As with all things practical, the idea of getting into gatekeeping came from real-life experiences in WoW / FFXIV and, more recently, Aion 2.

Prior to WoW, I don’t recall having any sort of gatekeep in MMOs, so when I got the first taste of it, I was confused about what had happened. Nowadays I fear it’s getting common and will only accelerate in the future.

Personal experience

I started playing WoW back in Shadowlands, so my first season consisted of goofing around - checking out raids and Mythic Plus.

Towards the end of S1, I decided to re-roll an Arcane mage because it looked cool. And how fortunate I was to be invited into parties, only to later see “Oh, ure not fire” in chat and get kicked.

Straight up, my first ever incident of gatekeeping, especially considering that:

1. It was a +8 key

2. The next season, Fire was nerfed, they did nothing to Arcane, and Arcane became ‘meta’ ¹

And in the next season, everyone was happy to invite me into parties all of a sudden, and I was no longer getting comments like “reroll fire, my guy, aint much effort” in party chat before the key started. ²

I thought nothing of it, thinking it was just a lunatic leading the party, but then fast-forward to S4.

I dropped the game, as it became boring and repetitive, but the friends I’d started playing the game with all remained. So I started watching their streams on Discord and witnessed the process of how they get their +12 keys done.

They let the party finder (LFG) marinate for a bit, and only let in those who:

1. Have a higher ilvl than all of them (3 pre-mades)

2. Have cleared +15s

3. Play ‘meta’ specs - iirc, only one healer spec is admissible, and only 2 dps specs are fine

4. Have BL/Combat res (if needed) ³

This whole process reminded me of a conversation I had with one of my friends weeks before, when he was bitching about entry-level jobs requiring 3+ years of experience ⁴

Both of us laughed and said ‘ye, those requirements are ridiculous’ - but when asked about their party recruitment process and why it looks like real-world recruitment, my friend replied “Nah, it’s different”

• “Different, how?”

• “Just different”

I honestly thought gatekeeping as a concept was a far-fetched fantasy, because even after my WoW debauchery, I started playing FFXIV and decided to raid for the first time in Dawntrail. I picked Black Mage because it felt cool to play, and pam-pam-pam, Picto is broken ⁵

I was bummed out, but whatever, we ball, I don’t like Picto, and after clearing M1-M3 and doing M4 (before dropping the game because of the real world), I received a fat 0 of gatekeep. Only once did one person say “it’s the first time I see BLM this expansion :crying: “

So it’s the exact same situation I got myself into, yet I got 2 different responses.

Aion 2 Gatekeep

The gatekeep experience deluxe for me actually came in two parts: me playing an assassin, and people gating by ilvl (Combat Power):

1. Party search descriptions saying “No assa”

2. Getting into another party, then getting kicked, even if my CP (ilvl) is higher than that of the other dps’es

3. Getting into a fresh party, filling it up, getting kicked

4. The gear requirement to join the party being what your gear score is gonna look like after grinding the dungeon out and no longer needing it

And this is what I’ve been seeing everywhere in this game.

So where does gatekeep come from? My naive assumptions have always been:

• The content has tight DPS checks, so unless you’re meta, you risk bashing your head against the wall

• The class is genuinely hard to pilot (and is badly balanced on top), and people have a sour taste after having this class in their game

• The party lead loses something of value if failing is possible

• The time saved by gatekeep is insane, so it’s worth spending more time looking for a ‘better’ teammate

So let’s walk through all of these assumptions one by one:

1. The content has tight DPS checks, so unless you’re meta, you risk bashing your head against the wall

Never have I ever seen the dps checks in action in Aion 2. I’m fully aware that they exist, but they are lax even for a party of randoms with no gear requirement other than the hard req to queue the dungeon set by the developer.

A good example of tight DPS checks would be World of Jade Dynasty, where, in my experience, in order to clear a dungeon on its release, you had to limit yourself to 1 death maximum, otherwise it’s cooked. I remember spending 2 hours on the final boss of 1 particular dungeon in order to clear it with a full party of random Chinese players.

On top of that, it was plain to see some classes perform way worse than others due to balancing problems, and yet - no gatekeeping was set by the community.

On the other hand, WoW has been halfway between both worlds - the gatekeeping on lower keys (which are braindead) does exist, but it’s not as widespread as it is in Aion 2. However, DPS checks do exist in higher keys, where meta plays a more crucial role, but I’d still put that into the ‘understandable’ category.

