Exactly, you can remove people from the group because they are not performing to the groups expectations without being rude. (I responded in the most extreme way to see how you would respond, sorry if I offended you) However people assume that just because someone gets removed from the group, it's automatically accompanied with remarks of belittlement. Which of course is pretty much one of the main reasons for being against meters because people get made fun of. While yes, it does happen. I'm not saying it doesn't. It's just not nearly as frequent as people make it out to be.

And when they do add auto grouping, guess what? You don't have to use that tool and can continue to play with your group of friends that don't care how you perform. However when you use that tool, it's the same as joining any other pug. You waive your right for them not to judge you and even if you don't choose a leader, the GROUP still has the right to remove you from the team if you don't perform to their standards. Especially since when lfg tools come, tools like vote kick come not too far down the line.

Words hurt people. Therefore we shouldn't have language.

For those of you that say, "Meters are bad for the community because it hurts the pug environment with people judging each other." I'm sorry, but I have news for you. People aren't forced to join a pug. You CHOOSE to join a pug. The second you join a group of people that don't know you and the goal is to complete the flash point or operation, you waive your right to not be judged by other people on your performance because your performance matters. By CHOOSING to join a pug, you are in a way telling them that you are able to perform your role at a proficient rate and you will help with the completion of the goal. If that group sees that you are not performing up to their standards. Notice I said THEIR standards, not YOUR standards, they have every right to remove you from their group. Just as you have every right to remove a group member for being a jerk, they have the right to remove someone for not performing up to their standards. If you wish to play the game without the judgement that comes along when playing with a group, then by all means play with your friends. Don't join pugs, just play with your friends.

Anti-meter people are anti-group. Here's why. If you like to go to the batting cages, you have every right to swing the bat however you want or you could even just bunt the ball on every pitch the machine throws at you. Do you know why? Because it's a single player activity. The second you join a team, recreational or not, the players on the team have every right to keep track of your stats, critique you, judge you, and ultimately decide if you are going to be a starter or someone that rides the pine. Do you know why that is? Because your performance effects the team. This is something they fail to realize. In team sports or team games, your performance matters to every person in the group. When you join a team, unless every person in that team is your friend, you have no right to tell them they are not allowed to keep track of your stats. YOU decided to join a TEAM activity where YOUR performance matters. If you don't like having others judge your performance on... your actual performance, then stick to single player games or exclusively play with your group of friends. Because as soon as you join a pug or a raid where everyone isn't your friend, then your performance is on display whether you like it or not.

Because currently, my two buddies prefer playing this game because we've basically completed wow in terms of raid content. With that said, their preference is slowly waning and I suspect within a month or two we will be back to wow.

This is an important part of the argument that the anti-meter group either doesn't understand or refuse to accept. It's not a solo game, it's a group game. The second you join a pug or a group that isn't solely made up of your friends, then what you do and how you perform becomes the group's business. If you want to run an op or fp to talk and joke around without a care if you win or not, make sure you make that group with your friends. The second you join a group that isn't all your friends, the goal is to complete the objective. How you play and the amount of dps matters because the goal of the group is to win. If you play poorly and cannot do a decent amount of dps to contribute to that goal, the group has every right to replace you with someone that can help with the goal, which is to win.

Decisions change over time and they can just as easily add damage meters to this game. If people keep voicing their opinions, who knows what will happen. Nothing wrong with voicing opinions. Before they were against LFG tools, now in a future patch they will add them.

Say you are forming a raid group and you have two people that want to join it. Both are the same class. One is a fresh 50 with lvl 47 blue mods in their gear and the other is someone that has full daily gear purple mods and a few pieces of tionese. You run a flashpoint to see if they are good players and if they will be a good fit for your group. It turns out they both have the same personality and they can both stand out of the fire. Which one are you going to take to your raid group? All you have to go off of is if they can follow basic mechanics and personality. It turns out they are the same in both departments. The difference is one of them has better gear. Now let's say you have the same players and run the same flash point. The same thing occurs and they have the same personality and both players follow mechanics. Except this time you have a damage meter. It turns out the fresh 50 in 47 blue mods does the same dps as the 50 in all daily purple mods and a few pieces of tionese gear. Now which one are you going to take?

