Random system as described is exactly how Temerity's alt loot system worked when I was in the guild. The 'problem' (depending on who you ask), was two fold with it. Firstly it didn't award on any sort of 'need' basis, but they're filthy Alts and our raids typically had less than 5 Alts outside of Time and Rathe Council anyways, but this also meant a 1% RA person rolls the same as a 100% RA person. Secondly it didn't detract at all from your main loot considerations, coupled with free accounts in late-Al'Kabor... People happened to have 5-6+ Alts they keyed to VT or EP3/4 and were then capable of rolling on every single item with no penalty. I call this the "oh shiny" disease. Certain mains are also prone to this disease. They just aimlessly put in on everything with no consideration given to his/her guildmates. (This sort of person exists in every single loot system though. With random rolls and tons of Alts they have the greatest place to prosper if their goal is quantity of loot) For Classic/Kunark when a lot of the gear is random planar armor drops or class specific, I don't see too much issues with a /random system. Though I could see Phara Dar's Crown/Ear/Cloak/Robe causing a stir. Once you get into a Velious/Luclin where the loot is spread out to more classes and the best pieces are quite rare or everyone wants is where I would start to feel like a random system outlived its purpose. Though, Destiny has proven it a workable system through EPs on AK.
Since Oiwon is a new member he just agreed he will not roll for the next 6 months. Btw Oiwon, we are not a raid guild bro. Nor do people keep up with attendance/points. That's so eqlive. /yawn Remember, at the end of the day. All that matters is: Have we done enough for Bum? If not, you need to get him more Pixels.
A cranky nome took his toys and went home due to this. It is lol cuz he would have been awarded the robe like 2 weeks later. Throwing a fit in a 17 year old elf sim who has a final point is so silly. lawls. Just wake a week and win it.
I watched that gnome show up day in and day out since the beginning days of doing Hate endlessly for months. Throwing his dice against the wind infrequent on the pieces he deemed important, only to fail every time. While he did receive few left-overs along the way, he has not had the pleasure of his die showing face. Through diplomacy and small tactical forces he triumphed, but yet still continued to contribute. It was his chance again in those halls of Veeshan's Peak, however as fate always has it, odds were not in his favor. It was this day he realized this pattern would continue and until winter comes, there is nothing left for him here. Some may disagree with his actions, but he left quietly and peacefully.
Guys at the end of the day... Don't we just all want to be friends with Bum? Well I mean, having only one ODS makes up for some space to improve my faction with the Bum venture capital in Bazaar Inc.. We must all remember that we play for the fun!
Would this game be any less fun if every dragon/raid mob dropped it's entire loot table when it died? Or at least dropped twice as many things? EQ can be so brutal at times. The margin of error is small, can be rough times in Norrath. From time to time I have to blow off a little steam and come back. Everytime I do come back, i take the game less and less serious. You realize how far you've come and how much more fun lies ahead. This game to me, has become more about the people than the pixels.
I've said over and over I wish this was like diablo or whatever and you get your own loot at the end of every raid
Diablo/Diablo2 Did not give each player their own loot. There's 15,000 newer MMOs with that type of loot system if you want that
I was in raiding guild in original EQ for several years, level 65 when that was the cap. DKP system worked well for me then. Now I am dabbling 3-box leveling. It's taken me about 8 months to get to level 48 this time around (see I really am casual , and someday when I grow up may want to re-experience some raiding end-game. But I can't imagine playing regularly like I did in the old days, so I would probably never earn much in a DKP system. I can't say it's "fair" to let casuals win /random versus the regulars who spend much more time, but if a guild wants to support the truly casual player then /random approach has advantages. Then again I am happy soloing my way along it is fun/nostalgic.
I've been in guilds that had all different systems. DKP is great, but personally my favourite was the guild council thing, with DKP in the background. The guild leaders just did the right thing for the guild, based on need before greed, attendance, and the impact that item would have on raiding. For example some insane resist item would go to the main puller, no debate. They needed it for pulling and all raids relied on the puller, so that was that. The best tanky items went to tanks, best mana items to clerics, etc. They also decided which characters were mains and alts based on what the guild needed. If you ran a tank and healer and the guild needed healers, then they would have your healer be the main. All characters would get upgrades, but the focus was on the mains and the decisions were made in general to be best for the guild. Also all cash and gems etc should go to the guild bank to pay for raid costs. Coffins, cleric mass symbol spamming, etc. They tried to make sure that nobody ever went too long without getting a nice upgrade, but that never happened anyway because we raided regularly. In not too long the whole guild was well geared and people were less desperate for upgrades and were happy to just get whatever and whenever. Everyone is eventually going to get everything anyway, as long as they keep showing up, because even the best items will end up being looted by everyone else, so at some point there will be no competition for those items and they are yours for sure.
In Destiny I was mostly fine with /random. Except when I had spent huge amounts of time trying to figure out a strategy to pull KT for a very small raiding crew (historical note: Destiny used to be primarily a Euro raiding guild, who had small raids on Thursday approx 3pm eastern). We had an unguilded wizard named Torusk (I think) join us, and because we failed to explain our loot rules to him, one of our first KT kills by a small euro crew went to him because he won the random. Manlee said he was sorry, but I played so long I eventually won the stupid helm anyway and replaced it not long after. I guess what I'm trying to say is if you plan on sticking around a while, /random sucks occasionally, but I like it as a professional statistician.
