Reinstated Post by DarqflameFollow

REMOVED

Edited, Feb 10th 2009 1:32pm by Tavarde

Original comments linked in this post: http://www.allakhazam.com/forum.html?forum=21;mid=1234234630170468568;page=2;howmany=50#m1234359905214856594

I am leaving this up because this sort of childish behavior pisses me off.

Edited, Feb 11th 2009 9:31am by Darqflame

Edited, Feb 11th 2009 9:32am by Darqflame

Edited, Apr 10th 2009 12:29pm by Wordaen

People will have problems with every loot system. That's just the nature of it.


Open rolls - you show up to every raid, and have had terrible luck on <insert best in slot weapon> dropping over the past 4 months. That damn weapon just hates you and refuses to drop. I'm sure we all have our stories..warglaives, DST, tier chest, whatever. You work hard and show up to just about every raid and have been a core raider from the beginning. Recently you recruit a new guy who comes along and does a rather mediocre if not poor job. And guess what? The weapon drops! Open roll system..you roll a 6. He rolls a 99. Takes the weapon then you don't see him for a week. Skips the next raid he signed up for on the calendar, and eventually just gquits or get kicked.

DKP - You have a core of raiders who feel like they own the guild. You've all been around for months, but slowly raiders start leaving for one reason or another. Lack of content, loss of interest, burnout, transfers, arguments, whatever. The point is, you need to slowly recruit new members. Who wants to join a guild like this when the top dogs are hoarding 5 million DKP and you get like 10 per raid? These guys seemingly NEVER miss a raid, how will you ever catch up? New recruits just decide they'll never catch up and gquit or lose interest.

Loot Council - I've never been a fan, maybe because I've seen some of the corruption. Officers and guild leaders who act like best buddies swap loot back and forth. The quiet guy who shows up on time occasionally gets a piece, but it's only when the big dogs don't want it (you get the table scraps). They say they don't like DKP, but it essentially is DPK. The people who constantly show up to every single raid are given highest priority (in general).


"Gear the bads" - Doing this "for the good of the guild". You have an iLevel 200 epic and the i226 weapon drops. Give it to the guy with the quality level 80 blue. That's the theory at least, and I don't mind it. This could be a good system if it's used along with proper recruitment. Often it's not, and you wind up carrying someone through Naxx in ungemmed quest blues with green rings and trinkets. Basically the people who have no business showing up to these raids will flock to these guilds. I have no problem giving the good gear to the guy who obviously has a set of top notch level 80 blues, solid gems and enchants, a few heroic emblem epics, basically the new raider who works hard and just wants a shot. I love to help gear these people. But I find, you wind up with the lazy ones more often then not, the ones who hit 80 *yesterday* and wound up in your 25 naxx today.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly, you basically changed the whole looting system without letting anyone other than an officer have a say in it.

Read that lat paragraph again, if you would. That alone would be pretty annoying to me. Not QQ worthy, but annoying all the same. I get in Guild X and the rules are all set. Great. I either agree to the rules or find another guild. Shouldn't be any hard feelings on either side. However, I get into guild Y, and 2 months of work later, the rules change? Yes, that is annoying.

Your karma system, while GREAT in theory never works in practice. You'd expect people to jump on an upgrade when they see one, but the intelligent ones don't. See, there's not much reason to. I know that if I get the good drop now, that lessens my chance of getting the better drop later. Since the guild doesn't need me to upgrade in order to win these fights, I'd rather be patient and get the better drop later. Its a good idea, but it generally doesn't work out well.

So, I guess this comes down to two things. One, if you want the most active people to get the best stuff, do that. Person X had gone to more raids than Person Y? Person X gets first shot at the upgrade. Two, don't pull the rug out from under people. If you set the rules and want to change them, that's fine. Discuss this ahead of time with the guild as a whole. Discuss what the perceived problem is, and possible solutions. Now not everyone is going to be happy. That's just life, not much can be done. But at least people will understand WHY a change is needed and feel that they got to add their thoughts to it.

Translation: they didn't agree with you? Sounds like you're doing the same to us; you ask for an opinion, and when it doesn't match yours you trivialize the speaker. You wanted psychology? There it is.

If I were in a guild that implemented your new system, no matter what rank I was in the system, I'd leave. Your system is bad and you should feel bad.


Two ranks, IMO.


General Raider(doesn't always use consumables, less than stellar attendance, stands in void zones) = Unbuffed rolls.
Serious Raider(High attendance, uses pots/flasks and food buffs every time, doesn't repeatedly die to stupid **** in raids) = roll + 20(or even roll +30).


That's it. The loot system should not benefit officers over the rest of the raid populace. Any system that does is just asking for some damn trouble. The loot system should either attempt to distribute loot fairly amongst all raiders(RNG can cause even a random /roll system to fail at this) or to encourage proper raiding behavior. It should not favor anyone else beyond that.

