Mine's Bigger

Posted on April 1, 2010 by Scott Jennings| 40 Comments

Normally I stay off the Internet for Amateur Hour (aka April Fools’) but Blizzard’s entry this year is, as always, worthy of note.

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  • Aufero

    I just about choked to death laughing at that. Lawsuit time!

  • Vetarnias

    That hoax is all the more effective by being credible. Don’t tell me the EPEEN doesn’t already exist informally, or that Blizzard doesn’t pander to this sort of gear-craving mentality. That’s what the WoW Armory is for in the first place; all this would have done is calculate the figures and implement it.

    Just look at guild applications such as this one, and it’s suddenly not that much of a joke. Unless the joke, dear WoW players, happens to be on you.

  • http://virtualgunmen.com Noel Walling
  • http://virtualgunmen.com Noel Walling
  • http://virtualgunmen.com Noel Walling

    Possibly their best would be the Battle.net matchmaking service: http://us.battle.net/matchmaking.html

  • http://beafraid.com hellfire

    Except it’s not at all an April Fool’s Joke — http://www.wowwiki.com/Gear_score

  • Pacer Dawn

    Yep, I quit playing due to gear score bigotry. I used to love MMOs, but this really has soured my taste for them.

    Funny thing: back in the late 80s/early 90s I thought it would be great if games could be networked so you could play them with other players.

    Then I met those other players…

  • http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com Rohan

    That hoax is all the more effective by being credible.Don’t tell me the EPEEN doesn’t already exist informally, or that Blizzard doesn’t pander to this sort of gear-craving mentality.That’s what the WoW Armory is for in the first place; all this would have done is calculate the figures and implement it.Just look at guild applications such as this one, and it’s suddenly not that much of a joke.Unless the joke, dear WoW players, happens to be on you.  

    Blizz is specifically mocking the GearScore mod. It already exists, was created by the playerbase, and is being used as a cutoff for Pick-up Group eligibility on many servers.

    Blizzard has stated in the past that they don’t like GearScore, but aren’t really sure how to eliminate it.

  • Tremayne

    Blizzard has stated in the past that they don’t like GearScore, but aren’t really sure how to eliminate it

    Errm – by not making their frakking game so gear-progression dependent?

  • http://blog.weflyspitfires.com We Fly Spitfires

    Their two headed-Ogre gag is still my favourite :)

  • http://blessingofkings.blogspot.com Rohan

    Errm – by not making their frakking game so gear-progression dependent?  

    But it’s not. That’s the point that is hard to get across to people. In WoW endgame, skill outweighs gear to such a degree that it’s not funny.

    But skill is hard to measure, and gear is easy to measure, so people discount skill and focus on gear.

  • Vetarnias

    @Tremayne

    Precisely. And that’s what really annoys me about this April Fools’ joke. They make their game that way, then they feign indignation when someone makes a mod that is the natural conclusion of what they put in place. Then they mock it up, for teh lollers.

    But here’s the real question we should put to them: When are you going to do something about it?

    But what is one honest question against the din of millions of cash registers?

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    I find this to be a great innovation. Before long, lil’ Ms. “If you like it you should have rolled need on it” finds herself without any party invitations. Of course, the Deckard Cain GPS is even better, as he can identify all the lint in my car during my morning commute. Lord knows somebody needs to, I can’t see worth a damn with this Battle.net Neural Interface on.

  • Vajarra

    They also turned everyone into Tuskarr on the armory, including the 3D model :)

  • http://www.battlevortex.com Fear

    That was classic! I think the bar going up into the air instead of side-to-side was the ultimate efunny.

  • Vaxhacker

    Ah, the irony. Blizzard’s dungeon system uses gear score to put together a group, but they don’t like user-generated mods that do?

    In any case, a very funny April Fool’s joke, whether you think it’s making fun of players who equal item level with skill, or the game itself doing the very same.

    Also, I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks that a WoW-based “match.com” service wouldn’t make even more piles of money for Blizzard…

  • Freakazoid

    It’s always a troll with blizzard, isn’t it?

    Can you opt out of the armory yet, or do you still need use the tinfoil hat/switch gear before logging out?

