New Post: The Perfect Loot System

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We can argue all of the technical details, what is or is not in the fine print and what constitutes a currency until we’re blue in the face, but it doesn’t change the few simple facts. @Hanzo essentially told @Cheeseus not to be a dick (paraphrasing here) and he was unhappy about it. Had he not been told that, the real question remains is would he have taken anything on the way out the door? Was it about having some parting trophies out of entitlement since the rules didn’t say otherwise or was it more about having the right to choose not to be a dick?

It all comes back to being a part of the DoD family for me. As somebody who was around since Burning Crusade among so many friendly faces throughout the years, hindering the guild in any way on my way out wouldn’t even be a question of whether or not I would be allowed to according to the letter of the law but more about the fact that even if I was burned out or seeking something else, I would still want to do everything I can to help the team out. The success of DoD always mattered even when I had to work weekends and step down from 25-man. It’s just the unwritten “don’t be a dick” rules that we’ve all come to casually embrace with one another (no homo). Really, it goes without saying in this family and nobody is afraid to say so.

@Dalans comes from that same mentality and will fight to defend it more than almost anybody else. I love you guys and you’re all adorable when your feathers are ruffled.

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Well hello there. Long time lurker, first time poster on these boards here which are in fact open to the public as people have said lol!

I have been following the blog for quite some time and I must say that I almost feel a part of DoD myself. Games like WoW are amazing in their ability to bring people together… make us all so integral into each others lives that we are friends, family and so much more. The journey of DoD and the people in it seems to have been an amazing journey, reading it is just as much of one :smile:

I was thinking of the two systems for loot though and I had some questions for both sides if people felt the want to indulge.

DKP:

  • As far as I can see it the biggest strength here is that it is a system with rules and little to no human intervention.
  • The issue is that as has been shown at times there are loopholes in the system, things that are either not well defined or may work in 99 of 100 situations but that 1 situation is a bugger.

From reading through ther blog it seems like Shawn was attempting to fill in those loopholes best he could with every iteration but the annoying aprt of any system like that is that the holes are not normally obvious until you are in the middle of them.

@Cheeseus With respect to the DKP system, was you only issue that the system did not provide a clear indication of what would happen when someone was on their way out? Or for that matter, did not cover all circumstances so when you hit one it seemed like a crap shoot? It seems to me like you would have been fine if you had known that was the way it was before you happened upon that, or perhaps you would have elected out of such a system because that wasn’t something you wanted, and that suits you more because you don’t like to be at the whim of someone’s discretion when you have a system in place that is supposed to decide such matters?

Now on to Loot Council:

  • To me the biggest strength is that if the right people are making the decisions and are completely unbiased, the loot goes to the best person every time based on whatever criteria that is decided upon (guilds best interest, tanks then healers then dps, GUILD LEADER MOAR LOOT NOW, etc)
  • The weakness seems to comes from the words “right people” and “completely unbiased” as when the council itself is close to the people involved and also part of the loot recipients themselves this is far, far easier said than done.

@Dalans Is that the biggest issue you have with loot council? Humans are by their nature flawed? The system is not well defined so therefore every single time loot drops we are rolling the dye so to speak and at a moments notice it can swing one way or the other?

I personally see strengths and weaknesses in both and can honestly say that in some ways Blizzard changing the system to the LFR model would be far, far easier on guilds (don’t even get me started on the issues in that system of course lol).

Anyway, please forgive my run on sentences and please ask for clarity if I am making no sense. It’s a pleasure to meet all of you and weather it be good or bad… DoD seems to have been an excellent place that I am envious I was never able to partake in. As they say, all good things must come to an end so no matter what happened, DoD seems to have had a lot of amazing members and without that it would have been Shawn making rules for no one to follow lol. I would read that blog but I would get joy from it in a much more sad way.

Nice to meet all of you!

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Since your reading comprehension needs some help I’ll spell it out for you: Loot Councils are great for small groups of people that know each other and interact on a semi daily basis and not for large guilds of people who otherwise would not interact whatsoever.

DPG did not have a DKP loot system.
Redspyne did not have a DKP loot system.
The Final Cut did not have a DKP loot system.
But I’ve been with a DKP loot system for 8 years, got it. No one gives a shit what you value, my opinion or otherwise because you value your own selfish needs more than that of a group or of others.

There’s an important distinction when noting an action that someone is committing is “fucking retarded” and not calling that person directly a “fucking retard” which are two completely different things altogether. It seems to have hurt you deeply, and by this point I couldn’t give less of a shit because you flew off the handle.I don’t know if it is because you can’t deal with the fact that “boo hoo I couldn’t use my DKP” or your screw-ups with Eh Team but you have some serious hangups that you might want to see someone about.