2. The class is genuinely hard to pilot (and is badly balanced on top), and people have a sour taste after having this class in their game

All classes in Aion 2 play the same - hold RMB+LMB, press cooldowns every 1.5 minutes or so, use gap-closers. The combat itself is WoW Classic level.

Assassin example:

LMB+RMB = autoattack

2 Buffs - which are to be used together = equivalent to 1 Buff

2 Dashes - use the particular one before the burst.

Have to hit the boss from its back

That’s it. Nothing complicated, and dare I say, it’s the easiest rotation of any MMO that has released / updated + I’ve played in the last 10 years. ⁶

Where I would see that as an issue: potentially Shadowlands Arcane mage, maybe even Endwalker Black Mage, maybe.

If I had to pick one, however, it’d be the melee sword from World of Jade Dynasty, which was genuinely hard to pilot, as the class was a melee turret burst class that gets messed up by any mechanic proccing on you, or if the boss moves ever so slightly out of melee range. ⁷

But still, no gatekeep was performed there. ⁸

3. The party lead loses something of value if failing is possible

In WoW Retail, your key gets downgraded, so fail = you lose not only 30 minutes now, but your previous 30 minutes get invalidated as well, leaving out the time to compose a party and start a key.

In Aion 2, it’s impossible to fail, and you lose nothing. So this one is also out.

4. The time saved by gatekeep is insane, so it’s worth spending more time looking for a ‘better’ teammate

Upon consulting the ancient scrolls (YouTube), it takes 10 minutes to run a dungeon, 5 minutes of which are ‘killing the bosses’.

For the assassin’s case - assuming the healer does 0 dps, the +6% increase ⁹ from swapping the assa out yields a 6-second decrease in runtime, which is laughable. This does not justify the time spent ‘looking for someone else’, even though ‘technically’ there’s an abundance of dps, so perhaps it only takes 1 second more, but still.

For the case of general gear gatekeep: this one is harder to quantify, since it’s hard to find the relevant runs, but assuming the dps is cut in half, 5 minutes become 10, so the overall time to complete a dungeon is now 15 minutes. You’re cutting down 5 minutes, and in my experience, there’s a 95% chance of them not being multiruns.

Additionally, in my experience, the party fill for all but healers is a 5+ minute process, so it’s hard to see the value in this proposition, even taking into account that you’d need to run one dungeon 14+ and potentially 28+ times.

But now coming back to the assassin hate - I asked around on Twitch why people be gatekeeping assassins, and here are the reasons I’ve heard.

1. Hard to pilot - already discussed

2. Low DPS

Graphs at notmeter state -6%, so yes, it is true, but it’s negligible in actuality.

3. Dies a lot

Maybe there’s some truth to that, but minimal, I’d argue.

Assassins have to do the ‘same’ mechanics as anyone else. Being melee means being burdened by the melee tax in low-effort dungeon designs. However, in this game, being behind the boss is actually the safest space there is.

Another interesting point I’ve heard on one stream is: “Those assassins will stand in the fucking poison and will not move and die”

This can be understood in 2 ways, imo:

• “Playing assassin makes them dumb” or “dumb people prefer to play assassin” - which is lmao

• Greed to do dps when the boss is standing in the poison

I’ve played the game a lot, and never have I seen the boss locked in such a way that it’s impossible to hit him in the back without standing in the poison. And ‘locked’ is a word I use specifically here, which leads to my own assumptions of why the assassin gatekeep happens:

1. Minimal responsibility tanks

Tanks can freely rotate the bosses however they see fit, unless the boss is locked for some mechanic. And the tank can take a deliberate action or inaction to rotate the boss in such a way that the back is either accessible or not covered in putrid concoctions.

And any form of ‘expectation’ is rather met with disgust, in my experience.

2. Low threat pseudotanks aka Warriors

Can’t hold aggro for shit, so on burst the assa becomes the tank, due to the potentially increased threat generation for melees for some reason - therefore more deaths and lower dps due to hitting the boss in the face

3. It just feels bad to see “the community-designated worst class” perform better than you do at the same combat power.

So why even have the possibility of feeling bad, when you could just not have it?

Gatekeep in common sentiment

I’ve seen many people refer to Lost Ark as having gatekeep, but I didn’t play LA :<

But I’ve also seen many people state that gatekeep is one of the main reasons the game’s dead in their opinion, and in my experience, again, when people state why the game ‘died’, they echo not the ‘quantitative’ metric but rather their own personal grievances with the game, if they have played said game.

And given the amount of such grievances I’ve seen, gatekeep is not good for the health of the game, but it will continue until morale improves ¹⁰

Continued in: TBA link to the Gatekeep in Theory