  • Boanerges

    It’s just like Topeka (new name, same site).
    As for a real MMO matchmaking service… uhm… do you REALLY want to find out who’s on the other end of that screen? Seriously? Don’t say we didn’t warn you…
    And that’s why that no work.

  • Cedia

    Priceless! What makes it so sad/funny is that it’s so true!

  • http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

    Blizz is specifically mocking the GearScore mod.It already exists, was created by the playerbase, and is being used as a cutoff for Pick-up Group eligibility on many servers.Blizzard has stated in the past that they don’t like GearScore, but aren’t really sure how to eliminate it.  

    They will just ban it. They have banned other player generated content before. For example the mod that would basically play your character for you as long as you pressed a single button over and over again. I guess they were embarrassed that a simple Boolean script could play the game better than any human ever could.

    Then they did away with the player made auction tools and the player made boss encounter auto grouping tools and the pvp auto grouping tools and so on and so forth… Back in the day when we were playing WoW, we wrote user interfaces for the guild that made every boss encounter “easier” to say the least… But I digress.

    This isn’t about April Fools day, it’s about Blizzard and anxiety over how to ban yet another player user interface mod. As was stated earlier all these mods ever do is apply Blizzards own criteria to the came in an automated format, a simple script is yet again smarter than any human can be when it comes to a simple script of a game.

    Gearscore matters because Blizzard wants it that way.

  • http://stabbedup.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    The WoW raiding endgame is actually very interesting because it’s gameplay in transition. People have been stuck with the EQ model of end game raid guilds and really want something else instead. Using metrics to form a random group instead of being stuck with the tank who’s always half an hour late and the rogue who whines about loot every kill is very appealing to many players.

    Many raid leaders get into it mainly because it is frustrating to watch someone else do it badly rather than because they actually like the role for its own sake.

    Gearscore and “link achievement” are player-created systems that reflect a need. I don’t expect Blizzard to ban them. I expect them to come up with a clever solution to enable raiding for people who want to play with competent players but don’t want social ties to those players.

  • hitnrun

    They can’t really ban it because the information is made available *by them* via Armory. The internet can do the rest. Like so. It’s the entire concept, not the mod, that’s the problem.

    Rohan is correct. While it’s the fetishistic focus of the entire game, gear is fairly overrated in WoW (and even if it weren’t, GS just measures item level, not relevant stats). Of course, the game is so trivially easy now that one can hardly blame leader-types for just throwing out arbitrary numbers (sometimes humorously higher than the leader’s own GS) to simplify PUG selection.

  • Dren

    Gear score doesn’t matter for high end raid content? I’m not sure what game you guys are playing.

    Does player skill matter? Hell yes, but without a decent set of gear, skill won’t matter. Thus, raid leaders look for gear first, then decide on skill later once it is demonstrated.

    Heroics? Yeah, gear doesn’t matter much other than deciding on how fast an instance is finished, not if it is finished.

  • blachawk

    What I fund funniest is that this gag has largely flown right over the heads of those it is mocking. It just so happened that I /gquit my raiding guild last night, but not before catching the disappointment of a few members who logged on to discuss the new epeen meter only to find out it was a joke.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com/ wowpanda

    it immediately remind me of that fake starwars movie when the two guy duel with their long light sabers

  • http://geldonsgaming.blogspot.com geldonyetich

    “I see that your Schwartz is as big as mine.”

  • Iconic

    “They can’t really ban it because the information is made available *by them* via Armory. The internet can do the rest. Like so. It’s the entire concept, not the mod, that’s the problem.

    Rohan is correct. While it’s the fetishistic focus of the entire game, gear is fairly overrated in WoW (and even if it weren’t, GS just measures item level, not relevant stats). Of course, the game is so trivially easy now that one can hardly blame leader-types for just throwing out arbitrary numbers (sometimes humorously higher than the leader’s own GS) to simplify PUG selection. hitnrun
    ”

    The very design of WoW does make gear score more useful than it could ever be in other games. Because gear is just cranked out according to a set of formulas (item level X yields Y and Z stat), as long as some one is wearing “correct” gear, gearscore will actually give you a good idea of their potential for tanking, healing, DPS etc. Typically it is only in the trinket slot where low ilevel items are quite often superior to high level items– a consequence of the fact that trinkets are not designed to be a raw stat item.

