Excellence Fun: Charvanek, my BE ret paladin, hit 51. Went straight over to Alterac Valley. About 15 minutes of waiting, got into a 51-60 bracket AV. For some reason, I was Battleground Leader. With my first look at new-style reinforcements AV, we win with 66 reinforcements left, mostly with me running around Drek's room smacking people running in. Ice Barbed Spear on the first try!
Hmmm...: Had about 103/255 Polearms skill. Time to bash on Hinterlands turtles.
Whenever I start to want to do 25 man stuff again, I come here and read Ob's posts and it quickly kills any of that foolishness.
Well, Ob's posts aren't exactly the most representative sample ever, but yeah, I think 25 man raiding is far more trouble than the potential return is worth. I do look forward to the occasional Kara though, and hope to eventually run ZA a few times. ZA actually seems even more perfect than Kara, in the long run, because of the potential for the fastest runs(top prize is from a 1.5 hour run right?)
We use EPGP too, decay and automatic tracking (yes it's still via officer notes) are very nice, prio based bidding is fast. Downside is that it makes people skim minor upgrades, because if you take on you can drop prio a lot in a situation where everyone is only waiting for 1 - 3 major upgrades (In last nights raid, prio was something like 32, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17 at the top, for who use EPGP with default values, they know how hard it is to get that high).
Overall, quite happy with it though. It's especially nice that after 4 weeks of raiding everyone has the same income*raid attendance. We may switch, some officers don't really like it, but I'll be vocal about keeping decay involved.
I really liked our old zero-sum system. Before we started working on each instance we'd go through and tweak the item prices to what we felt was more accurate, so when loot dropped everything was really well priced and nobody ever really complained about it. I don't think it would have worked for us at the moment, what with Tier tokens being worse/better depending on class. Also the fact that we've recently had a lot of turnover. I think /rolls with cooldowns deal with new people well.
The only way that our current system is really a problem is when people don't see anything drop while they're off cooldown for a long period of time. The cooldown where you have maximum priority is five attended raids. I know a couple of weeks ago at least, there were people who had attended ~14 or more raids without getting a piece of loot, just because the loot (and sometimes /roll) RNG hadn't gone in their favour.
@Oboro: Honestly your loot system sounds, while kind of strange, better than anything involving bidding. The worst case scenarios in most bidding systems are horrific. What? I just got my Kael Vial so I can finally transfer off the server? Time to blow every single point of DKP I have!
Whenever I start to want to do 25 man stuff again, I come here and read Ob's posts and it quickly kills any of that foolishness.
Just don't be a drama queen and/or join a raid that isn't retarded and you're good to go.
Nah, it's a time issue. Full time job, full time school (online), and 2 kids means I can't keep up with dedicated 25 manners. And then there is all the crap that comes with it. All 25 man raiding guilds run into drama eventually, it's just human nature. Most of the good ones quash it quickly and survive though.
I would like to see some sort of bonus modifier in our system for people who have been off cooldown for 10+ raids. (For people other than exis: In our raids, you win something, you go on five-raid cooldown, so someone who's been off cooldown for ten raids hasn't won anything in fifteen.) It's rare but it happens and it really sucks for those people.
Then again those people are often "one of our two hunters who already have almost everything they could possibly want so they don't need priority on off-drops and tier tokens too" or "people who refuse to roll on slight upgrades because they're holding out for best-in-slot", and I feel no sympathy for those types.
Cooldown as in you can't grab anything? Shouldn't there be enough drops, on average for everyone to get one item closer to once every three raids?
Yeah, like, /roll priority is essentially 1. People off cooldown, 2. People on cooldown, 3. Trials and off-spec.
It depends what we're working on, but usually the majority of people are on cooldown at any given time. It used to be two-raid cooldown but we found that, for example, the DPS warrior was getting every piece of DPS plate defaulted to him but also since the cooldown was so short and he was /rolling high a lot, he was getting tier tokens and rings and shit too, while the rogues and other people sharing warrior tokens were stuck off cooldown for weeks. Five days seems to make things pretty even and a lot of people win stuff while on cooldown anyway (more often than not, all the healers are on so they all /roll, etc.).
It gets more skewed when we're stuck on a boss like Kael or Archimonde, because there's more raid days with zero loot going out.
The loot system Oboro described sounds kind of like zero sum if you took away the zero sum part.
My guild's current DKP system ends up being a lot like that, due to the constant upwards adjustments for raid attendance. It has turned into a de facto seniority system rather than a real zero-sum DKP, since unless you take in a lot of loot (or really expensive loot, weapons are notoriously high priced) or miss a lot of raids the only people you can feasibly exchange places with in the queue are the people who joined up around the same time as you.
