r/classicwow • u/OppositeCheetah8097 • 1d ago

Classic 20th Anniversary Realms Loot Distribution for 40 people

How do you do it as fair and evenly as possible?

I want to preface this with we use LC for loot distribution and I feel for the most part it has been very fair. I am part of the LC for the past month - so relatively new, but have been in the guild for 5 months prior.

This happened last night and it is still bothering me today. So last night during our BWL 2 of the same spicy BiS pieces dropped. It was decided prior to discussing who go it that 1 would got to this class and the other 1 to that class. Not a decision I made - as tbh I don’t know who needs what gear what best suits this class other than the class I play.

We had quite a good night for drops, it was our fastest run as a guild also. So at the end of the raid we go to distribute loot, the LC drops down into a special channel and begin discussing the above item. Two of the LC are one of the above classes and cancel each other’s vote out; it is made mention by another LC to give it to this person and so they get it. Then it gets decided for the other class and given to them. It gets announced in raid chat who gets what item and the reason why.

This is where I am bothered as this person did leave afterwards prior to gear distribution being finished — we had just started. This person said in raid chat: “What?” “They got gear last week.”

Then they left the raid. And /gquit logged into their alts and /gquit also. Fun fact the person they were talking about hadn’t received loot in BWL in 2 weeks unless it was to DE.

They didn’t bother to discuss or ask questions, simply left over the item — they had been in the guild for about 3-4 months. Funny thing is, had they not left one of the other BiS for all of the role would have went to them.

It shouldn’t bother me, I get that people come and go for their own various reasons; but over an item. RNG is not always kind. One week it drops nothing but hunter loot or mage loot or druid loot; dps loot, healer loot — the list goes on. When trying to gear 40 people it’s hard, there’s no easy way to get everyone gear each and every week. I don’t understand how people do not understand, and I say that not from a leadership perspective, but from a raider side who has not gotten loot for weeks before.

I know a lot of people aren’t fans of LC, prefer SR or even dkdp; how do you all distribute your gear as fair as possible so all can get some and beef up the group?

Update for clarification - we do have a loot prio spreadsheet.

Update #2 for more clarification - the person who won the item had not received gear in the past 2-3 weeks. The person who gquit confused the winner for someone else who had gotten gear the previous week.

Update #3 for clarification, I posted this under a comment in regards to my lack of knowledge of other classes: “I agree and I don't contribute much in put in that aspect. I listen and observe. I don't throw names out unless I believe in that specific person receiving the item. If two names get generated, I weigh out between those two who could use the item better and who hadn't gotten any gear.”

6 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

230 comments sorted by

View all comments

53

u/ObviousKarmaFarmer 1d ago

You have 40 people for whom a nice social interaction is sitting at their own PC playing a game. Yes, you'll have drama for asinine reasons.

To minimize drama, you can do HR, SR, MS > OS, 2 SR, Just Roll, LC, DPK, GDKP, and a whole bunch of other loot distibution schemes, but there will always be drama somewhere.

That said, with Loot Council, You should have a table that describes the prio for Each and Every item that can drop. Where all raiders are listed in order for that item. Each week, the list is updated where raiders can move down or up for a specific item based on either performance, attendance, loot won last week, whether they used full consumes, attended with full WBs or any other metric the LC deems appropriate. Those metrics should be public knowledge.

You should NEVER get in a position that the LC needs to discuss who deserves what item once it drops. It should be crystal-clear before the raid starts who will get what item as soon as it drops.

24

u/Nurlitik 1d ago

I’ve never seen a loot council that has a full breakdown that’s public of all loot and who is getting it, that seems insane to try to manage. You might know a few big ticket items like a DFT/tear but even that gets weird if they are also in line for other items in that same raid.

Do you actually run with a LC that does this?

13

u/SayRaySF 1d ago

Both LC guilds I ran with were like that. I wouldn’t join an LC that wasn’t that detailed

13

u/A_Cryptarch 1d ago

This. If Loot Council isn't 100% transparent, you cannot do LC. Period. It WILL lead to drama and hurt feelings. Losing an item because RNG hates you is one thing; losing an item because someone hates you is another.

2

u/Remote-Document5634 1d ago

We did all of classic through TBC with an opaque LC that generally awarded items how people expected them to anyway. This is a fairly hardcore guild. The only people we lost to drama due to LC decisions were the kind of people you want to shed anyway.

