I’ve certainly been around the block – when it comes to raiding at least. I’ve been in numerous guilds ever since I started raiding back in Vanilla, although admittedly, it wasn’t very serious back then.
None the less, I’ve seen a good representation of guilds and how they handle loot. Some are fair, some are not. Some are simple and work really well, and others are really complicated without achieving anything.
I’d like to go through the most common systems of distributing loot (read: The one’s I’ve dealt with) and how they work. Who knows, maybe one of them will speak to you and your guild.
Dragon Kill Points
DKP started back in Everquest. There were only two end-game bosses to kill, Dragons, and killing them moved you up the list for loot. Getting loot would reduce your DKP and so on and so forth. I never played Everquest, but at the very least, the system has transfered into World of Warcraft, and we are very affected by it today.
DKP in its most basic form is both fair and unfair. The more you raid, the more you kill, the more points you earn. If you have the most points, you win the item, and then you lose points. It’s fairly simple to grasp, and while it is a system that rewards perseverence, it punishes newcomers. If you join a guild with year old members, they will be so far ahead of you that you wont see an item unless all the others have it.
Sure, it is fair that people, who has worked longer to get where they are, should get their upgrades first, but this causes a gap between the old members and the new, when all the old ones are in really awesome gear, and the new ones aren’t. Half of your raid group will be much further ahead, and the other half will be struggling to keep up, and that doesn’t make for a balanced raid group. Some choose to reset DKP after each level of raiding, but that turns the gun back at the older members, who suddenly does not get reckognition for all the hard work they’ve put in.
DKP works, but it is certainly not a perfect system. It’s favored by most, but can quickly become very messy to deal with, and will almost certainly punish one part of your raid group.
Zero Sum
Someone got the brilliant idea to make a points system, where adding all the numbers together would equal zero. When you get an item in a Zero Sum system, the points you spend is distributed equally to the 24 other people in your raid. The idea of this loot system is to make sure that everybody gets item at an equal pace.
Unfortunately, this system can fail at a moments notice. While it does distribute loot fairly, it only does so if the group is always the same 25 people. New people introduced to this system is screwed, because when they get items – that the oldies already have – the older guild members will have such a big lead in items that it will take a long time for new members to ever reach the same level of gear.
Not to mention the fact that the whole Zero Sum idea breaks as soon as one person stops raiding. What are you going to do, delete the points and have a non-Zero Sum system with a quirky distribution method, or divide -452 points between 30 raiders?
Rolling
Rolling is the game of gods. Or people with a lot of luck. Sure, rolling seems fair. It treats everybody equally, and why shouldn’t it, everybody chipped in on the kill. Unfortunately, rolling treats everybody equally, so the old players, who has done the fight and executed it perfectly, are now rolling on an even footing with people who died 1 minute into the encounter, or pulled aggro off an add.
Rolling is fine for some groups. PUGs and 10 mans, where people don’t know each other and probably never will, are fine places to use rolling, but for any serious sort of raid group or guild, you might want to steer away from this. It can cause some ill feelings if someone happens to get three lucky rolls in a night, and even though chance predicts that it will all even out eventually, it wont seem that way on that particular raid night. And if you start making restrictions on how many times a person can roll for an item, then you are taking the statistical chance out of the equation, and the system might as well be changed to something else.
Loot council
I was in a guild that had loot council once. This is a great system if it is executed correctly, but it is a delicate system, filled with mistrust and disappointments. I was lucky enough to have a council concerned with the well being of the raid group as a whole, trying to make sure that everybody got their upgrades as they needed it, and for the most part it works. The only problem is when somebody feels that they are more entitled to an item than someone else is, and there is not much to do about it but to sit back and take it.
I’ve heard of other “loot council” systems where the council were more concerned about the councils performance and gear than that of the raids, and when you are striving to be in a progression guild, you sometimes just have to take the bullet and accept it. Generally, guilds acting this way wont last very long, but if you start suspecting some foul play, my only advice to you is to get out, and get out fast!
EPGP
In my current guild, I was introduced to a new distribution system: EPGP. It is a little complicated to get into, but it is probably the most fair system I have ever encountered. EPGP has three components:
EP: Effort points – Gained by attending raids, killing bosses, being on time or on backup or the like. EP can be awarded for just about anything.
GP: Gear points – Gained when you get new items. GP is different depending on the kind of item, the item level and the like.
PR: Priority – Your EP divived by your GP gives you your PR, and your position in line for new items. PR shows how “much items” you have gotten for the effort you have put into the guilds progress. When you get new items, your GP will go up, and in turn reducing your PR. When you attend a raid, you gain EP, increasing your PR.
It is a system that changes constantly, after every raid. It is very difficult to really get ahead, but it will still reward people who has been in the guild longer. But not forever. EPGP usually has a weekly decay of 10%. This does nothing to change your PR, because your EP and GP are reduced by 10% each, meaning your PR will be the same. But the system ensures that even new people will recieve their first item after a couple of raids, two weeks at most, and after 10 weeks tops, a new member will be perfectly on par with everybody else.