You admit you called me a cunt. You don’t know me, I’m not your friend and I’m barely an acquaintance to you, in what world do you think that calling me a cunt is humor? No one is that naive and if you still that’s ok, you have some social issues to work out as well. This was not mod abuse.

You want something constructive? In your example there are plenty of other variables to consider. What is needed more? Does the tank have enough survivability and is able to be healed easily due to the many other pieces that have been looted recently? I would think that for a new character on a raid team, almost everything that drops would be a complete upgrade. Is the raid lacking DPS? Maybe that would be a better option. I could come up with a hundred other questions to consider. Would it be fair? Maybe but at that point why wouldn’t you just switch to a round robin system? What happens next time when another token item drops that will give someone else a 4/4 set piece or a weapon/trinket that is a huge boon to the whole raid? Do you stick with your promise from before and let that character loot or do you again go for the good of the raid? Discussing hypotheticals is a waste of time.

I’m not saying DKP is perfect but again it is an attempt to eliminate as much as the human element as possible from the situation. This is for both sides of the coin, the human element in assigning the loot and the people who may or may not be making the correct choices and the perception of those choices by the rest of the people in the raid.

Pardon my french: get bent. Guilds would be better off with less people like you and more people like Jungard.

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Thanks for your question. I think my biggest issue with Loot Council is it serves to separate the guild even more than what already may exist or could evolve between officers and other guild members and could accelerate that process much faster to the point where it causes collapse. There’s too much room for abuse and favoritism and implementing checks and balances such as having a whole other group of people on the Loot Council from week to week would cause more overhead or confusion or lead to items poorly distributed.

Many times in our guild folks would view and classify themselves as “second class guild members” and accept the mentality of “I’m not good because I’m in the “B raid”.” Wherever possible I’d rather people not refer to separate raid teams as A or B, Main or Secondary because when you start using those terms it can start to affect one’s mentality. That’s why the ranks were implemented so that if you wanted to advance, you had a set list of what to do (along with making yourself visible to your class officer or being noticed in Vent; it wasn’t just "do this set list and ok now you are an elite) and you could work toward what you wanted.

Loot Council might work for other guilds but it would have never worked for ours and I think that had we moved to it at some point, DoD wouldn’t have been around as long as it was.

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So all you’re doing is basing your opinion on only using DKP. Your opinion has 0 fucking value here.

I called you a “the c-word” as you called me fucking retarded. If you hadn’t opened you mouth, so to speak, I wouldn’t have taken the thread we were in to heart. So Shawn, leader of Shawn’s guild, and not you, fixed your fuck up.

The world would be better off with more open minded people, but instead we’re stuck with you. Oh well, make the best of it.

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Once again reading comprehension not your strong suit. Go back and try again:

DPG did not have a DKP loot system.
Redspyne did not have a DKP loot system.
The Final Cut did not have a DKP loot system.

There’s an important distinction when noting an action that someone is
committing is “fucking retarded” and not calling that person directly a
"fucking retard"

Good try though, you get a gold star.

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I’m fine with DKP as a whole, and I enjoyed my time in DoD. I was a little surprised when @Hanzo told me about the two weeks, but that’s all.

I have 0 issues with DKP, as I have 0 issues with LC. I have issues with people who say “No, LC is terrible and it never works”, when they haven’t actually tried it. I bring up my example of unspent DKP to show that the DKP system is not the flawless thing people are making it out to be, and no matter how much you try and remove the human element, as some call it, at the end of the day it’s humans using it.

The system people should use, and the one that will work best is whichever gives better visibility. I work on projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars. But we hard bid, so our profit margins aren’t as large as they used to be years ago. Since the scope of these projects is so large, things change, and we need to change our hard bid prices accordingly. The way I deal with it is to approach our client with all the information at hand, say this is what it was originally, this is where it is now, we need approx such and such to make it work now.

I don’t try to hid things from them, so they appreciate it when I come forward, and are more forgiving if I/the people under me fuck up.

So which ever suits you best is the right one to do.

Edit: “right people” and “completely unbiased” can be accomplished though transparency. If they had a log of what loot they gave every night, as well as the reasons, and they made it available to all within the guild, you could have more visibility on if there is a bias. Ideally you have people who think of the good of the guild as a whole, and what the raiding group as a whole is missing.

Hope this helps.

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Nope, that’s not what you said. Try again.

Champ.

Edit: What did they use then? Need before greed? :smile:

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@Cheeseus @Dalans Thanks for the info.

I have to admit. I find both systems to be valid for certain situations. That being said Shawn seems to clearly like DKP as well and there is always that good old homage “Go with the guild leader” lol.

My guild was a smaller group so we technically used DKP (well EPGP for those familiar) and it worked fine. That being said I am pretty sure it would have worked fine with whatever system we used as with only 10 or so people, loot eventually drops for all after a few clears.

