Raiding Point Systems

[Zephyrus]

The Hawks are finally to the point where we can start thinking about organizing 25mans. Or at least, that's the impression I was under.

The Hawks are trapped in a somewhat vicious cycle. We don't have enough members with a steady schedule to get Kara on farm, yet people won't join a guild that isn't past Kara. We are essentially a casual raiding guild that is attempting to become a bit more serious.

I've proposed some sort of Raid Point System, something that I think would offer members and potential recruits a better reason for raiding other than they were bored or had nothing better to do. I'm tired of better players passing us by for larger and more successful guilds.

If we're even to get to Mags, for God's sakes, we're going to have to be good enough to get Kara on farm.

So lend me your opinions and let me know the possible pros and cons for a Raid Point System.

 

[Ike]

A... raid point system?


Do you mean for loot?

 

[Kayeich]

Hwah? Raid point system? Like...DKP or some such?

If that is what you mean, then you do realize that while such systems reward people for showing up on time and the like, they also tend to reward people with guild seniority rather than new recruits, right? It has some perks, since it does encourage people to participate more so they can get loot, but it also has some pitfalls, especially with making new recruits feel shafted when it comes to their chances to get new loot.

And honestly, something like setting up a reward system isn't exactly going to help, because that's not our problem right now. At -all-.

Point of fact, most of us -are- good enough that if we joined a pug group aiming to farm it, we'd do just that. Hell, a good portion of us are geared enough to go into SSC/TK if we had the groups for it.

Our problem is lack of organization, and the fact that we just can't get people involved besides a small core group which is lacking tanks and healers and has entirely too much dps (especially rogues). And because we keep trying to make it all-guildie runs, we waste time trying to get things going, sometimes even -cancelling- scheduled raids, instead of trying to fill up with pug members.

Our group calendar addon is a joke, because a lot of us won't use it or have experienced guild raids enough to see that it's pointless, especially for the healers and tanks. The raids are entirely too dependant on the whims of players showing up or not.

As long as we can't organize our existing members, how are we going to deal with getting new members? Of -course- no one wants to join us then or we have a lot of people that don't stick around for long. We have no stability, not even enough to organize kara? And we want to set up raids for beyond? It's a joke.

We just need stable raiding schedules. If people don't come, we fill up with pugs until people actually get off their asses and participate in scheduling if they really want to come. We keep making all sorts of adjustments to make an all guild raid, and people get bored or annoyed and prefer to go on pugs.

Hell, I already made a rant in our guild forum regarding this in the scheduling thread. I already said we need to organize ourselves, either by making people post by the end of the week, or to reply to those in-game mail messages you sent out for me. Because by sunday's officer meeting, I want to set-up definite raid schedules we can stick too.

But as for rewards, I think we've been handling things fairly well and don't really need a raid point system to try and encourage people to participate, at least for the time being.

 

[Zephyrus]

Hwah? Raid point system? Like...DKP or some such?

If that is what you mean, then you do realize that while such systems reward people for showing up on time and the like, they also tend to reward people with guild seniority rather than new recruits, right? It has some perks, since it does encourage people to participate more so they can get loot, but it also has some pitfalls, especially with making new recruits feel shafted when it comes to their chances to get new loot.

And honestly, something like setting up a reward system isn't exactly going to help, because that's not our problem right now. At -all-.

Point of fact, most of us -are- good enough that if we joined a pug group aiming to farm it, we'd do just that. Hell, a good portion of us are geared enough to go into SSC/TK if we had the groups for it.

Our problem is lack of organization, and the fact that we just can't get people involved besides a small core group which is lacking tanks and healers and has entirely too much dps (especially rogues). And because we keep trying to make it all-guildie runs, we waste time trying to get things going, sometimes even -cancelling- scheduled raids, instead of trying to fill up with pug members.

Our group calendar addon is a joke, because a lot of us won't use it or have experienced guild raids enough to see that it's pointless, especially for the healers and tanks. The raids are entirely too dependant on the whims of players showing up or not.

As long as we can't organize our existing members, how are we going to deal with getting new members? Of -course- no one wants to join us then or we have a lot of people that don't stick around for long. We have no stability, not even enough to organize kara? And we want to set up raids for beyond? It's a joke.