Echo what are you using to keep track of it? The in-game addon or someone of your own? That was probably the main thing keeping us from trying it out. The original system kept track of people's EPGP in their officer notes, and we pretend-gkick people so often that that wouldn't work for us at all.
We wanted it in-game, but we didn't like the officer note thing (not that we ever joke-kick people), and the plugin can't handle decimals. We have two decimals in our gear points.
So we wrote some stuff to keep track of it, including hooking it up to our forums so it makes a post in a locked EPGP forum when people get EP/GPs.
The people on the top of the list have such OMGHUEG priority because they haven't looted anything under GPs yet. It'll drop to reasonable values as soon as they get something. Instead of having 0 GP until you loot something we add 0.01 to everyone's GP when priority is calculated so we don't have to divide by zero.
We may switch, some officers don't really like it, but I'll be vocal about keeping decay involved.
Yeah, I remember exactly what you thought of the DKP system we used on Magtheridon. :P
Decay is a great thing. It prevents people from hoarding points, since they reach a point where the weekly decay is equal to the amount of points they gain, and it keeps inflation away since members who don't bid on stuff won't skyrocket in points so that old members have way higher points than fresh members.
We wanted it in-game, but we didn't like the officer note thing (not that we ever joke-kick people), and the plugin can't handle decimals. We have two decimals in our gear points.
So we wrote some stuff to keep track of it, including hooking it up to our forums so it makes a post in a locked EPGP forum when people get EP/GPs.
Ooh very nice. I managed to modify an EQDKP installation to keep track of our cooldown stuff, but it's still a bit tedious to add all the info. I wish I knew how to write things like that instead of just cobbling together other people's stuff.
Totally happy playing my Spriest again after a short absence on my paladin. Starting to work on PvP stuff for arena and just having a blast.
AV is incredibly boring after gearing up my paladin almost completely in S1 stuff. But who can do arena as a Spriest these days without 11k hp and 300+ res. Sad: None of that gear is of any use to me in raids. Funny that a holy paladin can completely be low-end raid viable with complete pvp gear, 10k mana, almost 30% HL spellcrit, and 1650+healing. Is this the only class/spec that can do this?
Happy in a totally non-stalker, coincidental way: Being in the same BG as Beasts from Ravenholdt. Whoever plays Kumchou the shaman . . . damn. You were like 210k dmg done in an AV last night. I cheese my dmg done by dotting all the Alliance lemmings as they run past Balinda toward snowfall and you still beat the highest dmg done by almost double. SwP, VT, VE on as many alliance running past means great health/mana returns for my group inside downing Bal though, so it's not totally useless.
Oscreth on
Old man, family, works too hard, locked into a routine, but still plays with army men and video games.
If you want to play League of Legends, here is my refer a friend: So I get points
Totally happy playing my Spriest again after a short absence on my paladin. Starting to work on PvP stuff for arena and just having a blast.
AV is incredibly boring after gearing up my paladin almost completely in S1 stuff. But who can do arena as a Spriest these days without 11k hp and 300+ res. Sad: None of that gear is of any use to me in raids. Funny that a holy paladin can completely be low-end raid viable with complete pvp gear, 10k mana, almost 30% HL spellcrit, and 1650+healing. Is this the only class/spec that can do this?
We have a shadow priest that specs disc/holy for arenas. Which makes sense, he does pretty well. Didn't hurt that when he decided to try it he already had a mix of Shadow arena gear and random pieces of raiding Holy gear that nobody else wanted.
So, are Priests like the new Twink of choice or something?
I decided to try the WSG daily last night, and about 70% of the people in there were priests. I got my ass fucking handed to me on a platter. I dunno if it's starshards or whatever, but that shit is hax. There was like 6 different walls between me and the priest, and I was still getting hit by them. I was dying in seconds. Pretty awesome.
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
edited January 2008
We actually use a bidding DKP system that's been tweaked. In essence you have two pools of DKP. The first pool is capped at 50 and is what your bids draw on. The second pool is a bank of sorts. When you go over 50 on the first pool the next 50 goes into your bank. At the end of the week the bank refills up to 20 tokens in your main pool.
It works fairly well in preventing the whole "Blow everything and /gquit" issue and gives people the feeling that new people aren't going to be hammered never sniff an item but at the same time it allows longer term members to feel like they aren't being screwed over.
In the end, there is no magic DKP system that fits every guild. Different group dynamics lead to different priorities. For me the very mention of a loot council throws me into fits of rage. For other groups it's the best workable option.
