I'm just curious to hear the thoughts of TAKP community, no wrong answer here - just seeing if maybe I can learn something new, or maybe you can! This is always a hot topic and one that hits close to home for many, so let's express our opinions! Which is the fairest way of distributing loot, which guidelines would you implement if you were a guild leader? Is it fair for "Cookies" who rarely ever raids to show up on a raid day to win rare NTOV/VT loot over "Milk" a dedicated player and consistent raider? Is it fair for someone to log in a character who wasn't at the raid to loot a piece of rare loot, while others present or their alts could have used that item? Mains vs Alts? ^^^ Should tanks have priority over DPS when it comes to drops? Should someone be able to loot an item because they think it's pretty, but don't really need it when others actually need that item? #Fashionquest How do focus effects matter when distributing loot that is useable between both casters and melee? In a DKP system, should the DKP points ever expire? Is it fair for Cookies to come back 6 months after a break and slam down her DKP points on loot off of totally new content? Feel free to add your input or other scenarios/experiences! My 2 cents: Personally, I believe in need before greed. Whether that be in relation to groups, or in guilds. How that is achieved, I really don't care that much (an honest officer loot council/dkp system both work) but I would always prefer that pixels go to the ones that need those pixels, over the ones that might just get lucky or happen to show up on that particular day. I think attendance is important, especially when rare drops are being distributed, and there should also be an incentive for people to show up consistently, and know that if they do, chances are they are going to be rewarded and not griefed. The guild benefits from having consistent numbers at raids, and thus more things are killed and more pixels for everyone. When I was playing back on EQlive I feel like Povar/Xev was one of those servers that like AK had a good hearted server base so NBG was always the way that loot was distributed (except for that rare case you were grouped with a jerk) Most if not all the guilds there were DKP/Lootcouncil. I couldn't believe it on p99 I had to random against other classes to get monk epic pieces, because "the MQ sells for 7k!!" I think randoming works for Gems and Rots and stuff that other people don't care about. Or if we are absolutely lost we can random for it! I do not however feel it is a reasonable way to distribute rare loot between consistent and inconsistent players. Or between the greedy and the those in need. What do you think?
Haha i was hoping for a little more input than that but yeah, i should have expected that from you! I'm totally fine with randoming things like cryosilk boots..
I've been apart of almost every type of loot policy. IMO the best and fairest is dkp, there is just no question about it. You use dkp and you bid against other people. Hands down, there is no argument against it. There is no set dkp amount for an item, there is no max on the auction bid. Malignant had this approach on AK and it was absolutely amazing because we could use our DKP to gear raiding alts... Lets be real here, by declaring a raiding main you open the door for people to gear out on their main, and then switch (no one is ever gonna be told no they cant switch.) Now that person has a geared "alt" while they now declared a new main. In a non-dkp system this is highly unfair. Sometimes though a raiding alt deserves that piece of loot way more than that recruit just turning full member. In a dkp system where you can use points for all your toons equally, these scenarios do not happen. Ask Torven how he thinks that system went. In a world where your guild is composed of boxed characters, it's simply the fairest thing to do. And to answer Oiwon's question, dkp points should be awarded based on hours spent raiding, not the target. So in that case dkp should never expire because the economic value is flat.
If you want more input here it is; I think every loot system has its own pros and cons. I have been a part of guilds that use channels and discussion from interested parties to figure out loot, officer councils, dkp, merit systems... I am happy with Destiny's system of randoming between mains. Surron brings up a valid point that people can change mains, but it hasn't happened enough in our guild for me to care and it's no more of a negative versus other loot systems (greed, hoarding points, peer pressure). Rolling in an open raid or group is different than rolling against your own guild members. What is good for one is good for the whole, and I don't think myself entitled to any item more than anyone else that's there to see it drop, regardless of how long I've been poopsocking. Outside of a select few items I don't care who gets what. I am here to experience content and I know that on such a long timeline I will obtain 99% of the items I want. YMMV.