There was an interesting thing for some of the guildies in Ulduar. Our group was mainly these 10 people:

  • 1 DK Tank
  • 1 Paly Tank
  • 1 Priest Healer
  • 2 Priest DPS
  • 1 Warlock DPS
  • 2 Hunter DPS
  • 1 Shaman Healer
  • 1 Rogue DPS

Can anyone see the issue? :slight_smile: :smile: Extra credits if you see it.

That being said I was the DK tank so I was loving life.

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Not to interupt the scuffle between bear and canadian (wtf, i thought canadians and bears lived together in harmony up north? Whats with all the hate?) but another aspect of DKP is going to be the constant need for rule addendum. Shawn did an awesome job each xpac to put forth a bunch of rules to cover most situations, and I believe tried very hard to not shift those around too much between then. If it wasn’t for the fairly major mid-expansion changes I’m sure they would have carried over fairly well.

It also really helps to have guild officers and members on board with it, and making an effort to not abuse the system. I know during Cata it would have been VERY easy for me to walk away with just about every piece of multi-class healing gear and still be at the very top of the dkp list. Being one of the only holy pally’s I could get every healy plate upgrade for 5 dkp since I had no competition. I didn’t really pay much attention to my dkp at the start and accumulated quite a bundle of it. I ended up bidding fairly large amounts on plate upgrades even though I didn’t need to just to force my DKP down and spread it out among everyone.

Had I abused the system I could have walked away with a substantial amount of gear with very little anyone could do about it. How do you make a rule to account for only 1 person using an entire set of drops and therefore not needing to spend dkp on it? There are some instances where hard rules just won’t work, so you need to rely on the basics of ‘Don’t be a dick, dick.’

Also, IMO LC would never work in a guild the size of DoD simply because no matter how set in stone the rules were reguarding upgrades, with so many people and so much turnover among the benched players there would be no way of remaining fair. Someone every raid would be getting annoyed that they didn’t receive a piece of gear. And this could very well take place simply because the people in charge of the loot council may not notice the players usefullness. Take a player like Neps, he typically didn’t top every healing meter, and had he not been vocal and sexy as shit you may completely overlook him as a healer. This is because whoever he was assigned to didn’t die, and he didn’t do stupid shit to need to be called out. He simply did his job very well, kept everyone around him alive and kicking, and therefore his name wouldn’t have gotten floated around as much. I’m sure there were a great many raiders who would fit into that category, but again their names elude me simply because they did their jobs, remained quiet and just pushed us forward without making any waves.

Its far easier to overlook peoples contributions to the raid and guild as a whole when you are pressed into a few minutes to make a decision. You can be right 99% of the time, but that 1% will cause far more damage then the broken rules in a DKP system would cause simply because everyone can see where the rules are broken, but its far harder to explain human error to angry people and make it sound like it wasn’t favoritism.

Also, holy shit was DoD a god damn family. My wife even knew to schedule our outings around the 25 man raids, she called it my “game date night” since WoW was my other girlfriend pretty much :slight_smile: During Cata when the guild was on the brink of stopping the raids it was probably my worst experience in gaming. Its like hanging around your parents while they are arguing, the tension and apprehension for what you know is inevitable is just so much. I’ve never been able to get so into a game since, and to be honest I don’t think I’d want to anymore. DoD and WoW may live on, but the death of the 25 mans killed the game for me. Shit, is this a spoiler or is it fairly common knowledge that Cata blew ass?

Anyways, welcome to the DoD forums, post more often! And ignore dalans and cheese’s arguments, they should realize this slap fight of theirs is pointless soon enough, apparently this is what happens when 2 assholes disagree :slight_smile: (Yea, I just called you both assholes, and I’m positive I’ve called you both that many times already, so deal with it and get back to being sexy!)

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@klocker Thanks for the welcome!

I am not so worried about the disagreement. DoD is/was obviously very passionate. The guild had life and the people in it loved the game, the guild and eachother at times lol. Those types of feeling can lead to disagreements, differences of opinion and issues over time.

My guess is that there is more for the blog to show and maybe that will explain even more of the situation to people like myself but in the end, everyone must always be true to themselves.

Oh yes, I am also Canadian so I can indeed attest that we have lots of bears and we live in harmony. The bear is on our money after all. ALL HAIL KING BEAR III

I look forward to posting more and being involved in the conversations! Who knows… maybe I will lose my cool at some point… we all do sometimes after all :slight_smile:

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@klocker Good points. I think @Hanzo did a pretty awesome job keeping up to date with things, but it’s important we all realize that no system is 100% infallible. Not DKP, not loot council, nothing is. In some situations, one system or the other will fail and cause drama. I think that’s inevitable. Just because you have a couple cases of “loot council or DKP worked fine for guild X” doesn’t mean that a system is perfect or that somebody wasn’t unhappy behind the scenes.

What we had was pretty good, though. Issues happened but I feel like we were all pretty happy in the long run.

