Pro/Cons Loot Council

[SaionVHR]

Afternoon Everyone

Wanted to ask the above question to the public to get some insight.
Our issue is recruitment, late game, I know, but I have had several great interviews, but get to loot in the conversation, we use epgp with 10% decay every raid with a sound system of EP reward timed towards kills, attempts and hourly, that causes me to keep getting nope from potential raiders. I currently see and have noted several teams using Loot Council.

Thoughts?? Pro/Cons
How is it used?
What steps do I have to do to prepare it's use??
What info do I need to have to be fair on its use??

Comments, Links, Videos are all welcome and thank you.

[Deja Thoris]

Pros, it lets you assign loot to the people who should be getting it. Cons, people whisper you with "why am I not getting that piece!"

Make a council of 3 people, use the RC lootcouncil addon so people can need / greed and then the council votes and hands it out. All you need to do is configure your lootcouncil addon.

In fairness changing your looting system is more about the people than the addons you use. Get buyin from your team and address their concerns or you will have a shitstorm. I can't empasize this enough.

To be fair? Ideally you should have a clue what is bis for people, when they last got loot and so on. People should also see you as being transparent so they understand how you arrived at a decision.

[Kuruption]

The only con is if you have idiots as part of the council. If you have fair people, it's easily the best loot system out there.

[SaionVHR]

I have seen the term best used at high frequency in other threads, videos and online material, but how exactly is it the best?? It is clearly the standard loot system for high end raiding and has been for time now. Interested in why it evolved into being numero uno.

[Deja Thoris]

I have seen the term best used at high frequency in other threads, videos and online material, but how exactly is it the best?? It is clearly the standard loot system for high end raiding and has been for time now. Interested in why it evolved into being numero uno.

Because people can game epgp by passing on items that benefit them so that they can spend more on items they "want". Of course decay allieviates this but it does not eliminate it. Also, that mythic WF 2 hander with a socket might end up going to your raids "I stand in fire!" player instead of a good one under epgp.

[Lilija]

Pros:
- you can distribute loot more efficiently
- your raid members don't really need to worry too much about the loot - they just state if they want something and that's it

Cons:
- slightly more work for officers

Anyway, I was always in favour of loot council. Especially in how loot is nowadays (coins, wf, sockets), numerical loot systems will have issues (that's why my current guild switched to LC during MoP). Loot council is much more flexible and interestingly enough lowers the amount of loot drama (at least that was my experience both as an officer in a LC guild and being a member). With numericla systems there will always be some flaw leading to abuse and people tend to argue about that constantly. LC just works. Ofc, you need certain maturity of people for it and level of trust for your officers. But then again if you have a loot whore in the group they will be a problem regardless of loot system. What I find happens the most with LC is that eventually officers discuss with those interested with particular item, who might benefit the most. In my experience, people respond quite well for this kind of approach.

[shi]

I have seen the term best used at high frequency in other threads, videos and online material, but how exactly is it the best?? It is clearly the standard loot system for high end raiding and has been for time now. Interested in why it evolved into being numero uno.

You can put loot into the hands of people who will do the most with it. Could mean you'll complete 2p faster instead of having two people with 1p, or it could mean giving the BiS trinket to your best player instead of having it go to one of your mediocre players.

However it depends a lot on how well researched your loot council is. One of the guilds I was in decided to give one of our first heroic class trinkets to our resto Druid instead of one of or mages/Ferals/balance, when the Druid already had leech trinket/phylactery which is way better for progression. The Druid then proceeded to use class trinket instead of leech for the rest of prog despite leech being a better choice on most fights, prob because he cared more about flourish numbers showing up on skada/WCL while leech wouldn't.

[clevin]

EPGP is far better than /roll since rewards consistent attendance. (this can be adjusted if you give EP for kills, etc). It was great for midlevel guilds where a) you needed a fixed number of people to even make the raid go (before flex, when raids were 10 or 25 only). It also guards against the person who shows up occasionally doing a /roll and winning something that a regular raider had been wanting forever. IN short, it links loot to participation and keeps loot mostly to the regular raiders.

However, LC can do all of this without rigid mechanics and if you're aiming to be a mythic guild you will end up kicking/benching the people who have poor attendance anyway. It also allows you to intelligently apply policies. For example, if a raider needed to skip a reset because of a good reason they're not necessarily penalized - the people on the LC can deal with that. It also lets you gear according to your own preferences (i.e. DPS before heals, etc).