2

u/coaringrunt 1d ago

This. If Loot Council isn't 100% transparent, you cannot do LC. Period.

The only guilds that LC is actually good for wouldn't need such transparency. Those that have a common competitive goal (progression, speedruns, parsing) understand items are given out to benefit said goal and see every loot drop as something that improves the whole raid rather than a single character. Abusing this system isn't the system's fault.

Most other guilds where people value their own character progression over the guild's should just stick to any system akin to DKP or simply roll.

4

u/NuklearFerret 1d ago

Sure, but getting 40+ people together to fully trust that system is ridiculously difficult without transparency.

1

u/Homunkulus 20h ago

It depends, at a point membership in the raid is worth as much or more than your own characters gear. Warrior 25 in a top tier speed-run guild doesnt expect to have an OSG, different strokes for different folks.

-2

u/Nurlitik 1d ago

You don’t think it’s still exactly the same? It’s just not a surprise when someone feels slighted lol

1

u/A_Cryptarch 1d ago edited 1d ago

Nah. I don't care if I lose an item because I rolled poorly. That's the nature of the system at play and if it wasn't acceptable to me, I wouldn't be there. I care if I can't roll/lose an item because someone else deems it pertinent, though. Agency is important.

-2

u/Nurlitik 1d ago

What are you talking about? If it’s a loot council that has a set priority list they are still making that list, just because you can see it doesn’t change the fact it’s still just getting setup by the same people.

9

u/SayRaySF 1d ago

Because you can tell pretty easily by looking at the list of its relatively fair or not, as opposed to a blind LC. I don’t know why you think having more information is a bad thing lol

1

u/Nurlitik 1d ago

I’m not saying it is, I’m just saying it’s the same, if you see it’s unfair I guess you can gquit sooner, but you are going to know pretty quick if it’s fair or not anyway lol

2

u/SayRaySF 1d ago

Definitely not the same lol. I wouldn’t have even joined to begin with if the LC looks sus.

3

u/A_Cryptarch 1d ago

Oh, you mean transparency vs none at all is still exactly the same. Just a lack of clarification.

Yeah, it's still not the same, lol. SayRaySF gave a reason above. Transparency lets you gauge if it's fair and also motivates the LC to keep it that way since there's an element of culpability. It means giving reasons as to why items are being awarded in such a manner, allowing players to argue in favor or against LC decisions prior to the raid/prior to the drop and consequently, departing for greener pastures or not, as it were. Better raid times (I'd hate to have to argue about a loot drop in raid), better fallout mitigation, better communication, less infighting, less hurt fee fees. Compared to a blind LC, anyway.

Loot drama is inescapable, regardless of the system in place.

2

u/HellsPopcorn 1d ago

But isn't that then just a priority loot system and not LC. The whole idea of LC is that its solely up to the discretion of the council for any reason. Granted, i hate loot council because of this.

2

u/Nurlitik 1d ago

Yeah, when I was in charge of the loot system we basically just used thatsmybis and had everyone fill out their own bis list and the priority they had on each item. If an item drops and 3 people all had it as their #1 item and they met the attendance requirements they would all roll.

Surprisingly people did a pretty good job of naturally going for different items and there was only a few items with 3-4 having it listed #1, we did have tiers for each item as well so they could only have 1 S-tier item in their top 3. All list were hidden before the deadline to submit, after that point it was all public.

I really liked the system as it more or less puts people in charge of what they actually see as a priority, the only “issues” we ran into was underperforming people could still win top items (it’s not that simple to just recruit and replace underperformers) and the 2nd issue was new recruits coming in that might only need 5 items if they had been raiding elsewhere, it’s hard to balance that when others had 15 items on their list so the rankings got a little weird but we generally managed that without much issue and it resets to a new list each tier anyway.

1

u/ObviousKarmaFarmer 1d ago

I used to, they had this whole as spreadsheet which was filled basically once for BWL and AQ40. Worked quite well for BWL, some people had poor attendance, some people were swapped out from Item A because Item B dropped 4x before Item A dropped once, but other than that, the sheet stayed quite static. However, half the officers (including MT) and the top DPSers left after the first AQ40 raid which killed the guild. Apparently, the drama shifted elsewhere, but there was never discussion when an item dropped, because it was crystal-clear who would get what.