Having several high-attendance, high-AC warriors and a slew of clerics with deep mana pools can make gear-check mobs like AoW die a bit sooner. Beyond that, gear distribution has very little impact on raid effectiveness -- it's not zero, but it's totally negligible compared to the size, skill, and coordination of the raid force. IMO, a good loot system is one that keeps people happy and showing up for raids.
The fairest loot system possible is one with no limits that allows players to spend their DKP on whatever they want, no matter how dumb. Typically, this will be a nonissue. People will spend their DKP wisely and win items they want when they want. However there will inevitably be a person who buys up say... A Platinum Dozekar tear for their 52 cleric alt over a level 60 warrior who has been lacking a real haste and wrist slot item. It only takes a few Occurances of this to happen to have people complain about how dumb the system is for it to change from pure free market capitalism DKP to be something more focused on actually gearing raiding characters. Most guilds combat this by making DKP systems have Tiering. Usually mains bid before Alts. This is a decent balance of fair and focused on raid guild progression. Eventually there's gonna be Penny Pinching Paladin collecting every NToV 1hander, 2hander, shield and bow for 1 DKP a pop while the paladin 2nd/3rd boxed mains can't upgrade from their Velketor or Hate weapons. This will cause cries for some minimum bid requirement of weapon limit. Also there will be some Shadowknight that beats some necromancer on a Zlandicar Heart, because "I need to regen when FDed sometimes". Which will push for people to encourage class specific requirements on certain items. Eventually after all of these poor / greedy loot choices by random people, people want a loot council. After a few months of the loot council someone will feel screwed over on a particular item and claim corruption on the end of the loot council, and DKP will return. The cycle of EQ loot systems! DKP with some limitations and minimums is probably my favorite. I feel it's a balance of everything. DKP with no limitations is the most fair but most likely to cause loot to have the least impact on guild progression. Loot Council has the highest potential to progress a guild by focusing gear to where it is needed, but also the highest cause for interguild strife due to calls of corruptions and favoritism. Randoming is probably the worst system, as it doesn't value input of member versus any other. Some rare spawns show up once in a blue moon. They shouldn't roll against your main tank who tanks 95% of your raids. I probably benefited the most of basically anyone from Temerity's loot council system, being a 90% raider after 1 year I was the best geared Druid on the server. That being said, I would've always preferred being able to put value individual items myself. Some upgrades I'm fine waiting 5-10 drops before I get it. Others I would happily go all in on to get them asap. There really isn't way to do that in a loot council system. Though I will say, Temerity's loot council probably had the least complaining about of any guild I've ever been in. They handled it all pretty well though inevitably every 6-9 months one item caused a little ruckus.
I have only experienced Temerity's loot council system. I really felt sorry for officers having to quickly compare equipment among guildies and decide what was best for Temerity ( /tell harrassedofficer I am interested in X item. It will replace Z item )
It's worth noting that Tem's loot council decisions were significantly informed (perhaps dominated) by a carefully-constructed DKP system behind the scenes. That moved a lot of our decision making offline (haggling over DKP arcana on the officer forum, rather than debating a loot decision while a whole raid waits with bated breath). DKP alleviated a lot of stress.
While I've used several systems I've always preferred Destiny 's random rolls. Nothing says "fair" like random. With the occasional disclaimer on an item as to which class it May be best suited, I've seen plenty of people bow out to allow need before greed. And while I've seen people disappointed that they didn't get the piece they wanted (for 8 years) they still accept the ultimate ruling of The 100 sided die.
To build a little on what Pithy said. #1 thing for progression is having a high AC/HP warrior. Putting it all into one warrior was fine during PoP, but during Velious/Luclin you likely will want 3-4 solid warrior mains due to the necessity to swap tanks when Defensive discs end. In reality that's all you really need raid gear on. Just a few geared warriors and you can do EQ up til Elemental Planes where DPS checks become a thing. Clerics... I don't see the value in having some deep mana pool clerics, atleast not to the point of favoring them over other classes. Unfortunately for them, CH chains are the way of life on this server and having a 10 man CH chain on AoW will be a requirement. But having 5 of them have a deep mana pool will be rather useless when the other 5 go OOM a minute or two in advance leaving gaps in your chain (unless your raid leader had the foresight to alternate main cleric / crappt geared box cleric in the chain to mitigate these gaps affect on tank survivability). It's very much a weakest link type class. Having a few solid geared clerics is nice, but having some weak links makes the chain vulnerable to critical failure. Unlike a geared warrior who can make a worlds of difference when facing off against AoW, Tunare or Vyemm.