    The devs have tried to make life easy on themselves by making the effects of gear predictable, and gear inflation steady. The success of gearscore as a criteria for grouping is just a natural consequence of that.

  • http://wowpanda.blogspot.com/ wowpanda

    “I see that your Schwartz is as big as mine.”  

    Thank you! I googled that and now I remembered the movie, it is Spaceballs! Apologies about my comment with “two guy duel with long light sabers”, that is just so blah.

  • http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

    Don’t be silly. Of course, they can ban Gearscore. Three are some very simple things that were banned bcause it made it far to easy to automate healing and damage dealing… Believe me, all they have to do to ban Gearscore is change a script or two.

  • Foamy

    I don’t think they can ban gearscore because it’s to do with information display – the barrier to automated healing and damage dealing is telling the game what to do with that information. There’s plenty of Feral addons that helpfully tell you what your next attack should be to maximize your dps, they just can’t turn it into a button so that becomes the player’s job.

    The easiest way to stop (or at least minimize) gearscore elitism is to add achievements that deal with increasing the maximum recorded ilevel for other people in your raid group. We know the game records that information (the “Superior” and “Epic” achievements), just let it pay attention to other peoples’ records – “Assist another player (10 other players/20 other players) to get their first (second/complete set) of iLevel 264 gear”. Almost overnight you’d have raids holding the last slot or two open for people who’re there for the rest of the raid to get their “Gear Up” achievements, especially if there’s various vanity items for milestones.

  • http://virtualgunmen.com Noel Walling

    Gearscore doesn’t automate anything. Further, Blizzard doesn’t ban UI mods. Occasionally they lock down API calls to protected code (within the client). A full list of the API calls has been documented on WoWwiki, of course. Now, what Blizzard does do is run Warden to check API calls run while a Blizzard client is active, to attempt to ensure that memory hacking isn’t going on. It’s not bulletproof, obviously, but it does function.

    Blizzard doesn’t care about gearscore any more than they care about people asking for achievement links before they invite them to PUG raids. As has been mentioned here, their game design actively encourages gear score to be taken into consideration before being thrown into certain situations. The Dungeon Finder doesn’t use ‘Gear score’, but it does look at an aggregate value for what your character is allowed to queue for. If you’re unsure about whether this is true or not, take a newbie 80, and try and queue them for a Heroic: Halls of Reflection. Or you can just read Blizzard’s posts on the matter.

    It’s ignorant to say that ‘gearscore doesn’t matter’, or that ‘skill is more important’. No matter how awesome a hunter you are or aren’t, if you’re in gear from Naxxramas, you’re not going to be pulling the DPS requirements for Icecrown Citadel. So while being able to avoid standing in shit that hurts you is a requirement, so too is having the gear for the content.

    Not of course, that this matters. If you believe gearscore is the devil, I’m sure you still will. But don’t blindly state that without understanding the fundamentals of the game mechanics.

  • Foamy

    “if you’re in gear from Naxxramas, you’re not going to be pulling the DPS requirements for Icecrown Citadel”

    The reason that people often say “skill is more important” is because dead DPS is 0 DPS. You can have a decent gearscore from grinding badges and crafting stuff, but if you Stand In The Fire ™ during the first minute or two of the fight you’re going to have worse damage output than a freshly dinged 80 even if your DPS is fine during the brief period where you’re alive.

    In fact, it’s BECAUSE of this phenomena that gearscore checking is so rampant. Every pug is going to have at least one moron who dies every single boss fight from avoidable damage, so the rest of the raid needs to be (over)geared to carry their dead weight. If you had an accurate iqscore checker available, you’d see the gear requirements drop considerably.

  • http://virtualgunmen.com Noel Walling

    Even if you’re not dead, and in Naxx gear, for several of the fights, you’re just not going to cut the requirements. It’s one of the reasons why they’ve bumped the power level and itemization coverage of the badge gear so much in 3.3.

    But yeah, obviously if you’re dead, you’re not going to be doing dps. It’s kind of important that you can meet that bar. ;)

  • JuJutsu

    “If you had an accurate iqscore checker available, you’d see the gear requirements drop considerably.”
    Screw gear requirements, that would fix much much more.