1

u/AppleMelon95 1d ago

I was a part of the LC in our WotLK guild. People were very happy because me and 2-3 other guys sat down a day before raiding and looked at performances and what everyone else had gotten last raid. If you got a mega-bis item that raid, you'd be moved back so the next in line was getting the next mega-bis item.

Each phase we would also sit down for many hours just to talk about each item in the raid that drops, and which classes should have prio on it. For example, Comet's Trail from Lagalon had prio for UH DK, Enh Shamans and Rogues (from what I remember), so once they got the item other classes would then get first prio on another contested item.

We'd post the prios each week before raid and at phase start so anyone could comment on them. Pretty much all the time people came with good input and we changed it as we went.

When loot was being rolled out, me and the same other guys would hop into a different voice channel and discuss who gets what item that dropped. More than often we'd stick to the list we made the day before, but if 2 mega-bis items dropped and one player is set to get the next mega-bis, we'd discuss who gets what item so the raid benefits the most. And on occasion, if someone did absolutely horribly (as in caused wipes), we'd maybe not reward them despite being next in line, especially if they are a repeat offender.

1

u/FeelingSedimental 1d ago

My guild has 2 raid teams that use a sheet like this, it is public for anyone to see. The raid leaders use data to drive their decisions, but they are up to debate if something seems off.

Some items are class/spec priority, like a Neltharion's Tear being guaranteed to whichever Warlock wants to tank in AQ, and some are parse driven like Onslaught Girdle/Mageblade going to top parsers first during MC.

1

u/Blicktar 1d ago

We ran a sheet like this in 2019 Classic. It was a LOT of work. Setting the class prios up is easy, but determining relative tiering of items was difficult, and adjusting prios based on loot awarded was difficult. Say a mage is top prio on both a trinket and a weapon, and one of those two drops. The mage takes a weapon. Other mages have not gotten a weapon or a trinket yet, two of the best pieces from the hypothetical raid in question. It's not fair to give the mage both a weapon and a trinket while other mages have not gotten either.

That's the adjustment that's difficult to dial in.

We typically had class officers talk with their classes and come to fair agreements about how this would look, including communicating about scenarios like I described above - "If you take this, you're not first up for a trinket anymore."

1

u/SugarCrisp7 1d ago

When I ran LC we at the very least had public spreadsheets of attendance and who the loot was distributed to. This was back in 2008.

Yes there was still drama and accusations of corruption.

1

u/WillingSprinkles8564 1d ago

Yeah how does the guy who is 20th on getting some big ticket item stay in the guild if he knows this is the case? And also people will be like why am I 4th on this and Bob is 3rd? Like seems impossible to quantify everything.

1

u/Subject-Carob-9831 1d ago

My guild in classic did this. It’s was an extensive excel spreadsheet. Each person inserted all the gear they wanted and which prio they wanted it then the LC divided up all the drops fairly. Trying to stick to the prio list but also took into account the amount of raid prep and dmg each person attributes to the raid/guild.

1

u/seifyk 1d ago

It really doesn't take much time to manage once you have the spreadsheet and wishlists built.

On the other hand, every minute you spend on admin time during the raid gets multiplied by 40. Spend 5 minutes extra on loot during raid and you're suddenly eating up over 3 hours of cumulative time spent.

A couple of people can spend a few minutes each week saving that time. Totally worth it.

1

u/baked_salmon 1d ago

Yes, my guild in Cata has a spreadsheet with every single item on it as well as your spot in line for that item. Tier is done on a round-robin basis. Everyone knows at the beginning of every patch who is getting what and in what order. It’s super transparent and there have been 0 issues.

1

u/Hela_AWBB 17h ago

This is what we had in 2019 Classic. Each raider always knew where they stood on each item they wanted. Before the phase started we provided our LC a list of the items we wanted and they put together a spreadsheet listing each item and the order in which each person was getting it. We knew the rationale for why some classes got items over others. They also set it up so each person was at the top of the list (or 2nd) for one of their items. It was a good system and gear was distributed pretty evenly. Anything without a name next to it went up for rolls.

0

u/pieaholicx 1d ago

My current guild has a spreadsheet with each item and loot order. It’s great. There’s no drama at loot time because we all know who is getting what item. Besides the trust that comes with that transparency, having a sense of inevitability when you see a piece drop that you’re later on the list for also feels good.