I like it when people surprise me.
In trade there was a reasonably respectable member of a guild getting a Pug H OS up – after finding it was no drakes up I offered myself up – figuring it would be a hoot, and I would get something to moan about if we failed, and an experience if we did ok.
So as we were forming I was using Pugchecker to check people out, its quite simple to use – its stays on the realm you select and you can just run through people in the raid and see what they have done.
It then gives you a summary of how many times they have killed the last boss in a Normal and a Heroic run of that instance. ( go Pugcheck yourself.. I did 😛 ) I got a little worried when there were people who had done hardly any raiding, but there were others who had equal or more then me so I was hoping that it would even us out..
It was a simple well run Pug, loot master was on, some people weren’t so good on the Dps metres, but all but one person survived, and some of the non guilded or from little known guilds commented how easy it was compared to some of the nightmares that they had been on. Loot was done fairly, and the lootmaster stopped a couple of issues occurring when loot was distributed like double rolls and rolls for loot when they already won a piece.
To be honest if I had seen that the majority of people in the raid had no raiding experience I probably would have cut my losses and left, and I thought about it when some noob pulled the trash before we had formed up and killed those not close enough to the door – but yes people will surprise you, and under firm leadership with clear and simple instructions that didn’t take 10 min to explain we killed him dead. 🙂 Yeap.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
So then is there another lesson from this experience? That pugchecker/imba/wow-heroes/armory should not be used to decide the worth of a player?
The people with less experience did not not perform as well as those who did, but the case of the Sum of the whole being greater then the parts did hold true, that particular raid pulled through – Checking up on the members assured me that I was at least partying with some people who had experience, I don’t disagree that experience doesn’t always mean that they will be better and I would much rather my preconceptions be proved wrong, then right 😛
I’ve been using PUG Checker lately to check out guild applicants. Again it can’t be used to make or break the decision, but when they say in their application that they’ve cleared Naxx on Heroic and you check them out and find they’ve only cleared the Spider Wing on Normal… well, it can also be used as a lie detector test 😉
First, thanks for the link to PUG Checker.
As to Melissa’s comment, I didn’t build PUG Checker as a means of judging another player’s worth as much as I did to give myself an idea, pre group, what I might be in store for. So basically I built it to be used just as you did for your OS raid.
It’s nice to see that your initial hunch was wrong about this particular instance.