Zero sum systems start to really suck ass once people start getting geared. One week you can have a bad run of horrible drops no one wants, and since no one bids dkp, none of the raiders receive any. Another week could be nothing but great drops, meaning lots of DKP spent and lots of DKP accumulated by the raiders present.
So if you had the bad luck of being apart of the shitty run but not the good one, you get screwed out of DKP.
It's not so bad starting out though, since there are almost never any drops that are passed on. It got really bad in my old guild though when no one rolled on anything but Rag loot etc etc.
Yeah, that was the main problem with zero-sum. We figured to balance that out the primary stat would be 6wk attendance instead of DKP. And at this pount (and pretty much all of our pre-ravenholdt raiding) the actual DKP number was close to worthless compared to attendance.
Yeah, that was the main problem with zero-sum. We figured to balance that out the primary stat would be 6wk attendance instead of DKP. And at this pount (and pretty much all of our pre-ravenholdt raiding) the actual DKP number was close to worthless compared to attendance.
Yeah the one used by UDL is by far the best I have seen yet. DKP based on attendance is really the way to go, with DKP accumulating for time spent instead of drops received.
I found a mod that would do per-week (or whatever time period you wanted) zero sum. It wouldn't solve the issue of a week without any drops, but it would solve the "no one earns DKP for progression nights of wiping" problem, which was a hugely unfair thing in our old zero-sum system. Basically it would add up all the DKP earned all week and then divide it evenly over the raid nights. I quit liked that one, as I agree with the spirit of zero-sum, but it does have its problems.
Yeah, that was the main problem with zero-sum. We figured to balance that out the primary stat would be 6wk attendance instead of DKP. And at this pount (and pretty much all of our pre-ravenholdt raiding) the actual DKP number was close to worthless compared to attendance.
Yeah the one used by UDL is by far the best I have seen yet. DKP based on attendance is really the way to go, with DKP accumulating for time spent instead of drops received.
Well the actual DKP is still important, because someone with a perfect 6week attendance and positive DKP will loot before someone with the same attendance and a negative dkp.
But since its zero sum, its -really- easy to move back and forth from negatives, so you end up with a whole slew of people looting as opposed to the same 2 or 3 people.
DKP based on attendance is really the way to go, with DKP accumulating for time spent instead of drops received.
Yeah. Our EPGP (Effort Points/Gear Points, for people not in the know) breaks down like this:
(cut'n'paste from our forums)
* 25 EP for being on time.
* 25 EP for staying til end.
* 25 EP for progression boss kill.
* 15 EP for intermediate boss kill.
* 5 EP for farm boss kill.
* 5 EP for progression boss wipe.
* 2.5 EP per 15 minutes of raiding.
* Progression Status: Anything killed less than 3 times.
* Intermediate Status: Boss that we have killed 3 or more times.
* Farm Status: Boss which we haven't failed to kill 4 weeks in a row, and for which at least one of the kills was done with no wipe.
Our last Kara clear added up to 160ish EPs.
Then we have gear point costs for items derived from our fancy-pants formula. T4 tokens cost 25-30 GPs depending on which part. (Same cost for all classes and not stat-derived, like normal items)
We have a backend to add stuff to the system that's easy to use mid-raid. Gear points get awarded instantly, EPs as soon as the raid is done. Not much to take notes for unless you swap people mid-raid, in which case you need to keep track on raid start/end and a separate join time for the new people, and then we check the WWS to count wipes/kills. Works like a charm.
The priority for stuff is then EP / GP. Both values decay by 10% each week after maintenance, to prevent both hoarding and inflation where old members have tons of points and new people start at zero.
The decay gives incentive to loot stuff as soon as possible, since the decay sets an upper limit to how many points you can have. If you get 100 EP per week you can never go above 1000 EP, since it decays by 100 each week.
I think a well done DKP, with solid members who dont take anything within their grasp just because they can, is great. One that controls point inflation, one that allows new people a chance.
Unfortunately my guild currently does not do this.
Raided Kara last night for the first time in roughly two months.
Wasn't a bad run. Had some time issues with people swapping out and such, and we wiped on sub-20% Nightbane for a bit, but it went well overall and I got eight badges (although I still haven't seen Wrynn Dynasty Greaves, which irritates me.)
Salvation122 on
0
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
UDL's loot rules sound pretty fair, but made me go at the idea of trying to deal with all the mid-raid calculating of priority since it doesn't appear to be automated on the website. How long does it take you to do loot when each boss dies?
I think I already posted about it on here somewhere, but I've done a complete 180 on suicide kings. At first I thought it was this silly little system that didn't do a good job of distributing loots, but I've gradually come around on how easy and quick it makes things. People who want to hoard their position for a specific piece wind up being penalized because they can't get that far ahead.