I agree with Surron. DKP with a bidding system. Though I think bidding should be secret (You get 1 bid, and no one knows what it is except the officer handling loot).
#nailedit not that they had a choice swallowing that pill Completely agree. Why should someone who just happens to show up on that day have equal claim to rare loot over your Raidleaders, MT, People with perfect attendance, or even people with just good attendance and sh*t luck when it comes to rolling? Just so they can disappear a week later. Pretty discouraging. There's another circumstance i failed to mention in my original post, and that is the issue of people that only show up to the raids that drop the items that they need. But i guess that could just fall under the "elitist" category. *shrug* Anyways thanks for the great and informative feedback guys and gals. Cool to hear other peoples opinions experiences and perspectives. I dig it
I agree with a lot of the points darchon made about pro's and con's of dkp. I like the idea of an open dkp system, but also where officers can step in and prevent dumb things from happening. Or if they see a pattern starting to emerge they can talk to the people who are trying to beat the system. My guild on live, on our first quarm kill, a cleric officer (which became leader) ended up buying 3 of the drops, which barely put a dent in his dkp. I remember how mad our warriors were, losing on a ring with eternal ward clicky to a cleric, then seeing him rack up 2 more things back to back. For an era locked server like this though, I'm perfectly fine with rolling on everything. Everything will be killed a million times and anyone who sticks around long enough will end up being best-in-slot at some point. The points made about warriors / clerics are also significant. In velious you'll want a solid 4-5 warrior rotation, with very strong gear. FT gear is huge for clerics at this stage, as well as building up a nice mana pool. As a shadowknight, I'm going to be pushing for the reliable warriors to be getting decked out first, because geared warriors means smoother raids and easier kills that will lead to more gear overall and quicker progression. For clerics I'm a little bit more picky and want to see them with as much FT as possible, but I don't tend to care about the mana pool quite as much, although FT gear tends to have big mana on it. Setting aside a few specific items in velious for clerics is probably enough (buckler of insight, white dragonscale boots, brain of ct, eye of ct, make them do 8th shawl ) But that's just my opinion.
Pithy nailed it, as far I'm concerned: A good loot system is one that encourages and rewards attendance. The guild doesn't get stronger, for the most part, when its perfectly calibrated loot system puts an item on exactly the right back. No matter who wins that piece of gear, you only get it once; then we move on down the list. The guild gets stronger when its raiders show up. The only thing a solid loot system has to do, then, IMO, is create an incentive to attend raids at which one isn't personally hoping to win an item or get a flag.
Ravenwing's final point is very important. Making there be some sort of motivation to attend your 100th VT clear or 10th Saryrn kill when you have no loot or flagged needed is an important factor in a loot system. That is why I am a fan of DKP systems primarily. You know that showing up rewards you eventually on some other raid that does have something you want. Loot Council systems also sort of factor this in normally, as most of them keep DKP sites for attendance purposes. Temerity specifically had a hidden DKP value for raids that you earned and it was a large basis for the loot council decisions, which kept people interested in their 50th PoFire or PoEarthB clear. Eventually on this server, there will be guilds pushing into the EPs, and there will be Saryrn and Bertoxxulous raids run to only flag 5-6 people. Getting the other 40 to show up and actually beat the events is important, cause if they don't show up, you are going to fizzle out in the EPs when you can't get any new blood in there.