I'm not going to pass judgment on the system itself or the fact that the leader is inherently given more of a chance than everyone else (something, as a guild leader, I am totally against).

I will say that for this, you need to keep your communication lines open. Make sure that your members are aware that if it doesn't work, something will be worked out. Changes like these are huge and can really affect the morale of your crew. Letting them know that you are open to their suggestions and are giving this new system it's fair shake, but alternations may (and likely will) be made, will go very far in keeping things smooth.

I'd leave this line out of the official guild conversation if I were you. It reeks of pomposity and entitlement. While possibly well meaning, it won't be taken that way at all. Officers and leaders are under a microscope when it comes to decisions regarding loot or raid spots (at least, for a raiding guild) and every little thing will appear to be much larger than it really is. It's also a start down a very slippery slope leading to the horror stores of officer abuse that you saw in the other thread.

So, I'm sure you can insinuate my thoughts on the system through that, but I'm not going to tell you what to do, except to be prepared to handle thing very carefully and be very open to member input.

Edited, Feb 10th 2009 2:09am by cafeen

I'm not sure what you mean by "hardest workers in the raid". You've got two kinds of people in a raid: those who perform, and those who don't.

Those who perform:

1) Read up on fights beforehand.
2) Show up fully stocked with consumables and use them as necessary.
3) Show up on time ready to go.
4) Don't die for stupid reasons.

Those who don't perform:

1) Need every fight explained to them in detail when you get to it.
2) Show up without consumables at all, or hold up the raid why they head off to buy them/get them made.
3) Show up late, even if they were online on time but held up the raid to get consumables.
4) Die for stupid reasons on a regular basis.

Add in an extra tier for the raid leader who is basically responsible for making sure everyone is on the same page.

That's it.

So when you reference the GM and officers as the "hardest workers in the raid", do you mean that they're the top performers? They read up on the fights beforehand? So what happens when you get a bunch of raiders and senior raiders doing the same things? Are you suddenly going to get a massive case of officer bloat, or are they still going to be stuck on the bottom end of the totem pole when it comes time to distribute loot?

What happens if one of the officers/senior officers takes two weeks away from the game? Are they going to come back and still get higher loot priority than the raiders/senior raiders that have been there every raid since the officer was away, or does the officer/senior officer get demoted if they've been one for X amount of time?

The trouble is, you're fixing a value on someone's rank, which doesn't necessarily reflect their contribution or their performance. They may have earned their rank up to this point, but unless you're going to start taking a hard line and demoting people, the folks getting the edge for loot today may not necessarily be earning it a month from now.

If you've got people stockpiling karma/dkp for the zomfg uber loots and letting otherwise solid upgrades pass downhill while they continue to show up in blues, you need to have a talk with them. Either that, or override their decision to pass, give them the loot and deduct as necessary.

Loot systems have to be dynamic. They have to give the newcomer the impression that they've got a shot at loot as they go without having to wait 6 months for a promotion. Nobody is going to tolerate 6 months worth of hand-me-downs or, "Take it...it would just be sharded anyways." It's important to reward your top performers fairly, but at the same time you can't implement a system that makes the lower rank people feel like they're only showing up to raid to help the higher ranks get geared.

That right there is cause for genuine complaints as it smacks of the guild leadership taking the best stuff and leaving the scraps for the rest of the guild - the number of times people have the misfortune of getting into guilds like this and then ranting on these forums and others is legion.

If you're having problems with people hording points, then simply put people's points onto a cycle, say, four weeks, so if I've got 100 points from a month ago and I haven't used them yet then they drop off and I can only use the points from the last four weeks (the DKP system does something simular). This also thins out the infrequent raiders who, having saved up for the past two months but only attended 8 raids, are suddenly able to walk away with the best loot.

Another issue I see with your system is you noting that one's points are cut in half with each usage - that actually penalizes the frequent raiders as uber X drops this week and it costs me half of my 500 points, thus 250 total, then it drops again next week and you use half of your 100 points, thus only paying 50 points for it. How fair is it that I've been doing this raid for two months now (thus my reason for having 500 points) and you've only attended three times yet when the item finally drops for us, I waited longer and payed five times as much to boot?

If you want to give ranks for experience and reliability, make them earned and point based - say every raid you attend you get a +1 roll bonus, being on time and ready is another +1, DCing is a -1 and causing a wipe due to obvious ***** up is -1. Now the serious raiders get an honest advantage in rolling (you've been to the last ten raids and on time so you've got a +20 reward to your rolls. On the other hand, Huntard has only been to 7 raids, he was ten minutes late to one (so he's only at +6), he had one raid where he was DCing a couple of times (now only +5) and he left his pet on aggressive and once and right clicked instead of left clicking his target another time and wiped (now only +3). So you and Huntard want to roll and because you're a reliable, serious raider, you're rolling at +20 while he's only rolling at +3.