I think random has potential to be really unfair and terrible for some people in some guilds, but if the raids are often enough, everyone gets everything anyway. Random just really dictates what order people get it in. The only thing I see people missing out on is stuff for their secondary characters. Everyone's main seems to get everything they need pretty quickly, but if your non-main wants a popular raid item that happens to be rare, they likely wont ever get it. For example I'd love a Bone Clasped Girdle on my Shammy, and my Enc would love the insane 20 int gloves from VS, or the uber caster shield from Chardok Queen, etc. But there are a lot of mains that would get those things first, so I don't think it will ever happen for alts. But the alts do get enough items to stay relevant and usable on raids, so that's what matters. It may get harder with tougher raids when alts have to eat significant AoE's and survive.
Progress was so slow on EQMAC that I think /random was the perfect system. For cutting edge guilds fighting cutting edge content, that might not be the best system to keep everyone happy. Is progress so fast here on TAKP that complicated systems are worth the effort?
To be fair, the "if you raid enough eventually you get everything you want" defense applies to basically every loot system. The only exception I can think of is a corrupt loot council where droppables or loot rights get RMT'd.
btw caster shield from queen is "meh" i logged in one day and it was on bumming, asked why and they said I was the only boxed main there, i promptly gave it back
Yeah progress is fast. It may change if raid leaders go on long breaks but as long as I've known them on TAKP, it is has been fast with at least a few raids a week, sometimes one a day. And often we do multiple targets a night. I am sure DKP would be great but it would really add to the workload of the few officers and they are already busy. Yeah I was in a corrupt guild like that on live, I quit pretty fast. You're right any system works if you raid enough. But at least with the random thing it doesn't take extra effort. The officers already handle almost a raid a night and an ever growing guild bank etc. I would offer to become an officer and handle a dkp system but I don't think I would be able to handle it. It would distract me too much and there are so many raids it would be hard work to keep track of everything. I'd love it but I couldn't suggest it because it would be unfair. The last guild I was in had quite a big team of officers and they were such intense players, they never seemed to be offline I think there were 5 of them and they were at every raid, and did everything together. And even that was less than what Destiny does, because the raids were 4 hour things so you just did one raid a night on one target and also the players tended to stick around for that whole raid so there weren't people coming and going. Destiny does hardcore raiding yet it is a casual guild and lets people come and go as they please, so it is a pretty unique guild like that.
Nice humble brag! I think Thuule meant more along the lines of how fast the Expansions are released, not how fast things are beat or how many raids there are in a week. Destiny already has at least 1 "BiS outside CT and silly Sky gear" cleric and multiple warriors that share the same status, via /random. This server will be like P99, (and AK!) in that there will be an "end game w/o a looming expansion" and there's no real rush to finish gearing. This type of server is perfect for /random IMHO, really, as other have said. Dedicated members, both full time and part time (due to RL) benefit from the system. Part-timers have a chance to get a nice pc of gear ahead of the "DKP/rot status" schedule, and this, I imagine, motivates them to log on.
Ahh yeah they expansions seem about 1 per year. It is one of the things I like most about the server, it gives you time to do and see everything before the next thing comes along and makes everything obsolete.
I think the only things that greatly affect /random are frequency of encounter, encounter success rate, and rarity of drops. For example, Shei and the bard cloak. How often is your guild doing Shei? How often are they succeeding on Shei? How often is cloak dropping off of Shei? The answers are usually hardly ever, about half the time, and painfully uncommon. And when Shei becomes a novelty raid for people doing tradeskills as opposed to a gearing raid for Luclin targets, your chances begin to drop even more. Or another example could be the bottlenecks. Sigismond, Ginto, and MAoE are the ones that come to my mind. They're painful to attempt and rarely done after initial success for a guild. Time is better spent raiding things that take less time, are less challenging, and provide more reward. But they drop stuff that's incredibly desirable until you actually break into that next tier. So the few opportunities you take are going to be susceptible to the randomness of /random. I honestly couldn't imagine what the environment would be like in a guild where they /random'ed a Chestguard of Enchanted Marble.
Random is fine until you are at the end of an expansion, only a couple of upgrades left, and everyone wants them. More so when you've been on a dozen kills and a first timer gets something over you because... luck Then your best people just stop logging in.
That's a totally fair argument. Conversely, once they get what they want, (because they were on the top of the list) they also can stop logging in. No reason to continue logging in. This is a long standing issue that likely has no solution in any loot system. At least (I know this sounds bad) the random system would "get" the full and part timers to continue to log on a bit while longer than if it was DKP or otherwise. As an aside, I've seen exceedingly talented part time players. Full time doesn't equate Best, in my opinion. Maybe I misunderstood your comment, Lenas.
Eh not exactly. That's the point of DKP systems and in loot councils tracking raid attendance. You show up to events you need nothing from to accrue points you spend (DKP), or credit you redeem (loot council) on events you do need things from. Even if those events or items may be from expansions not yet released or fights not yet beaten. Both of those systems resolve the issue of how to get people incentivized to show up to content they don't need things from... That being said, it was a real concern in Temerity when we were working through Phase 5, what could be done to keep people interested especially after they get a few God pieces of loot and there's almost nothing in the way of gear for them to be interested in. Not everyone is into Alts, so on a timelocked server like this, that burnout/loss of interest point is an inevitability... But the server/guild has to live long enough for that issue to present itself. On TAK for example though, I don't see this as a problem until guilds reach PoTime and are farming it. So it's a long way off.
Like Darchon, I would argue that this issue is not universal but rather unique to random systems. The signal virtue of /random is that it is simple and low-fuss. The signal virtue of other systems is that they all create an incentive to attend raids at which you can't personally win anything.
Yeah and sometimes people go to an endgame raid once and stop logging in after getting the top loot. Plenty of good "part timers," I agree. But by definition these are people that put in less effort than others. Best may not be the right term, certainly most prepared and dedicated. Why put in so much effort when you can just log in at raid time, pick your nose the whole way and then win some great loot.