  • http://chrome.blogspot.com Chrome

    Gearscore doesn’t automate anything.

    Um, it automates going out on the web and looking at an armory page and looking at some numbers and then giving an answer in the form of a number. You even go on to state how important said automation is when using finder.

    Further, Blizzard doesn’t ban UI mods.

    Noob. I’d post links examples but then what fun would that be.

    At one time we had scripts for raids and encounters that only required a single button be pushed over and over again by every member of the raid/encounter and we’d win every single time. They banned that. I guess completing a task in WoW and then knowing what to do and scripting that was an issue.

    We created a script that would let WoW put a flashing red box up on your screen and you just needed to hold one button down and mouse over whichever box was flashing to complete a specific task. They banned that.

    Eventually they limited “if,then” “and” “yes, no” to the point that it became critical to keep UI scripts in house as the moment any were released, they’d be banned.

    It is still possible to automate groups for raids and encounters by placing the right guild members together for an optimal chance to win an encounter.

    Understand? It is still possible to automatically create a group and *automatically assign it a task*, based on gear scores and spells, and specialization alone.

    Individual “player skills” don’t mean much. The avatar is what matters and placing that avatar in the right company of other avatars is what matters most. The only skill really required is to be able to open a browser window and follow the outline of what abilities, etc. your avatar should have available and the “skill” to use those within a group that is automatically given a specific task.

    Blizzard doesn’t care about gearscore any more than they care about people asking for achievement links before they invite them to PUG raids.

    Blizzard had damn well better care. I’d explain myself to you but then you’d not be a babbling idiot anymore or you’d chose to be an even bigger babbling idiot.

    Either result does not please me.

  • Hatch

    “In WoW endgame, skill outweighs gear to such a degree that it’s not funny.”

    Take off all your gear and equip vendor purchased gray items. Check your before/after DPS and tell me the % you lost. That’s how much gear matters assuming you didn’t change your rotation.

    Now tell me how little gear is worth again, because it isn’t true. You do need good gear. In UO I could actually purchase store items and equip them and not lose a ton of DPS (if any). Gear didn’t matter in UO. Gear is almost everything in WOW.

  • Iconic

    “Um, it automates going out on the web and looking at an armory page and looking at some numbers and then giving an answer in the form of a number. You even go on to state how important said automation is when using finder.”

    Actually it doesn’t even look at the armory. It looks at the data that gets passed to your client already as soon as some one comes into sight range. You know when you inspect some one, you see their paper doll with all their gear, enchants, gems, spec, etc? That information is automatically passed to you. Gear score just looks at it, the same way any other gear mod does, and displays that information in a very specific way (basically it takes the ilevel of each item, assigns a weight based on the slot, and then adds all those values together).

    There isn’t really a good way to shut down mods like gear score without shutting down dozens of really useful mods that display information like a comparison to an item you are thinking of getting and the item you already have equipped, or mods that show you what rating to actual stat conversions are for things like crit or haste rating.

    Sure, they could break Gear score, but it would be impossible to break it without breaking a lot of other mods that display character information. Personally I’d rather deal with gear score, since in reality there’s nothing wrong with the mod, only the mentality of certain people who use it.

  • blachawk

    Take off all your gear and equip vendor purchased gray items. Check your before/after DPS and tell me the % you lost. That’s how much gear matters assuming you didn’t change your rotation.

    Why would you take the ‘gear is not that important’ argument to its most illogical extreme? If we were arguing that automatic transmissions can be faster than manuals when you take driver skill into account, then you’d talk about a stick shift camaro being faster than an automatic prius.

    I see people in ICC in lvl 200-232 gear regularly outperforming those in all 232+. They have certain wow skills like being able to quickly write macros, turn with a mouse, use hotkeys, get out of the fire etc. that the unskilled, heroic-trained, well-geared folks don’t have. Gear matters to a certain point, then the difference becomes negligible compared to skill.

  • Triforcer

    Wasn’t it Lum’s schtick at some point that any game company that dares to make a joke that might conceivably offend even one person who is angry about an issue is a horrible horrible thing to do that should never ever be done? What changed?

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