The only real problem I have with it is that it tends to encourage sharding offspec loot and trash drops, but our raid hasn't had too much trouble with this.
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
0
ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
I'm the only holy paladin in the guild, so I gladly and wildly bid on each and every piece of ret gear I find, since the holy stuff would default to me anyway. :P
I'm still passing on SSC stuff for the main spec DPS guys, but I've started snagging some T4 and Kara ret gear now. The hope is to have enough gear to go ret in 25-mans from time to time, but for now I'm still way more useful as a healer.
Posts
Hmmm...: Had about 103/255 Polearms skill. Time to bash on Hinterlands turtles.
Well, Ob's posts aren't exactly the most representative sample ever, but yeah, I think 25 man raiding is far more trouble than the potential return is worth. I do look forward to the occasional Kara though, and hope to eventually run ZA a few times. ZA actually seems even more perfect than Kara, in the long run, because of the potential for the fastest runs(top prize is from a 1.5 hour run right?)
Just don't be a drama queen and/or join a raid that isn't retarded and you're good to go.
Overall, quite happy with it though. It's especially nice that after 4 weeks of raiding everyone has the same income*raid attendance. We may switch, some officers don't really like it, but I'll be vocal about keeping decay involved.
Assuming they keep adding 10 mans now and then.
The only way that our current system is really a problem is when people don't see anything drop while they're off cooldown for a long period of time. The cooldown where you have maximum priority is five attended raids. I know a couple of weeks ago at least, there were people who had attended ~14 or more raids without getting a piece of loot, just because the loot (and sometimes /roll) RNG hadn't gone in their favour.
@Oboro: Honestly your loot system sounds, while kind of strange, better than anything involving bidding. The worst case scenarios in most bidding systems are horrific. What? I just got my Kael Vial so I can finally transfer off the server? Time to blow every single point of DKP I have!
Nah, it's a time issue. Full time job, full time school (online), and 2 kids means I can't keep up with dedicated 25 manners. And then there is all the crap that comes with it. All 25 man raiding guilds run into drama eventually, it's just human nature. Most of the good ones quash it quickly and survive though.
Then again those people are often "one of our two hunters who already have almost everything they could possibly want so they don't need priority on off-drops and tier tokens too" or "people who refuse to roll on slight upgrades because they're holding out for best-in-slot", and I feel no sympathy for those types.
Pfft, you make it sound like the latter is some easy task
Ghalan - Tauren Druid
Yeah, like, /roll priority is essentially 1. People off cooldown, 2. People on cooldown, 3. Trials and off-spec.
It depends what we're working on, but usually the majority of people are on cooldown at any given time. It used to be two-raid cooldown but we found that, for example, the DPS warrior was getting every piece of DPS plate defaulted to him but also since the cooldown was so short and he was /rolling high a lot, he was getting tier tokens and rings and shit too, while the rogues and other people sharing warrior tokens were stuck off cooldown for weeks. Five days seems to make things pretty even and a lot of people win stuff while on cooldown anyway (more often than not, all the healers are on so they all /roll, etc.).
It gets more skewed when we're stuck on a boss like Kael or Archimonde, because there's more raid days with zero loot going out.
My guild's current DKP system ends up being a lot like that, due to the constant upwards adjustments for raid attendance. It has turned into a de facto seniority system rather than a real zero-sum DKP, since unless you take in a lot of loot (or really expensive loot, weapons are notoriously high priced) or miss a lot of raids the only people you can feasibly exchange places with in the queue are the people who joined up around the same time as you.
We wanted it in-game, but we didn't like the officer note thing (not that we ever joke-kick people), and the plugin can't handle decimals. We have two decimals in our gear points.
So we wrote some stuff to keep track of it, including hooking it up to our forums so it makes a post in a locked EPGP forum when people get EP/GPs.
The people on the top of the list have such OMGHUEG priority because they haven't looted anything under GPs yet. It'll drop to reasonable values as soon as they get something. Instead of having 0 GP until you loot something we add 0.01 to everyone's GP when priority is calculated so we don't have to divide by zero.
We're such a bunch of nerds.
Yeah, I remember exactly what you thought of the DKP system we used on Magtheridon. :P
Decay is a great thing. It prevents people from hoarding points, since they reach a point where the weekly decay is equal to the amount of points they gain, and it keeps inflation away since members who don't bid on stuff won't skyrocket in points so that old members have way higher points than fresh members.
