Quote Originally Posted by Hezzlocks View Post
You can blame players for ilvl actually. It started as gearscore, which was a player made scoring system for gear, but was horribly exploitable with healers using DPS trinkets etc to increase their gearscore to satisfy player made checks. Thats still somewhat doable with ilvl, but not to the degree gearscore had.
Gearscore was just an addon based entirely on ilvl after it was made visible in WotLK. ilvl was around from launch, but not shown to players.