What will you require?

This is not a long analytical post...it's a short, thought-provoking post. With luck, I will suffer the fate of Gnomeaggeddon and Cynwise will turn it into a fantastic post for me later ;-).

Cataclysm will offer us the chance to put together full premades for rated battlegrounds. It stands to reason that people will have more requirements for these premades then we do currently. What would you require, if you were running one? What are you working on now, to prepare for trying to meet other people's requirements? I think the major options are the same as they currently are for raiding --

I. Guild Runs
II. PUGs with a GS requirement
III. PUGs with an achieve requirement
IV. The always-popular PUG with no requirement whatsoever

I'm not going to discuss I & IV. If you are lucky enough to have the former, or idiotic enough to do the latter, in either case you are not going to receive any help from this blog.

II. Gearscore

I think this is probably as stupid as it is when running a PVE raid...it's easy to game the system by wearing the wrong gear (PVE in this case, despite the usual stereotype being to wear PVP gear to game a pve GS requirement). But maybe it has some value if you combine it with an inspection.

III. Achieves

This is where I think most people are likely to go; it seems to be the route of choice for PVE content currently also. The question is, what achievements would you ask for? Or are you looking for currently? Certainly I think a Battlemaster or a Gladiator title would probably net you an easy invite in the same way that posting a 25-man kingslayer gets you an icc-10 normal achievement faster than you can type it out. Is that extreme? Probably. I think I would gun for the individual mastery achieves, or maybe even just the veteran (100 wins) of whatever BG we're premading.

I recently put Ihra back into a pvp guild called We Met During Skirmishes, which is arena-centric. They are not going to let anyone into their rated premades who doesn't have a 2k arena achieve in some bracket. Allegedly there are "too many 1800 carries" for that to be respectable anymore. I don't think I approve of this -- I've seen too many well-geared arena masters in BGs who care about topping meters and not working as a team. I think arena encourages small-scale cooperation but that people for whom arena is their sole focus tend to miss the bigger picture cooperation necessary in BGs. On the other hand, rated BGs are supposed to be as SRS BSNS as arenas are now, or at least the rewards are the same. So maybe having a cross-achieve like that is useful. Or another thing that hasn't really been discussed, is that *rated* BGs implies that you're going to have some kind of rating associated with your name. More fluid than an arena team, I would imagine, but will they have formal teams associated (Maybe you can put up to 30 people on them?) with the rated BGs in addition to pugs? If so, maybe requiring that kind of achieve/rating would be a good idea instead.

What would you require?