebody wants it from you.
Just to clarify, I realize you said pug and raid leaders, but I am such a mod nut that, as soon a new one pops up on my RSS feeder, I check it out. And, I worry that it will become every players new epeen-ometer and clog channels with more data.
I would like to have more information on the amount of data being sent. Have you checked with FuBar_AddonSpamFu or similar? When I have GearScore loaded (my non-raid set) I am getting tons of data from other users of the mod.
@ Shadowed. Ah, well that answers my questions. Thanks. I’ll probably check it out now.
I should have noticed that you wrote it. I would have checked it out, then. SUF looks very nice, by the way and it is on my list of things to mess with one day.
What is with this trend of addon authors commenting on blog posts featuring their addons? ^^
Word of mouth is a powerful thing! It’s been relatively common for people to say that Elitist Group does something they dislike because Gearscore, even if it’s not true. So I’d rather not see bad information on how the addon works be spread :p
That and I’m a bored college student currently and Google makes this easy.
@Shadowed: Well by all means. Is the post accurate? Did I miss a feature somewhere? Anything incorrect? Any upcoming new snazzy features?
Nope! Spot on.
I appreciate the author chiming in and alleviating my concerns. And, not one but two posts about this mod. Powerful recommendation.
@Tebla: Hmm, I wonder if I can make money off of addon recommendations for authors ^^.
I don’t know how much money you could make, but they, at least, would probably be cool enough to give you credit for the work you put in.
I’ve been using this addon since it was originally posted about on MMO-Champ’s Interface/Macros forum. While it’s nice to check out the gear of the people in randoms, most of my use for it comes from another angle.
I’m the “raid leader” (grandiose name – I feel more like an instructor) for a fairly new levelling+casual guild. 90% of the guildmembers have never raided before in any expansion. Many of them are just now getting their very first characters to level 80. I use EG to help me with talking to these new 80s about how to properly gear up, gem up, and choose enchants. For this alone, I could kiss Shadowed…. er, well, okay, maybe not kiss. Bro-hug-double-back-tap, definately. Respect knuckles, most assuredly. Kiss, probably not.
[...] details, screenshots and reviews: MMO Champion Nostock UI World of [...]
Taryble’s post actually gave me hope. Thanks!
All the epeen add ons just annoy the crap out of me. I’d rather run any heroic with an under equipped, inexperienced player with a good attitude than all the idiots out there measuring themselves by the color of their pixels, a misplaced sense of accomplishment, and acting superior.
It saddened me to read Matticus’s comment on the stat confused Pally. Not everyone has the same levels of understanding or time options to get balanced gear sets … that’s usually why they are badge collecting to begin with. Rather than pass them by for a simple heroic why not help them out?
“Keep in mind when using this that it isn’t entirely indicative of player skill.”
Why do I have a feeling people wont be keeping this in mind when using this add-on.
There is simply no way to judge skill, knowledge; yes, time played; yes, but skill or ability? Never… Unless everyone starts frapsing and uploading there videos to youtube and some sort of in-game youtube player is implemented.
Heh, even the last alone would be awesome.
I digress, I do like the add-on somewhat, reminds me of a cut-down in-game version of wow-heroes, just don’t have a need for it personally.
Oh also, does the idea of people sharing notes about a player scare anyone else? Friends rating friends or someone rating someone else as bad because they just got undercut on the Auction House are two worrying examples that come to mind instantly, especially if this becomes the norm for judging players for pugs.
I’ve been using the addon for about two weeks now and overall, it hasn’t been super useful to me. Honesty, I could care less (as a raid leader) who has particular achievements or what they’ve actually cleared. What I do look for is whether the person has put in the time to get the equipment to withstand the gear checks for high end instances. We always talk everyone through the encounters anyway so it’s a non-issue the majority of the time.
Pwnyxpress´s last blog ..How To Work With Two Guilds
What I like best about Elitist Group, as a healer, is that, at the beginning of an instance I can see who is going to be taking the most damage and keep and keep an eye on them specifically. Most of the time my guild runs random Hs and we pug a couple people. I know my guildies really well so I then just worry about the pugs. GS never really meant anything to me since I’d seen people with 5K+ scores who took tons of damage or just couldn’t play. EG helps me because I don’t know the gear for all the other classes and now I have a better understanding of what the players are wearing.
I appreciate Elitist Group far more than any of the gear score addons.
I’d also like to say that I have never voted to kick anyone from a group unless they dc’d. Even the pally tank in Gundrak that said at every pull before every boss “I usually die here.” We made it to Drakkari. Tank and heals lived, barely. I just couldn’t keep dps alive. I didn’t vote then, but I probably should have.
Hope “I usually die here” is doing better now. He got some good gear from those 2 bosses.
Thank you.
“If I see a Ret Paladin wearing a hybrid set of DPS and healing gear, then he’s probably going to be passed over.”
I think EG is definitely and improvement over GearScore, but I think you should also give players a chance to defend their gear choices, specs, augments, etc. before automatically passing them up. For example, my holy priest is using an off-hand that has hit rating. I hate that it has hit rating, but it was a huge upgrade from my old off-hand in terms of intellect and spellpower, so I’m rolling with it until I find something better.
I think as long as people remember these are tools to help accelerate the decision process, we’ll be just fine. I’m getting pretty fed up with all the hype around GS these days though.
Just yesterday I was going to pug VoA. Someone was advertising an open healing slot, so I messaged him w/my class and spec. He said the position was filled, but then went on to say it was filled by a healer with a 6k gear score. I replied, “that’s fine, but I don’t really care about his GS”. Seriously, what was the relevance?