The downsides are several, though, and while they're easy to guard against, you DO need to think them through:

1) Favoritism... My friend, spouse, fellow officer get loot before others. This is death to a raid. You can avoid this by rotating who's on the council. Note that this is partly a perception issue as well as what you're really doing.
2) Using loot to punish underperformers. If you have someone who's truly not cutting it then as a RL it's up to you to talk to them in private and tell them that they need to do better. The wimpy, chickenshit RLs just don't give these people loot without telling them why and this, of course, just widens the gap.
3) The LC needs to know something about stats, etc so they know if a piece is really better for the lock or the mage (for example). There's also some record-keeping that should be done so you know that the lock has gotten the last 2 pieces, etc.
4) Lack of raid buy in. Don't just develop a loot policy and then not tell people about things like a strategy of gearing DPS first,etc. COMMUNICATE.

[Jamber]

I have seen the term best used at high frequency in other threads, videos and online material, but how exactly is it the best?? It is clearly the standard loot system for high end raiding and has been for time now. Interested in why it evolved into being numero uno.

Its because the officers/heads can distribute the loot in sauch a way to maximize impact on the raid group, thus allow a smoother and more productive progression of future raids. You have full say (as the council) in who gets loot, and you never have to worry about your hands being tied as a BiS piece goes to a class it's not BiS for.

The only issues that may arise comes from when your raiders feel shafted or slighted. This system works best with players who are interested in progressing as a group first, and care about themselves' wants second.

However, that being said, it is more work for the council, and you do need to be sure not to just give pieces to the "core" players and ignore new ones. I used this system for years from wrath to mop, but it worked especially well since the whole group was comprised of individuals who played with each other even prior to it, and we were open and honest with why loot went where.

[bicycle]

Pros:
loot is handed out in a sane manner

Cons:
Morons complain about it.

[Kib]

All the pros and cons have been pretty much stated already...

If your raid is worried about transparency in the voting, favoritism, etc. I suggest you add a rotating member to the loot council.
Let's say you have 3-4 officers, at the beginning of the week have raiders /roll 100, highest roll is part of the loot council for that week. We used to do this back in the guild i was in SoO and people enjoyed that.

An other thing or rule if you want, No one and I mean No one should be able to vote on a piece of gear that they want (I'm pretty sure you can setup up RCLC for that as well). Again to help with transparency, etc.

[PosPosPos]

Cons:
Morons complain about it.

Replace them like you are supposed to(unless it's a legitimate complaint like the bis mage trinket is going to a healer first).

[kamuimac]

Pros : its the most effective and giving best resoults gearing system for progression

Cons: its the most subjective and prone to corruption loot system that exists in game -_-

either way i have yet to see a guild that uses loot council and doesnt have ton of people unhappy about how loot is distributed even if they say that its for good of guild jezus the amount of whispers about how X,Y,Z was unfair because they gear up fotm classes first.

[Summer]

Loot council allows you to prioritize who you want to gear:
- Reward for attendance / skill
- Preparation for upcoming progress (gear the specs you need for upcoming wall boss, including alts if needed - DK's & Mannoroth says hi)
- Hand out tier tokens in a smart way when starting in a new tier (instead of 4 people having one token each you get 1 person with 4 set == more raid output)
etc. etc.

The downsides of LC are sometimes people will perceive the decisions as unfair and then discussion is needed, and sometimes the LC makes mistakes. LC can also slow the raid down if they're slow with making the decisions (do not put your RL or tanks in the LC).

If you do change in to LC I recommend writing short guidelines on your website on what principles loot will be handed out. This will both make it faster for the LC as they have thought the stuff out in advance and also let your raid know what to expect, and be able to offer feedback and suggestions if they feel improvement is needed without wasting raid time. Also if and when you do make the transition, go and test the addons etc. in advance, I was once in a guild that took up LC without pretty much any work in advance and it was pretty bad - don't waste people's time

[Deleted]

Pros;

- With a good team you can distribute loot correctly to get the most output out of your team
- It's quick, as long as you have a good addon in place to see who has what and your guild is clear what and what isn't BiS it doesn't take long
- An odd number, 3 preferably, means no disagreements

Cons;

- High end guilds as well as low end guilds get loot drama, someone does more on the fight it drops and therefore is annoyed when they don't get something.
- People management, being the former GM of a raiding guild that used it I think I spent maybe 75% of my time explaining why someone didn't get loot. People get butthurt incredibly easily
- Having to explain to someone who plays a strong class badly that they aren't getting loot because someone who plays a bad class exceptionally well is very difficult

Neither for nor against;

Again, having been on the loot council as GM of a raiding guild this corruption thing is a bunch of shit. If your guild claims there's corruption it's probably because the Loot Council is actually working. Bad players shouldn't get loot. We fucked up and chose class over skill early on and adjusted it, the people who played Mages and Druids were given loot, then played awfully, so we stopped giving them loot and prio'd the decent players for mythic loot. If this is corruption then basically every guild in the world that isn't shite does this.