We just need stable raiding schedules. If people don't come, we fill up with pugs until people actually get off their asses and participate in scheduling if they really want to come. We keep making all sorts of adjustments to make an all guild raid, and people get bored or annoyed and prefer to go on pugs.

Hell, I already made a rant in our guild forum regarding this in the scheduling thread. I already said we need to organize ourselves, either by making people post by the end of the week, or to reply to those in-game mail messages you sent out for me. Because by sunday's officer meeting, I want to set-up definite raid schedules we can stick too.

But as for rewards, I think we've been handling things fairly well and don't really need a raid point system to try and encourage people to participate, at least for the time being.

That's what I was aiming for. A loot system. Because that's the whole point of a raid, no?

And personally, I was thinking that a Raid Point System would do wonders for organizing us, at least in terms of getting people to actively and regularly show up for raids. Admittedly, as students and minimum wage workers, many of us have wonky schedules, but as you pointed out, that should not prohibit the RL from pugging if need be. Guild runs are nice, but stable, regular runs are better.

I'm all for stability if you can figure out a way to get it going better than I did. I was just saying that a Raid/Loot/Whatever Point system might be one way to go about it, to show that we mean business about getting organized.

 

[Ike]

Easiest Loot system i've ever seen is Suicide Kings.



Picture a really big ladder, with as many rungs as you have guild members (say, 30).

The top of the ladder is rung 1, and the bottom rung is rung 30.


You give out said rungs in whatever order you choose (randomly, to officers first, whatever), so that you ahve each person assigned a number.


When a piece of loot comes up, you 'bid' your ladder rung for it. The number closest to the 'top of the ladder', which means the number closest to 1, wins it.

That person then 'suicides' off the ladder, and everyone else moves up a rung, while the person who got the loot is now at the bottom.

New person enters teh guild? Hello rung 31.



http://www.curse.com/downloads/details/8675/


In a 25man (because you sure as fuck dont need a loot system more complicated then 'need before greed, don't be a dick' for Kara), thats a lot of movement around the ladder rather quickly, so its rather easy to be in position to get the loot ya want.

 

[Bjorn]

Ike, the easiest system I know of is, "Free Loot, Sticky Fingers Win." :snigger:

 

[LXK3K]

You are once again trying to fix that which it not broke. As Kay already stated, we do not have a problem distributing loot. We have a problem with actual people not showing up for the raid itself. We need more stability and organization, not yet *another* thing to keep track of. DKP is used when you have a core *25+* raiding group doing weekly scheduled runs like clockwork. Right now, we can't even field a heroic at a scheduled time because someone will always not come. It has been proven time and time again that we are very casual in all things and we do things on a whim rather than any real organization. Such is the case for nearly all core members and you know it. Trying your hardest to push the guild into 25 man scheduled raids will not work, not with this group. But i am getting into whole different argument here.

In conclusion, having DKP for the sake of saying "Oh hey, look, we got DKP system, we are leet now!" is a bad idea. We need to fix the underlying issue with raids first. And i will always and forever be against DKP because i believe it is an archaic system that should of went the way of the dinosaur with the death of 40 mans.

 

[Kayeich]

That's what I was aiming for. A loot system. Because that's the whole point of a raid, no?

This...this is a very, very BAD mentality to have for raids

Most raids don't have a whole lot of bosses. Hell, many just have 1-2. And even considering this, because there's so few bosses and so many classes and specs, that's a lot of random loot compared to even instances/heroics that have much more controlled loot drops. And then there's the fact that there's a lot more players involved, meaning a lot more people wanting the same items.

So, while yeah, getting gear is an accomplishment in itself, the purpose of raids is a challenge to triumph over. These are the endgame difficulty challenges, and as such, your purpose in challenging them is to surpass them and then try the next challenge.

Gearing up -is- an integral part of raids, true, as you have to gear up before you can even think of challenging a higher tier of raiding, but going into a raid with the mentality of "I'm doing this for the gear" instead of "I'm doing this for the challenge" or "I'm doing this so we can progress" is just going to give you a -huge- heartache, especially since chances are that your own gear won't drop or that you'll lose a roll for it.

Yeah, we do want to have a method for gearing up people. But what's wrong with how we're doing it right now? Is our method for loot distribution hurting our raiding?

Not really.