Whether you realize it or not, that is a VERY selfish thing to say. You are basically saying, "I'll play how I want and I don't care if the group suffers because of it." Are you telling me that the other players in your group are nothing but NPCs? Does it not matter to you that by you not pulling your weight you are ruining their experience?

That was the part I found most fun when raiding in wow, competing with my group for top dps. It's gotta burn that going knowing that he, an anti-meter person, unknowingly gave you one the best reasons for using damage meters; keeping raiding fun with competition when you have the raid on farm.

What you don't seem to understand is, if you can make a spec that's different than the normal one and can still put out comparable numbers, then people don't mind that. It's when you use a spec and do terrible dps that people comment on your spec and ask you to change. Being different is fine if you can make it work. But being different and putting out terrible numbers (like comparable dps to the tank) and start hurting your group is when it's not fine.

People don't get made fun of because their dps is "off". They get made fun of when they perform terribly, like doing less or barely more dps than the tank. If your role is dps, and you do comparable dps to the tank, then there is something very wrong and that's when people start feeling the need to say something.

1) I'm not 100% sure on that number but I know it's pretty close to it. 2) It means that it takes more of the stat to get the same impact. For example, if you have zero surge and you add 50 surge rating it'll give you like 5% surge. When you start hitting diminishing returns and you add 50 surge rating it'll give you like 2% surge. (Not exact numbers but just giving you an idea)

If you aren't pulling your weight you open yourself up to ridicule and nobody likes to be made fun of. If you take consideration of the other people in your group and make sure you are pulling your weight you will be playing better and have a better time. The better you are at something, no matter the activity, the more you'll enjoy that activity.

Except, people that are doing 95% of the damage as someone else aren't being considered a poor player. The people that are being mocked and are considered poor players are the ones that are doing less, or barely more than the tank.

It's like I said, when you play solo you can play as you like. When you play in a group you have to consider the other people. Are we so selfish that you having fun is more important than taking consideration of the other people? What you are asking is like saying, I would have fun on my football team as the running back if every play they handed me the ball. I don't care about the others on the team or if we win, I just want the ball because it's more fun. While it would be more fun for you, you have to think about the teammates and some plays you have to block for the qb or go out on a passing route. In other words, when in group play, you have to think about the others in your group and the good of the team.

It seems to me this is what this whole debate boils down to. The anti meter crowd is trying to protect the individual - especially the ones that are poor players, or the ones that would get mocked by playing poorly. The pro meter crowd is trying to protect the group by having everyone in the group be able to perform decently and making it so everyone in the group has a good time by having less frustration with wiping on bosses over and over. If they are wiping they can look at the meter and pick out what's causing it and if it's someone doing poor dps they can tell him to pick up his game and if he doesn't then replace him. When you are winning, everyone has a good time. When you are constantly wiping, nobody is having fun including the guy that has fun with his weird spec.

It's not that I dodged number 4, it's just that the question you asked has some give and take. When playing a group game you have to consider the other people in your group. If your version of having fun is having some weird spec and using weird moves thus doing much less damage than your class is capable of, that's fine when you solo. However in a group environment that's not fair to the other people.

Not sure if those are acceptable answers, but it's how I feel about them.

I was happy to see the addition of combat dummies with the legacy system. Then I realized that without a real time log/meter running, they won't be so great. I've spent hours on the target dummies outside stormwind in wow trying to perfect my rotation and different gear setups while looking down at the meter to see which setup was the best. During my fight with the dummy I would look at the meter to see the dps go up and down and see how much I can put out when I pop all my cooldowns and see how I would do over a five minute duration. With live logs/meters you can do that. However with a log that gets saved that you then have to run a parser when combat is finished, you cannot do that. For example, when you stop attacking, you don't get out of combat. If the log doesn't know you are trying to get out of combat, it will skew your results because time will pass and you'll be in combat so your dps will drop. You won't be able to see how well you do on burn phases by popping all your cooldowns, and overall it will be a hassle. Combat dummies are fun...when you can see your info in real time. When you have to log out and run a parser each and every time they become cumbersome and an overall pain.