A couple of other random thoughts: Darchon makes a nice point about how one of the neat features of DKP is that a lot of the time it's a self-correcting system. Players who make inappropriate bids will lose the power to do so, and that means lots of flexibility for people to build their toons the way they want. Other systems may need more tweaking and class preferences, at the cost of the some of that flexibility. My personal preference is also for a loot system that doesn't reward boxing, either by preferring raiding alts to non-raiding alts on rolls (lot of lobbying for this in late-stage Tem) or by awarding boxers extra points (as, say, DC did). I see the arguments on the other side, and they make sense. But my problem with a system that favors raiding alts is that it creates too many "raiding alts" that actually aren't, clogging the raid window with unresponsive toons that aren't being played effectively. Worse, it may encourage people who could run two toons effectively to instead run three terribly, or to run class-combinations of toons that aren't optimal either for the raid or in terms of what kinds of toons can be played most effectively together.
Ahh yes when the raiding alt / alt loot lobby was the most pressing concern facing Al'Kabor/Temerity. I miss that. I'll take that any day over a sunset server . I half agree with Ravenwing and half disagree. On one hand, people will inevitably want to claim raid Alts to get more access to loot regardless of whether those characters were actually useful/contributing to the success of your raid. You're definitely going to have some dead weight and it sucks to tell someone "sorry your alt isn't considered a raiding alt because they aren't necessary", even if it's true that we don't need a 10th warrior alt for our Rallos Zek raid! On the other hand, I think over half of our PoTime CH/Ramp Rotations were comprised of cleric Alts. You simply don't do PoP without boxed clerics. Which goes back to my point on the cleric class on raids being only as strong as its weakest link. When you've got half of your CH chain made up of botted clerics in VT, PoP Progression and EPs you need their FT to be capped out and have some okay mana pool to outlast the fights. Later on in PoTime you need their resists to cap out with bard resistance Choruses or you need to sink numbers out of your 72 cap into bards so that every group has a PoV Bard to max your cleric's resists. By having them get some sort of priority or assistance it does make your life a tad easier, as there's only so much you can do on your own to cap cleric FT and get moderate resists. This is mostly assuming Al'Kabor #s or alpha PoTime though. If you're bringing 72 to a EP armor farm or VT farm, gear really doesn't matter, those numbers will just overrun it, at which point feel free to use a Ouija board for loot as it largely doesn't matter.
Fairest method? Attendance based DKP policy with zero restrictions and zero bonuses for boxing another character. If I want to blow all my DKP on Uber Breastplate of Ungodly AC and HP for my cleric alt, then it should be mine if no one else wants to bid higher. If there are no restrictions, then items will be more accurately valued. The Insanely Rare Clubbing Stick of Monkly Power won't go for only 1 DKP because there was only 1 monk "main" on the raid when it actually dropped. Instead the monk will actually need to spend as much DKP as the item is worth to him/her or else they may lose out to someone who wants it for their alt or box. Ideally it would be a silent auction to eliminate bidding someone up to waste their DKP, but this would require some sort of system to successfully pull off. The problem with this is when that officer tells his friend "soandso bid 15, do you want to increase your 12 bid to 16 so you win?" Even if this does not occur (which it will), some people will believe that it did occur and drama will follow. There needs to be a better system for the silent bid. It may not be the best method for the cutting edge of progression, but in my opinion it is the most fair. And honestly, a lot of EQ raids can just be overcome with enough raiders, and this system would keep attendance up.
It's my belief that we give far too much attention to loot distribution as opposed to loot production. The best way to distribute loot is the one that allows a guild to produce the most in the first place. If people can put their egos aside and focus on what is best for the whole, loot council is the best - it allows a guild to be mindful in gearing up its most essential parts and allows everyone to focus on winning. Once you are winning (say, clearing VT every turn in the rotation, or clearing PoTime weekly), you're producing the most loot you possibly can and then you want to distribute it in a fair way. DKP plays into the minds of egotists - I call this system "DKPMe!" Everyone gets what they think they deserve based on a number from their attendance record, and the guild slowly gets better with little regard to efficiency. The /random game is the most simple, and over the long term things work out little different than a DKP system. Players who attend more, get more chances on rolls. A rare attendee may win an item they don't "deserve," but over the long term those don't happen often. No matter what I prefer, I know that I'm only going to get as far as my guildies who collectively agree to the same set of parameters. The best way to distribute loot is to have a solidly performing group of raiders agree on a loot method, raid often, slay pixel monsters with impunity, and proceed to hand out gear in a way that feeds the beast.