Ooh very nice. I managed to modify an EQDKP installation to keep track of our cooldown stuff, but it's still a bit tedious to add all the info. I wish I knew how to write things like that instead of just cobbling together other people's stuff.
AV is incredibly boring after gearing up my paladin almost completely in S1 stuff. But who can do arena as a Spriest these days without 11k hp and 300+ res. Sad: None of that gear is of any use to me in raids. Funny that a holy paladin can completely be low-end raid viable with complete pvp gear, 10k mana, almost 30% HL spellcrit, and 1650+healing. Is this the only class/spec that can do this?
Happy in a totally non-stalker, coincidental way: Being in the same BG as Beasts from Ravenholdt. Whoever plays Kumchou the shaman . . . damn. You were like 210k dmg done in an AV last night. I cheese my dmg done by dotting all the Alliance lemmings as they run past Balinda toward snowfall and you still beat the highest dmg done by almost double. SwP, VT, VE on as many alliance running past means great health/mana returns for my group inside downing Bal though, so it's not totally useless.
If you want to play League of Legends, here is my refer a friend: So I get points
We have a shadow priest that specs disc/holy for arenas. Which makes sense, he does pretty well. Didn't hurt that when he decided to try it he already had a mix of Shadow arena gear and random pieces of raiding Holy gear that nobody else wanted.
I decided to try the WSG daily last night, and about 70% of the people in there were priests. I got my ass fucking handed to me on a platter. I dunno if it's starshards or whatever, but that shit is hax. There was like 6 different walls between me and the priest, and I was still getting hit by them. I was dying in seconds. Pretty awesome.
http://raid.undeadlords.net/
(DKPunch is our own in-house system)
It works fairly well in preventing the whole "Blow everything and /gquit" issue and gives people the feeling that new people aren't going to be hammered never sniff an item but at the same time it allows longer term members to feel like they aren't being screwed over.
In the end, there is no magic DKP system that fits every guild. Different group dynamics lead to different priorities. For me the very mention of a loot council throws me into fits of rage. For other groups it's the best workable option.
So if you had the bad luck of being apart of the shitty run but not the good one, you get screwed out of DKP.
It's not so bad starting out though, since there are almost never any drops that are passed on. It got really bad in my old guild though when no one rolled on anything but Rag loot etc etc.
Yeah the one used by UDL is by far the best I have seen yet. DKP based on attendance is really the way to go, with DKP accumulating for time spent instead of drops received.
Well the actual DKP is still important, because someone with a perfect 6week attendance and positive DKP will loot before someone with the same attendance and a negative dkp.
But since its zero sum, its -really- easy to move back and forth from negatives, so you end up with a whole slew of people looting as opposed to the same 2 or 3 people.
Yeah. Our EPGP (Effort Points/Gear Points, for people not in the know) breaks down like this:
(cut'n'paste from our forums)
Our last Kara clear added up to 160ish EPs.
Then we have gear point costs for items derived from our fancy-pants formula. T4 tokens cost 25-30 GPs depending on which part. (Same cost for all classes and not stat-derived, like normal items)
We have a backend to add stuff to the system that's easy to use mid-raid. Gear points get awarded instantly, EPs as soon as the raid is done. Not much to take notes for unless you swap people mid-raid, in which case you need to keep track on raid start/end and a separate join time for the new people, and then we check the WWS to count wipes/kills. Works like a charm.
The priority for stuff is then EP / GP. Both values decay by 10% each week after maintenance, to prevent both hoarding and inflation where old members have tons of points and new people start at zero.
The decay gives incentive to loot stuff as soon as possible, since the decay sets an upper limit to how many points you can have. If you get 100 EP per week you can never go above 1000 EP, since it decays by 100 each week.
Unfortunately my guild currently does not do this.
Might I suggest mcgib's awesome drawing?
Wasn't a bad run. Had some time issues with people swapping out and such, and we wiped on sub-20% Nightbane for a bit, but it went well overall and I got eight badges (although I still haven't seen Wrynn Dynasty Greaves, which irritates me.)
I think this one will do.
And one of the worst things I ever did was link the void crystals we got off of the Wrynn Dynasty Greaves. He has the worst luck with tanking drops.
He's got some really nifty stuff, some of which is quite NSFW.
OH SHIT
The only real problem I have with it is that it tends to encourage sharding offspec loot and trash drops, but our raid hasn't had too much trouble with this.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I'm still passing on SSC stuff for the main spec DPS guys, but I've started snagging some T4 and Kara ret gear now. The hope is to have enough gear to go ret in 25-mans from time to time, but for now I'm still way more useful as a healer.
Oh god, the last time i used one it just spun around in a circle until it blew up.
Well then it will be a short Trial.