http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20100222

I certainly agree with the above, as outlined in the post itself, and I wanted to point that out before I respond to the following statement:

“All GS does is indicate the ilvl of gear a player possesses. It does not factor in anything else, and as such, should not ever be used, for anything, period.”

This I somewhat disagree with. GS can provide some useful information, BUT it can only provide that useful information if operating under general assumptions that DO NOT correlate to any indication of player ability or other factors. Basically, knowing what Persons A, B, C, and D (all of whom have comparable gear scores) are capable of in damage, or healing, or mitigation means that Person E with a comparable gear score COULD be capable of the same level of play assuming all other factors are the same.

Where people make mistakes is assuming that this correlates to anything that resembles player skill or ability. The only thing this does is give a person an idea of where a player could perform given all other factors remain comparable.

In the end, I completely agree that using GS is unproductive, and is definitely something that should never be used as a requirement or restriction. However, for having a theoretical performance max/min at a glance (and remembering that all of those other assumptions have to be factored in), GS can be useful to an individual person to compare where they are to another, “comparable,” player in performance.

Spec
Rotation
Gems
Enchants
Correct gear for your spec/environment
Glyphs
latency

All GS does is indicate the ilvl of gear a player possesses. It does not factor in anything else, and as such, should not ever be used, for anything, period.

People don’t seem to get it that you have to actually play with someone to get an idea of how well they will perform.

Currently healers with low GS can heal content far above what they should be, simply because healing is OP in wow. I did a ToC 10 last week and not a single dps besides myself and a hunter was above 2k dps. We full cleared ToC in just about an hour and a half, no wipes.

Simply put, the people who use GS to determine if you can join a raid or not, are the kind of people who are too impatient to pug raids anyway. They are the kind of people who want to walk into the content, one shot everything, and walk out with shiny epics. They don’t want to spend times teaching other people the fights, they don’t want to spend time enjoying the game.

More often than not, these are the people who put together fail groups anyway. One wipe and they call it.

The general player-base doesn’t make the distinction between the addon itself and the way to use it (otherwise my first post on the subject would have been sufficient to explain it to most people), so the point being made here is to shed light on the method in which it is being used by so many, which is incorrect.

I use gearscore personally. I like being able to, at a glance, know what type of gear a player is in. I’m intelligent enough not to make a leap of faith and assume that correlates to player skill, though, which is where the majority seem to be failing.

Does GS get abused? Sure. I’ve seen idiots looking for groups to do HEROICS with a GS requirement over 3000 (which is utterly ridiculous). But I’ve also seen people looking for TOC or even ICC groups with GS of 2800 or so, and that’s marginal for those instances at best.

Those who use GS correctly use it to weed out those who are obviously under-geared for the instance being run. They then take the rest on faith of ability. (Obviously if that ability results in the instance being unable to be completed, those people will be dropped.)

Anyway my point is: don’t hate the addon. Hate the idiots who abuse it. Then again, most of them probably end up with fail groups anyway, so they probably reap what they sow.