All said though, your system was flawed and you guys only made it worse IMO.

Ouch. That's a terrible, terrible system. I can guarantee you that your core raiders would disagree with the notion that your officers work harder and therefore deserve more loot. Anything that favours rank is going to fail horribly.

You need a loot system that doesn't show favouritism. That might be DKP, but I'm familiar with the problems with it. Since Wrath we've used loot council, where the "council" is our GM, and it works wonderfully. Who gets what depends on the scale of the upgrade, the commitment of the player, whether a certain player has already won a couple of items, and if all things are equal it's a roll. Get someone you trust and it's great...I'm just not convinced that would work for you.

Poldaran is right. The weight system has merit but your ranks need to be changed. I suggest 3 ranks.

You have your base, no added weight to rolls. This is for your new raiders and the random pug.

Next the serious raiders who could get +10 or +20. These are your core raiders who are always on time with consumables and who can be trusted to not be complete idiots (bad nights aside of course. My old guild was very tolerant of the random face pull, as long as it wasn't the same face pull from the same raider 3rd night running.)

Finally you have the raid leader and class leaders.

Raid leader weight only goes into effect if they are actively leading the CURRENT raid. If they are taking a break from leading they should only be allowed serious raider status unless they also double as the class leader.

Class leader only get their weight added if they are raiding as the class they lead. That way you don't have the Mage class leader using their boosted rolls for the Death Knight they decided to bring that night. If the Class leader decides they rather play another class permanently, a new class leader is chosen and that person is demoted to serious raider until they work their way back up to class leader again.

Of course there has to be a little wiggle room too. In my opinion it's silly to go from t7.10 to t7.25 when there's another raider who is still running with a blue in the slot. But that is just me. And that situation should be discussed with the entire guild in a guild meeting.

It could also help in the decision on who should be promoted from base to serious. Say if Rogue A, who has T7.10, on several occasions volunteered to pass up his T7.25 to another rogue who was packing blues he should be considered for promotion since he has shown a repeated concern for what is best for the raid, instead of himself.

Maybe it's me, but I don't see your rationale at all. Your guild was on a karma-based loot system, but your raiders weren't spending their karma points, so you changed the loot system to benefit the officers and GM of the guild. How does that encourage your raiders to upgrade their gear again? From what I'm reading, it looks more like the officers and GM wanted an excuse to reward themselves for raiding, while putting the raiders, even the hardcore non-officers, at the bottom of the totem pole.

Of course, we're missing information. Are people promoted to officer because they raid heavily, are prepared and are dedicated to the guild's raids? Are all people who fit that description made officers, or are they still in the Senior Raider category? Do people who aren't as dedicated to raiding make it as Senior Raiders just because they've been in the guild for a long time, or do you have a requirement for attendance and performance in order to be promoted? The tiers themselves, the way I see it, are not well laid out. It's top-heavy. But that's just my preference- I'd have Members, Raiders, Core, Officer, and GM. Only Officers could be Class Leaders or Raid Leaders. That way, you streamline the hierarchy and also make it more friendly to people who raid, without so much emphasis on leadership. For example, when you have 20 leaders and only 10 raiders, that's too top heavy. When you have a filter-down chain of command, it's inefficient. However, like I said I don't know much of your guild's hierarchy and policies, so I'm going on speculation.

Finally, you're focusing on the wrong part of the problem, IMO. Instead of finding ways to encourage your subordinates to spend their karma points, you develop a new system that discourages attendance and participation for anyone below officer. From what I've seen, awarding points for attendance, for prompt arrival at the appointed raid times, for downing bosses, for staying the whole raid, etc., are good motivators to get raiders to attend, be prompt and try to run the whole raid. Telling the Senior Raiders that they get 20 extra points, while the GM gets 50, will not encourage them to attend, much less spend the points they have. If you want to get them to spend, there are alternatives. Have a mandatory spending minimum on items that are a significant upgrade. If it's a minor upgrade, they don't need to roll on it. If it's major, they roll or get replaced by a member who is probably waiting for an opening. Another option is point decay systems- where, after a raid, if you don't spend your points, you lose a percentage of those points every time. A third option is point-capping and a system of diminishing points. Once you hit a point cap, you start getting less points when they're awarded- until, after x diminishing returns, you get zero points, while a raider with less points keeps earning full points. It discourages point hording.

There are many options for changing the system if it doesn't work. The one you've chosen seems the most flawed- rewarding people not by their effort, but by their rank.

And one small point, your title has no psychoanalysis of QQers, unless we analyse your OP.