The biggest challenge with Loot Council is BiS loot. When handing out HC loot everyone will claim an upgrade is BiS. In the case of my previous guild we had myself with fairly extensive knowledge of all dps, a healer with extensive knowledge of all healers and a melee with a mixture of healer and DPS knowledge so we covered all bases excluding tank, however tanks were Guardian and Prot pala so you're looking at very different stats.

The other thing is raider involvement. Nothing would piss me off more than us handing out loot and me (because I was the only one that got whispered) getting whispered from someone who hadn't posted ANY loot requests on the forums, moaning about not being given something they claim is BiS. Baring in mind this would be Heroic gear, you'll need at least 1 person with enough people skills to explain to the fuckwits that don't post on your forums... That well it's tough shit.


Though my post and a lot of others sound very negative, if you have the team, time and knowledge to build a strong Loot Council it will go far.

[Khebul]

Pros:
- Allows loot funneling during progression, which helps alot
- Impossible to game the system and bank DKP only for BIS items

Cons:
- People on council need to know BIS list for literally everyone in the game
- Personal relations matter than distributing loot

EPGP is way more complex to manage than Loot Council, I would never chose EPGP as the system to progress with. Having 4 people with 1 piece of tier each is way worse than having one guy with 4-set from the get go. Same goes for trinkets.

People will always be at least somewhat unsatisfied with how the loot is distributed, probably more so when progression is over. The best thing to mitigate that is to have some rule set in mind, explain it to your raiders and stick to it. E.g. the goal is for everyone to have set of BIS gear, and then ensure everyone has roughly the same amount of WF/socketed items.

If you are going to run Loot Counil - get RCLC addon.

[Axphism]

Pros:
- Allows loot funneling during progression, which helps alot
- Impossible to game the system and bank DKP only for BIS items

Cons:
- People on council need to know BIS list for literally everyone in the game
- Personal relations matter than distributing loot

EPGP is way more complex to manage than Loot Council, I would never chose EPGP as the system to progress with. Having 4 people with 1 piece of tier each is way worse than having one guy with 4-set from the get go. Same goes for trinkets.

People will always be at least somewhat unsatisfied with how the loot is distributed, probably more so when progression is over. The best thing to mitigate that is to have some rule set in mind, explain it to your raiders and stick to it. E.g. the goal is for everyone to have set of BIS gear, and then ensure everyone has roughly the same amount of WF/socketed items.

If you are going to run Loot Counil - get RCLC addon.

Regarding the bolded part: my CO-GM and I had our raiders do their own research and post their BIS list on our guild forums. It sort of served two purposes:

1. It forced our raiders to learn what gear they should actually be going for, so they weren't wasting the loot councils time when they hit "Need" on RCLootCouncil for no good reason.
2. It saved our time doing that research and we just compiled their lists on one big page to double-check against.

[Echo of Soul]

The only con really is when the loot council start to give loot to the people they like or who performs well rather than the people who need it. Happened to me in the beginning of WOD where I played one of the classes that didn't perform or scale as well as the others which meant that the officers didn't give any members of my class any loot and instead gave it to the ones that were already OP and then they started to question our performance since everyone else did so much better than us.

[Axphism]

The only con really is when the loot council start to give loot to the people they like or who performs well rather than the people who need it. Happened to me in the beginning of WOD where I played one of the classes that didn't perform or scale as well as the others which meant that the officers didn't give any members of my class any loot and instead gave it to the ones that were already OP and then they started to question our performance since everyone else did so much better than us.

Did you not just have a simple conversation with your officers and let them know that your class/spec is one that scales better with gear? If so, and they ignored you, then it's likely time to just find another guild.

That was a mistake we intentionally avoided right from the start when we started raiding.

[Quibble]

Make a council of 3 people, use the RC lootcouncil addon so people can need / greed and then the council votes and hands it out. All you need to do is configure your lootcouncil addon.

This, except for the RC lootcouncil part.. my guild tried it out once.. it was horrible ineffective and just a huge fucking pain in the ass, comapared to just using the ingame rolling system to show interest and then having a lootcouncil make dicisions based on peoples current gear (which can easily be tracked with stuff like exorsus, which many people have anyway, or just inspecting.)

Before we got a loot council, we always made people link the item they wanted to replace, and the person who had the worst item, would get the upgrade (if it was BiS for them, or just a colossal improvement.