I do have a couple of months of officer experience. Unfortunately for me I did it because I felt I needed to to keep the guild alive, it was not something I wanted to do and therefore it burnt me out and I gave the responsibilities away as soon as I saw the guild was ready to take it on from there. I tried to never have the appearance of gear benefiting myself or the leadership by making excel sheets with number counts to try to keep loot distribution as even across the guild as possible based on standard parameters (attendance, performance, world buffs, consumables, etcetera).
But the main point here what Crossie also says is despite that I didn’t like being Officer, the thing that keeps you rewarded is the praise you sometimes get when a guildie notices what you do for the guild and said ‘Good job man’. That’s worth more then any loot you give yourself to feel ‘rewarded’.
Leadership already has its own intangible benefits. As an officer in my guild, I have a say in guild strategies, schedules, have an almost-assured raid spot and, in a more general sense, I have more control over the guild’s aims and directions than any member could hope for.
I really don’t need to get awarded extra DKP on top of it.
We run a LC guild - there’s 5 “leadership” people (we don’t have a dedicated GM) on the council along with all the class leaders… So far we’ve only had one person leave the guild (since release) due to LC decisions (a hunter who was not given prio on Ashkandi), and the biggest concern “recently” was why we didn’t give the boomkin lok’amir until after a few healers had it.
At this point, with classic being so easy, I’m not sure we really need to council much any more - as it stands, apart from a few items being prio for some classes, most of the stuff gets raidrolled between “eligible” members anyway. The idea of having a council was (and still is) to try and distribute items fairly and relatively evenly over time - but that will always be somewhat subjective, and we can only do our best.
If your council is giving desired items to people based on arbitrary decisions then it really is the fault of the council, not the system IMO.
But isn’t that a contradiction? If you have a system, you dont need loot council, you just hand out loot based on that system.
Loot Council is by definition not a system per se and is handing out loot on arbritary decitions. You can run other systems along with LC, for example roll or a loot list etc, but LC is not a system. In my opinion. I’m not saying it’s bad. But it’s not a system. Well its a system based on arbritary decitions. Unless you have a different system that have specific parameters, but then its not LC.
That’s kinda one of the main reasons why I don’t like LC in Classic, in general. Even when playing fair, many LCs come to the obvious conclusion that there’s really no major difference between their core members (at least in terms of skill/attendance - sure there might be some fine differences you can make such as who uses more consumables or bothered with PvP, but that’s a problem in its own right), and thus resort to some kind of “qualified raid rolling”.
Personally, I prefer a point system like DKP because, unlike raid rolling, it slowly improves my chance of grabbing an item I want next time, until I can actualy ensure I’ll get it (and not just because nobody else needs it anymore). At a subtler, more psychological level, it helps not making me feel like I got nothing at the end of the raid if I got no items at all.
About LC 5:07 “Now back in the day it made sense because you wanted your set bonus as quickly as possible in some people, so they could carry the raid essentially. But people are clearing Molten Core in 45 minutes in green gear.”
Craving it is not what I said. I mean it might be fair sometimes to give a piece of gear to someone who put in a lot of effort for the guild (isn’t that obvious?). I’ve never been an officer or GM btw and I can understand they don’t want to seem corrupt.
Ofc, any LC must keep track of attendance and performance. I’m not talking about giving yourself a bunch of loot, but rather the GM and other officers might want to give you a piece to reward you for your work, and they can even be totally transparent with this and ask the guild if they agree and ofc it would only make sense if u also had high attendance and high performance on top.
Maybe it’s not needed as you say, but from a raidmembers perspective I think it would be OK to sometimes reward the officers for their work. As a member I sometimes feel like a freeloader, not helping with the plans or strategies. Just show up, press buttons, get loot
If you want to donate more to your guild leadership, feel free. I for one would rather not risk joining a guild only to end up working for somebody else. Which is why I vastly prefer the transparency offered by a DKP system.
You’re talking about a full guild vote situation here. Unfortunately some LC’s think they can award loot without consulting people and maybe even think they are entitled to it based on their efforts. Those LC’s most people dislike and it gives LC as a whole a bad name. I am lucky not to have been in such a LC, in my experience most have at least the right intention. But then comes the matter of knowledge and beliefs, and even with the right intentions you can base your decisions on things you think are true which are not transparant until you have been in the guild for some time.
Yeah, like other ppl said before, I think it’s not the “LC method” itself that is the problem, but rather about how it’s done and having the right ppl on the LC. It also needs transparency and some kind of metrics, like attendance, performance and current gear, or it won’t work well, I think.
Whether LC works well or not is 100% dependand on people running it as people have pointed out. Theoretically if the council are benevolent saints and omniscient it’s the best loot distribution method by far. Of course that’s impossible but you can get pretty close to it if they’re fair enough and the guild members aren’t too difficult when it comes to loot. Sometimes they can be “corrupt” and just want as much loot as possible for themselves but other times officers will try to avoid the accusation of being “corrupt” so much they’ll end up being the worst geared of their class. If you don’t like your particular loot council experience it’s probably because your specifil council is “bad” or rather incompatible with what you want from the game.