If we want to get people to actually take raids seriously, we need to organize them so even the casual players don't consider it a hassle to get involved. Complicating things more and more isn't going to help with our crowd.

Perhaps if we get more people interested in raiding or we recruit a lot of asshats (and I don't want to progress so badly that I want this) we'll want to worry about some sort of process for distributing loot beyond what we have now.

But for now, our "main spec rolls, then if no one does, off-spec rolls" method works just -fine-, and we still take into account undergeared new players and tanks/healers and as a collective decide if we want to give them further roll priority. True, there's some rare dissatisfaction, but for the most part, everyone's been understanding of how we've distributed loot, even those pugs that join us on guild runs.

We've had what, a grand total of -two- times where people were actually dissatisfied (Holy with that wand, and you with t4 helm) with loot distribution? That's honestly not bad given we've been doing kara for a while, and that's a lot of loot distribution to cover.

 

[minstril]

The way my Guild does it is we have the raid leader use Master Loot and priority is based on Main spec, Off spec, Disenchant.

If it's DPS gear and your a DPS class you can roll for it- Main spec
*note* For example, if the DPS gear is for a caster and your a Rogue you will be ignored on the roll

If healing gear drops and your a DPS class and the healing specced toons don't want it you can roll for it- off spec
*note* If your DPS and you can respec for holy/resto then you can roll, if you cannot then you will be ignored

If no one wants it the disenchanter gets it to make mats and we do a group roll- Disenchant

Group roll is highest roll gets the mats

If no one really cares we put it in the guild bank


We haven't started 25-man raids yet, but were getting closer, we can do a full Kara run in about 4.5 hours, and we can get through the 4 Animal Bosses in ZA

 

[Solarman]

@minstril: that's almost exactly what I do, except that mats all go to GB. What Zeph wanted was to institute DKP or something similar... for T4. He brings it up every once in a while and it gets been shot down, either by myself or by other officers, every time. The Suicide Kings system Ike demo'd would be a nice one to use for T5 and up, but we're not there yet.

 

[Zephyrus]

I wasn't saying that we -had- to implement it for t4. The system that we have now for Kara seems to be working just fine, as I've had crammed down my throat time after time. I still think that -some- system needs to be implemented once t5 and t6 loot starts rolling around. SK looks interesting and fairly simple. Easy enough to roll with since we're a fairly small guild with an even smaller core raider group. The reason I was insisting so earnestly that we adopt a system to early was two fold: mainly to get used to the system before (if) we ever get to higher tier raiding and to help prevent the mistakes that humans are bound to make in the Master Looter position.

 

[Ike]

... and to help prevent the mistakes that humans are bound to make in the Master Looter position.

... Regardless of what loot system you decide upon, unless you're a total moron, you WILL have a master looter. The systems just determine who 'deserves' the loot.

 

[Trunkyboy]

Not really, my guild has no master looter, everyone passes on the items and then the bidding starts. It's a matter of trust and it's a nice feeling too. Only thing I don't like is that every boss is worth three dkp, it sucks if some people don't show up for earlier bosses and don't get that far behind.

 

[Ike]

Not really, my guild has no master looter, everyone passes on the items and then the bidding starts. It's a matter of trust and it's a nice feeling too. Only thing I don't like is that every boss is worth three dkp, it sucks if some people don't show up for earlier bosses and don't get that far behind.

And that system is prone for error, and has a much higher rate of screwing up where the item goes then master looting.

With master looting, the only possible error is that you send it to the wrong person. This is easily fixed by putting up a ticket, and is a rather uncommon problem.


Without it, you have several ways of screwing up.

First, someone could accidentally need/greed the item in question. This is fixable by tickets, too.

Secondly, someone could accidentally pick up the item in question when they go to grab badges. This is fixable by tickets.

Thirdly, someone could purposefully ninja an item. Whether its because they wanted to ensure they got it, and pay up the dkp later, or if they are just an asshole who steals items, it still gets taken. This is possibly NOT fixable by tickets, depending on the circumstances.


So sure, you have anecdotal evidence that it works for you, but you are also far more prone to error then master looting. Maybe it hasnt screwed up for you yet, but it doesn't mean that your method is the intelligent one.

 

[Trunkyboy]

We, of course, know all this, but like I said it's a matter of trust and knowing one another. No douches allowed in our guild.