I'm pro meters so I guess what I have to say doesn't really matter, but I don't see a problem with either of those. I am curious as to see how an anti meter person would answer your question. It seems like they are purposely ignoring it though.

If someone does poor dps in your raid group and you try to help them improve upon their dps yet they continue to do poor dps, it is not elitist to kick them from the group. It's improving your group as a whole because you replace that person with someone that can do good damage. That's not elitism, that's looking out for your group and the people that can actually perform their role.

I played full lethality for the first time today and it's not too bad. It puts out great damage but the problem is... I don't know what spec does more dps, this or full MM. MM has the big burst and giant numbers. For example this is what I'll see. Use relic (225 power) and pop auto crit snipe for ~2400 dmg, follow through for 1800-3600 depending on crit or not, ambush for 2700-4900 depending on crit, use move for 20% haste and use SoS which hits 4 times for 1200-2000 a tick over 2.2 seconds, follow through for 18-3600, use move for 2 more SoS. So basically in the span of ~12.6 seconds I do anywhere from 23,100 - 38,500 depending on how many crits I get. On the flip side, lethality has some great burst too when you have your dots up and use cull along with that move that makes dots hit 30% harder. From what I was seeing whenever I use cull along with the dots, I was doing about 2-3k dmg per tick of cull (adding up cull and dots) So basically that's like 6-9k dmg over 3 seconds. When I use sos (which seems to me the tree is based around dots + cull and sos) It would be ~5-8k dmg when all was added up over that 3 seconds. When cull or sos wasn't up, depending on energy I would use basic attack or snipe. Anyway, both trees put out fantastic dps and they are both fun to use. The question though is which one puts out the most damage. Until we get logs we won't know, that is, unless we frap it then look at it but I don't like doing that. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. Either way, no matter which spec I use, I know for a fact that I am enjoying my sniper over my old commando and I'm pretty sure the damage is a great deal higher with my sniper.

The point of my post was to give a bit of insight into both pro and anti meter camps (which is probably why figuring out which side I was on was a bit hard) and the sociological effects that meters have on the players. With that said though, I am part of the pro damage meter crowd. Though I'll admit, my reasoning is sort of a selfish reason. For those of you out there that care or if you just like to read what others have to say, I'll give you a little back story as to why I like them and why I miss and wish they were in this game. I used to only play as a tank and the same thing would happen every time a new raid came out. I would be with my raid group and over time we would complete the raid. The initial progression was fun, I enjoyed it a lot. However once we got to the point of being able to go in and clear it no problem, I would always lose interest and get to the point where I just didn't want to raid anymore. One day while talking to my roommate that was also in the raid group, I found out why he played a dps character and loved to raid. Basically he told me about the thrill of competing for top dps for the nights we would raid. It intrigued me so I made an elemental shaman to dps with. Luckily for me, one of the dps in the raid wanted to play a tank so we switched roles with him being the tank and I was dps. At first, it kind of sucked because I was under-geared and was getting smoked in the meters. However once I started getting gear I caught up to them and when I had equivalent gear, I was competing for top spot. When that started happening, raiding become fun for me again. Each week I actually looked forward to raiding and throughout the entirety of cataclysm I raided and competed for top spot. When raids were done we would also load our logs onto worldoflogs.com to see how we did vs other people of the same class and one week towards the end of firelands I was ranked 33 on heroic baleroc vs other ele shaman when I pulled 37k dps. That was pretty fun. I would have continued to play it, but my roommate wanted to switch to this game. I'm raiding in this game and it's fun (I play a sniper) however I'm getting that feeling I used to have when I tanked. My group now basically has hard mode on farm and that's all we run because they have no desire to run nightmare modes. We go in, kill the bosses, see what drops, log out. If there were meters in this game like with wow I would have that competition and it would keep things fresh. But of course, we don't. I will say that the council fight is my favorite fight because there's that sense of competition trying to kill my add first. However every other fight is like, "Eh, whatever. Let's kill it so we can log out." But ya, that's why I like them and wish they were in this game.