Once its set up, it pretty much acts on its own accord. It announces items in a special interface where raiders can call out an item for main spec, offspec, a minor increase or simply pass on the items. If you have the most PR, it means you’re next in line for the item, and then you get moved down the line. If the item is particulary valuable, you’ll move further down to balance out the system. I’ve been pleasantly suprised with how the system handles new people as well as old guildies, treating everybody equally and as fair as possible. It doesn’t exclude new people, but allows for oldies to still recieve the items they have earned before the new people are fully incorporated in the guild. And when they are, everybody is equal.
Whatever system you are running with, consider if this is the best for your guild. Maybe there are other systems that fits your guild better.
We use EPGP, and I really like it. The priority system makes it great for both veteran members of your raid and new members, since the priorities tend to be kept in check, giving new players a chance to catch up on the Priority ranking.
Aye, I really am quite fond if it. Back when I was a GM of my small 10 man guild, we used to manually type down DKP and had to update it by hand. Eventually, the system just got too much out of hand.
I suppose if you were to add a decay to DKP values, it wouldn’t be too bad. People wouldn’t be able to hoard points as they do now, at least..
I like EPGP in concept, but I’ve never liked the idea of setting it up.
One thing I’ve learned is that every loot system will seem unfair to the “loot whores” — never cave in to any single whiny player.
Also, there’s a big problem with ALL these systems (except arguably Loot Council)… the interaction of BiS lists with people’s rolling choices.
Let’s say a particular caster necklace is BiS for every caster in your raid. Let’s say it drops off Sindragosa. Let’s say you’re currently 6/12, and a perfectly good caster necklace drops from Saurfang. No one wants to waste their need roll on a decent necklace that is not BiS, or *gasp* even worse, “spend” EPGP or DKP on it. So everyone passes on it. Then, when you finally manage to kill Sindragosa, EVERYONE rolls on that ONE necklace.
So not only is your group taking longer to gear up because you’re sharding perfectly decent gear.. it’s also taking longer because the gear everyone DOES want has way more competition.
For any system to work correctly, players must not confuse “best in slot” for “only item available for slot.”
Having raided in multiple guilds since release, I’ve seen a most of these loot systems (and some unmentioned). From my own experiences, though, I’ve found that systems which put the power in the raiders’ hands are the most likely to being taken advantage of. In all my past guilds which used point-based systems, I saw players find ways to cheat the system. Usually by hoarding points or making deals with other players, there were a few raiders who seemed to consistently be getting the best drops first, even including a decay mechanism.
I tend to prefer a loot council system. Fortunately, the only guild I was in which actually used a pure loot council had the two necessary traits to keep the system afloat: an unbiased council and legitimate power. An unbiased council to reward raiders fairly and legitimate power to enforce the belief that the council is indeed fair. It probably helped that said unbiased loot council was actually just the GM, not a collection of senior members. Even though he was a bit of an elitist and a douche to slacking raid members, he took the loot system (and therefore, raid success) to be of utmost importance. And this was back with 40 man raids.
Nowadays, though, I only run 10 mans. My current guild is comprised of about 50% real life friends and 50% long-time in-game friends. We simply just roll for loot, but because we’re all good friends, it has never been an issue.
Other systems I’ve used include a Zero-Sum Tiered Loot Council (sometimes too complicated for its own good, but ultimately fair) and a DKP Bid System (probably the most corrupt system I’ve seen). I’ve never heard of EPGP, but it looks intriguing. With Cataclysm, I’m forming a new guild with friends and we haven’t decided on a loot system yet; I will bring this up to them. Thanks for the post, Qieth!
Dusk: Well, in our guild, any sidegrade is free. So, I have 277 leather boots and belt, because its an upgrade. Eventually, I’ll be able to swap them for cloth pieces for free, but the casters still have prio. Usually, people can work something out though, and people still talk together
@Qieth – sidegrades are one thing.. deciding not to take a perfectly good ilvl 264 when you have an inferior ilvl 245 in its place is more what I’m talking about. This is a problem in a coworkers guild; its silly how many items they’ve sharded that would have been upgrades for 4+ people.
In THC, you are supposed to roll on upgrades. People not doing so are asked why they’re not bettering themselves.
I used a system in an old guild that was actually quite good. It was called Luck Points. It was basically like a DKP system that only went up to 100 – and then when an item dropped, you rolled and your Luck Points were added on. So if you had maxed out Luck Points and rolled a 56, your ‘roll’ would be 156., and a newbie with no Luck Points might have rolled a lucky 100, but you still won because of Luck Points.
This meant that it was still more likely that older members who had put more effort in would get the item, but it didn’t stop lucky newer members rolling nice and high!
Personally I prefer the loot council, but the problem with it is that in the raiding today people are to loothorny and it is to easy to get a new guild so most people dont wanna spend their time convincing the council that they deserve to be in the guild and get the freaking items. And today there is really few people back like me, who doesn’t give a **** about the loot and are there only to progress and see the boß it self.
@Jinjiro – love the luck points system. You can also adjust it to award luck points when people *lose* a roll, and reset someone’s luck points to zero when they fail to show up to a raid on time.