Quote Originally Posted by PondHollow View Post
You seem to assume most good players mind picking up slack. I dislike elitists more than I dislike bads.
I'm glad you bought this up, it's something I thought about afterwards but was too far gone to get back up and throw it up here

Oh and don't get me wrong, I'm trying to work on as few assumptions as possible, this idea is coming both from the friction I see on these forums between casuals and raiders, as well as the salt I've seen first hand. Whilst I think overt harassment isn't as a big a deal as some make it out to be due to the fact that a simple report will quickly earn someone a temp ban, it's not that rare for a duo or trio grouped together in roulette to silently kick someone who isn't playing to their tastes. I still see it occasionally and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth everytime even if I'm generally not the victim of it.

Back on track, I would think the easiest way around this would be to have mentor status temporarily set your score to the baseline or just below it.

This would allow a higher ranked individual who fancier a milder paced roulette to increase the odds of getting such a group. Technically someone with a negative score could abuse it to get a group above their 'station' so to speak, but they would only be harming their own ranking overall as stronger teammates will mean their personal contribution will actually be lower.

@PondHollow, I disagree with your second point tho, if this system purely concentrates on DPS done I think it'll actually work well for healers and tanks too. Look at it this way, I personally pull 1300-1500dps as SCH in expert and in my logged runs I average 80% uptime on cleric stance across the entire instance irrespective of how good the rest of the group is, a 'mediocre' party actually inflates my personal DPS as it gives me a lot more bang for my buck out of the longer dots and shadowflare. This is a double edged sword for the tank to deal with. Not only are they going to see their health dropping lower and for longer than they might be comfortable with due to me only really healing with the fairy and an occasional and brief burst of personal healing when it's required, they also have to deal with my substantial aoe agro which even in expert, can become problematic on the longer pulls. Fresh 60 tanks are likely to find this overwhelming whereas a highly scored DPS hungry tank is going to be expecting it.

On the tank side of things, a lower ranked tank doing less DPS is likely to be sticking to smaller safer pulls and thus getting less aoe DPS as a result. They are going to be taking less damage and will be far easier to heal than a tank going for a 99 percentile run that's maximising their DPS stance uptime and getting the biggest pulls they can. Again, by explicitly going off personal DPS, said low ranked tank would be more likely to get matched up with an equally cautious healer with this system. Sticking a top tier DPS hungry healer with a super cautious tank or group overall is just going to increase the odds of friction, frustration and salt spilling over (As you state though, just odds, nothing is a certainty of course). Whilst it generally doesn't spill over into outright harassment, I suspect we've all seen the talk of 'lol oh my god this dps is doing a third of my damage' etcetc in FCs and linkshells. I wonder if that's somewhat demoralising for a new or casual player who might feel concerned about there own ability level and performance?

Quote Originally Posted by Kaethra View Post
But the squawkers I could do without. Though admittedly they aren't that good. The so called elitists, you know the ones, the vocal ones.
I was hoping someone would mention this. If anything, the most significant thing to come out of this idea is that people would actually have to suck it up and earn their fast clears.

It's great to see some useful feedback here, perhaps it's not as good an idea as I thought last night but there's always the chance it'll inspire a better idea out of SE themselves. Keep the thoughts coming <3