Why Gear Scores Are Ruining Modern Games

Community impact aside, the entire gear score concept has always been flawed. In World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, for instance, there is a 200 “item level” trinket that is actually the best available option for some players for most of the expansion. However, as other players begin to fill their equipment slots with 250+ items from subsequent raids, that 200-level item will drag down your overall gear score (despite its actual power level). Some group leaders may be aware of those item-level discrepancies, but numbers-obsessed groups just looking for the highest available gear score (or even games that outright demand a certain score) may not be aware of that information. Then again, a good gear score system should ideally be able to account for the actual power level of an item and not its assigned base value.

That’s the fundamental problem with gear scores in the vast majority of games. The number that is supposed to represent the rough power level of your currently equipped items often fails to do that simple job. Yes, you can occasionally realize that an item is more valuable than its gear score indicates, but those instances just raise questions about why that gear score is there in the first place (especially in single-player or local multiplayer games). 

Some of the answers to those questions can likely be attributed to the sheer amount of stuff you have to collect in so many modern games. Others have pointed out modern gaming’s loot problem in the past, but that problem is directly related to gaming’s gear score issues. As more and more developers look to invoke cheap thrills by filling their games with a nearly infinite supply of new loot to pick up, gear scores become more and more popular.

After all, the vast majority of that loot is pretty much useless. It’s like taking a metal detector to the beach and finding a bottle cap. The gear score is supposed to help tell you that the bottle cap is just a bottle cap and not a rare coin. That’s lovely and all, but why fill your games with bottle caps in the first place when you don’t have to? For a number that is supposed to show how valuable your gear is, gear scores have really just exposed how useless so much video game loot actually is.

It’s not just the bottle caps, though. If anything, high-end items in games are the biggest victims of gaming’s obsession with gear scores. Finding a “Legendary” or similarly rare item in a game should feel like a monumental moment. Now, though, a new generation of looter shooters practically flood your inventory with theoretically rare items once you reach a certain point in the game. 

As a result, you end up spending too much time in those games comparing the slight statistical differences between supposedly Legendary and Epic items so that you can please the gear score gods regardless of whether that new item has any meaningful impact on the game. Other times, you’ll be tempted (or, in some cases, required) to equip rarer items that raise your gear score regardless of whether they fit your current playstyle or even if you enjoy using them.