As a GM in a LC guild I have mixed feelings about LC. The purpose of LC compared to other methods is to take decisions that will benefit the guild the most longterm. So what do we consider
Upgrade: how much of an upgrade (compared to what you have and what is/will be avaible)
attendance: Obviously
Performance: This is not just your dps, but includes doing the right things at the right time (such as decurse, using consumes), and specially not doing the wrong things.
Loyalty: Not just to the guild but also to classic wow. All the gear you have been granted which you leave with needs to be replaced. This is obviously very hard to know, so is largerly based on feelings. This is why trust between the loot council and the guild is so important.
Reliable: It really sucks giving a person a spot on the raid and then he doesn’t show, it wastes everyones time.
Helpfull: Helping other people in the guild with farming gear, consumes, doing scepter quest, etc. But there is also a significant amount of time going into organizing every week.
It is so significant for LC that the trust is there. Both that the LC trust that it raiders will stay and the raiders trust the LC to have the guilds best interest at heart.
I tried talking about that and some other topics a bunch of times, eventually the GM said “If you don’t like it you can always leave, you know”, I left and then it was kinda the surprised Pikachu meme.
A handful of people left shortly after the BWL release and the guild disbanded. I’m very happy where I am now. We use DKP (10% weekly decay) with some items being reserved for some classes / roles and obviously MS>OS, which is something I like. Also the leadership is way more open for input from the rest of the guild.
If you are not CEO for they joy of representing the company you are in for the wrong reasons. CEOs don’t need to get money, all they need is the prestige.
Personally i think loot council works great for guilds with clear goals. For example if you are method pushing for world first, or progress pushing for fastest AQ clear time it becomes very easy to just push gear on who ever it benefits the most for your guilds goal, and everyone is happy about it.
I think it can get very messy when you’re in a social guild that is not speed running trying to balance attendance, dps, seniority, and all kinds of other things. You end up with 1 guy arguing he has 100% attendance vs another guy doing more dps with lower attendance vs an officer putting way more time into the guild than either of them. When the guild has no clear goal, it’s really hard to weigh up these different factors in a way that most of your 40 players will think is fair.
Personally i think LC is just a drama machine is social guilds, but by far the best loot system in high end guilds.
The big difference, here, is that players have a much bigger bargaining power against GMs and officers in general than workers have against CEOs (unless you picked some kind of lame meme spec). If a GM tries to raise his own “pay” the same way certain CEOs do, nothing stops a player from just leaving for another guild. And there’re enough GMs around the world who’re willing to do their jobs without asking for any special privileges that, unless you’re REALLY good at your game (or have other forms of appeal, like being a famous streamer), you can’t truly expect to attract a significant playerbase if you treat them unfairly loot-wise.
To put it in other terms - it’s not that CEOs have really good pays because they somehow deserve them. They just have the bargaining power to command them, in ways GMs just cannot.
Loot Council will always make someone feel cheated. You need exceptional leaders that read logs very carefully to truly judge someone’s performance and are knowledgeable about their class. Most council members can’t be bothered with that so they just look at the meter and some attendance and reward whoever they feel like.
The current content is piss easy and loot should never be given away to speed up progress except maybe for tanks.
What you gonna speed up? - 5 minutes, when you spend 3 hours getting world buffed?
EPGP is the fairest system IMHO.
The problem though is that, skill-wise, Classic rly isn’t that hard. Most of the intra-guild differences in performance are due more to consumables, world buffs, gear, race, professions etc. than any display of skill inside the raid. Which is part of why I’d never go along with LC in Vanilla, but would at least consider it in TBC and especially WotLK
I might be biased, but I think we’ve done OK so far… We expect (as a council) that some people will be upset that they don’t get X item, especially if that item is either rare or highly contested - but we genuinely want those people to understand why the item was awarded to someone else and see our point of view. Whether it’s because we’re generally a guild of dadgamers™ or because most of the guild are super laid back we haven’t had any serious issues.
I’m not saying LC is perfect, all of the council members have had concerns over the last few months - whether it’s the potential for some classes to get shafted, or the people who go “above and beyond” in terms of effort (consumes/wbuffs) not seeing as big a reward as they perhaps expect - these things get raised, we take it seriously, some of the 15min meetings end up going on for 4 fecking hours.
DKP would undoubtedly be easier to manage… But as a casual, mostly 30-something guild we wanted a way to reward effort that wouldn’t generally be recorded via a points system. Helping people level/attune, farming mats for the guild bank (that filters back into raid consumes for the guild) - the list goes on. Same goes for gearing up key roles if needed, extra tanks or healers to replace people who have quit or gone afk without penalising those latecomers to a point where they will always be last to get decent gear in the next tier of content.
LC is always going to be open to abuse, I’m not denying that, I just think it has the potential to be “fairer” in a more human way (taking more into account) compared to simply spending points on items.
All that being said, with what we know now about how easy classic is, I doubt we’d take LC forward into TBC - it takes a lot of effort to organise compared to just letting people buy items with points.
