Group consent is certainly something that works but only within parameters as we use and prioritise it – need vs greed, main vs off-spec.

I suspect that, with Wrath giving raid progression to 10-man theams, we will see other systems coming to the fore that wouldn’t be suitable for 25+

I’m also lucky in that I don’t remember every being in a PUG with a Ninja and we haven’t had that issue in guild. Yet!

snostreblas last blog post..Fraps isn’t all fun and games..

When we formed up our guild, we put a lot of thought into our loot system, and decided that dkp wasn’t the way to go for us.

What we end up doing is whoever is there to help kill the boss gets to roll on whatever item they want, and as the GMship we reserve the right to push it to a loot council in the event that somebody makes a poor choice. We’ve only ever overturned one or two loot rolls that were either an offspec vs a mainspec where the offspec won, or someone rolling on a pattern they clearly couldn’t use.

Most the time if we have say..two hunters rolling on something, or two shaman, the winner asks the other(s) what they are replacing with the item, and in many cases, the winner ends up passing to the next roller if their personal upgrade is more marginal.

Its worked pretty well for us! I love reading up about loot systems, they continually interest me, even if I don’t participate in them.

There’s definitely a lot of merits to DKP systems, as well as Loot councils for sure! The point made in your nutshell summation is what it always ends up boiling down to. When the Officers, or the Powers-that-be fail, the loot system will fail.

snostreblas last blog post..Fraps isn’t all fun and games..

You have to add other rules, like only roll on stuff for your class and spec, one item per night, pass to people who haven’t gotten something for a while, etc. Then it’s really not random roll is it? It’s a conglomeration of idiosyncratic rules.

I prefer systems that have stated rules so that new players know what the guild culture is going in. I’ve recruited a lot of players for a fairly large guild, and being clear about the loot policy is quite important in that context.

The other thing I dislike about random roll is the luck factor. Over time, two people who put in the same amount of participation may get significantly different amounts of gear because one is lucky and one is not. I just don’t feel good about that.

I liked the simplicity of the DKP system as well as the control it left in the hands of each individual player, but also considered what I saw its potential shortcoming one evening when an announcement went out in /general from one of the higher-end raiding guilds of our server. They’d lost someone in Hyjal and needed a spot replacement. The announcement said that the guild used a DKP system but the brave volunteer could ‘begin to accrue points.’

That seemed a touch disingenuous to me, because I imagined that everyone else proabably had a sizable bankroll of DKP and the pugged player would only benefit from some sort of trickle-down wherein the rest of the raid passed on something. And in a guild-only run in a bind, when would the volunteer ever have a chance to run with them again?

So if the strong point of DKP is that it rewards continuing contributions towards the raid objective, it can also stifle reward accessibility by new people (pugged or inguild, either way) who might also want to contribute and whose participation might might the difference between a run and a reschedule.

So I developed a system that was something of a compromise called ‘Roll Points,’ which we as well as our allied raiding guild now both consistently employ.

In short, for every boss you help down you get a ‘roll point,’ which is tracked from raid to raid. Then, when loot drops, the loot master (typically me) will announce the first item and ask for ‘bids’ (onspec first, then if no takers offspec). These are done in whisper, secret from everyone else, and they inform me how many points they would like to use on the item.

Once all such bids have been taken, I’ll announce who is bidding and how many roll points they’ve bid. Each bidder then /rolls once for each roll point they spent, and the item goes to the highest roller. All other points are lost.

This element of chance defines the system. While it rewards the dedicated raider (who will have more points to bid overall), it gives the new member a shot at getting the drop as well, even if they only have one roll point to their name (from the boss we just killed together). This keeps them engaged instead of tuning out and hoping nobody else wants it. Both players have their efforts rewarded.

Sure it can have some heartbreaking results (last week I lost with a string of horrid rolls after bidding seven points to the other priest’s three), but while it’s taken a little time getting used to, across two guilds we feel its the fairest way given our circumstances (and in the name of fairness and transparency, when an item drops that I am to bid on, I’ll whisper a member of the other guild in the run and tell them how many points I intend to bid before calling for everyone else’s whispers).

Should we progress past Kara we may tinker with how many roll points more advanced bosses will yield, but for now it works great!