My EQPC raiding guild used a system similar to DC's back in ye olden days. They didn't give points to boxes, and had some kind of provision for winning an item on the cheap if it was a minor upgrade and nobody wanted to go full loss on it. It worked fine, too. Almost any reasonable system will, as long as it's consistent within itself. Tem's system, for example, had some flaws. Or at least, the point system system "informing" the decisions of the nominal loot council (we basically thought of it as a one-number summary of attendance in to loot out over time) was flawed. It was designed to be "approximately" zero-sum, and technically after about 2010 it was truly zero-sum. But player turnover meant that it wasn't really a closed system, and new players gearing up always spent points more quickly than veterans. I don't think it was precisely the system any of the officers who joined after about 2006 would have set up if they'd been designing a system themselves. And we did make some adjustments. But even so, the system worked well for Tem for a lot of years.
I liked Vintage system, DKP with loot council. It always felt right. Never felt like anything was misplaced or unfair. Fun times.
buncha /random haters in here! here's an excerpt from a post i made in a similar thread in the destiny officer's forum not so long ago: what /ran DOES do that other systems don't, in my opinion, is incentivize new raiders. if i go on the guild webpage and see 15 different people's mountain of DKP, i'd be discouraged. why bother being one of the 5 people that need the saryrn key that you're so anxious to have the other 40 show up for if you'll always be a second class citizen on the loot they need the "new blood" for?
Well... it goes both ways, at least it did in Temerity. *Generally speaking* God loot from P4/5 was expected to go to long term/active members. That isn't to say us new 2012/13 folk didn't get P4/5 god loot (most of them did get a piece or two or three!), but you knew that you weren't first up for sure. You were raiding along-side guys who had been in the Elemental Planes for 3-4 years, guys who had every elemental drop, VT drop, etc. All they really needed was Time loot. So yes you're second class citizens to some extent for a bit. But you also need to keep in mind every VT raid or every Elemental raid you went to, you were likely to get a few pieces over the course of a month or so because all the long term members were geared out for awhile. Those farming raids were done for those new players and they got them relatively cheap and multiple pieces quickly, raids which those long term members really didn't gain much from.
I think Thucy's point that in the long run, /random will reward frequent attenders is a good one. We saw this in Tem a lot with alt loot, which we did random: I was always a little bit surprised that some people felt so passionately that raiding alts (especially clerics) needed special consideration on rot loot, because when I pulled up a ranked list of the best-geared cleric alts on Allakabor, the top of the list was full of the very cleric bots people seemed to think we should be gearing better. Destiny's veterans mains, under a full random system, also seemed to do pretty well for themselves! Another major virtue of the /random system is that it eliminates any bookkeeping burden on guild management. Zygor got DKP maintenance down to a science for Tem, with log-parsing tools to automatically fill in raid attendance and the lewt-bot hanging out in the officer channel instantly responding to queries about comparative player attendance, loot, and point histories. Even so, it meant a trip for somebody to the DKP site after every raid to keep things up to date. Most of the time, that was no big deal, but when the corps of active officers got thin, all the little extra things the O-crew did to keep the guild running smoothly could add up and start to wear on people. To the point about frequent attenders wanting to be rewarded on a more consistent basis than a /random system guarantees, meh. I think that under any loot system, you're going to have some people who think they're not getting their due and who'd like more loot! One has to shrug a certain amount of that kind of disappointment off as inevitable. Personally, I think the best argument for a non-random system is not that it does a better job getting items to more "deserving" people, but that it does a better job getting people to show up to raids that don't really interest them personally. It's also true, though, as Thucy says, that point systems tend to stratify loot. Under a random system, when an exciting new piece of gear drops, everyone has an equal chance at it. And that's exciting! Under point systems, people generally have to accept that newcomers will win more items more quickly, but that veterans will usually win the best and newest items first. I can attest from experience in Tem that this could be upsetting to both veterans and newcomers at times, and it's not an issue with a /random system.