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If it wasn’t clear enough already Cheese, giving you an item on an character you were no longer going to play is fucking retarded.

That’s straight from the edited post (oh hey useful admin powers, there I go again all abusing them and such). Doesn’t look like I said “Cheese is fucking retarded” I said the idea of giving an item to someone who is going to quit and therefore negate the item altogether because it is no longer going to be used by anyone is retarded. But again you read into that what you wanted.

DPG was small so guess what? We used Loot Council. Redspyne thought that the unseen roll mechanics of Blizzard’s loot dice was too ambiguous so they used a roll system: raid leader rolls, all guild members who wanted the item rolled and whoever was closest to the first roll, looted the item (mind bottling). The Final Cut, oh yeah we used Loot Council there too, imagine that. But I have no experience in that respect so that doesn’t count /rollseyes.

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If it wasn’t clear enough already Cheese, giving you an item on an character you were no longer going to play is fucking retarded.

That’s what you said. There will be an incoming edit.
Edit: well that, actually, but this isn’t the promised edit.

Other Edit: Fuck it, I don’t have time for your bullshit today.

Saying that you’re going to remove the human element from loot rules, and saying that giving someone loot is fucking retarded because of what they’re choosing to do with their life is another example of you contradicting yourself.

And, as per you, unless you were Guild leader of those guilds, then who the fuck cares about their loot rules. And if you were Guild leader, then it also doesn’t matter because “reasons”.

If you can come up with actual reasons Loot Council doesn’t work without contradicting yourself with your bullshit, I’ll be happy to continue our delightful chat. Otherwise, I have real life issues which are more pressing.

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Not getting into LC vs. DKP in the context of your arguments but the idea of taking loot on the way out doesn’t have much of anything to do with your life choices or why you’re not going to be playing at the time. It would just be a dick move. The greater principles surrounding the issue doesn’t change that much.

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“We appreciate all you’ve done for us, and we wouldn’t be where we are today without your assistance, but all the things you’ve earned, we’ll you can’t actually have them.”

Had I insisted on taking them, yes that would be a dick move. But that’s not the point at hand. People are claiming LC is bad because there’s no transparency, and DKP is better because there’s no human element to it, but when there is human element in DKP then it’s just written off as “dick move” and observing that DKP isn’t as hands off as people are trying to make it is apparently “not getting over loot drama from 4 years ago”.

So the greater principal is the LC vs DKP argument, that if you’re going to say one system is better than the other because you remove as much of aspects from it as you can, then when people point out that you’re really not and that you’re trying to guilt them for that, then you’re not making a good argument for the system.

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I see what you’re saying. I’m not sure your situation is proof of the contrary either though. What’s the value of receiving any further “earnings” at that point anyway? I never saw spending DKP as earning an entitled reward for my effort. Leaving some on the table wouldn’t make me feel like I lost anything. In my opinion, a loot system that works is one where people gradually get upgrades and can focus more on killing bosses and less on loot. We raid to kill stuff and hang out with each other, earning loot along the way to enhance our ability to kill stuff together. As long as that basic criteria is met, things are generally going well.

Unforeseen circumstances will always happen and there will always be some situations where somebody gets the shaft in some way, no matter what system you use. There is no one-size-fits-all. It seems more like an apples to oranges thing depending on the parties involved and their individual personalities/preferences.

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There is no one-size-fits-all.

This is all I’m trying to say. DKP isn’t the only solution, but people immediately shoot down LC and claim DKP or nothing.

Back to work meow :slight_smile: Hope your new guild is treating you right.

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Yeah, they made me an officer. Go figure! Ultimately, nothing is ever perfect but I prefer DKP with a good, simple implementation at this point. A lot of people have trouble being completely objective so there is a higher risk of problems with LC for sure. Risk doesn’t necessarily equate to happening though.

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Translation: You can’t find a way to spin that into me insulting you personally because it didn’t happen.

It would be impossible to remove the human element completely because the people playing the game cannot act like robots. Putting a DKP system into place (that has been tweaked many times to account for unforeseeable situations that popped up later) takes as much of that random element out of it as possible. However having an unwritten rule where an officer, group of officers or the guild leader can say “hey maybe we should look this over again” doesn’t invalidate the whole system. Your opinion that it does because you were on the short end of the stick doesn’t turn that opinion into fact.

Something about I haven’t only experienced a DKP system? You continue to ask for examples and then either you don’t read them out of laziness or you ignore them completely because it derails your argument.

If you are looking for reasons why Loot Council wouldn’t work you can go back and re-read my first reply to Kedavra about why it wouldn’t work in our environment and possible downsides for other guilds. I know reading/understanding is rough for you but when you are ready to stop “contradicting yourself with your bullshit,” reading things that aren’t there and injecting your own personal feelings into our delightful chat, you let me know.