After a year plus of Dragonflight I have found the current loot-roll system in raid to be more harmful to keeping a positive social environment in a guild than helpful as a system in the game. It creates more social problems with no controls for the raid leader to influence or minimize those conflicts or grievances. Some people like to play a ton and some people only like to raid on their main. It creates problems where we cant break up giving out loot to mains, then alts, then to anybody else with any sort of controls. People can see who is winning rolls and getting loot and sometimes its the lowest performers, and people get annoyed.
Personal loot had some of these problems but all of the rolls and distribution was obfuscated away from where players could see it, so they were less likely to get mad at each other and were generally more calm. Additionally loot was eventually freely trade-able so anybody that got something they didn’t need could be put up for roll among mains then alts.
I would prefer a return either to personal loot so people cant see who did or didn’t roll on what. Or an increase in controls for raid leaders so we could actually manage loot distribution easier among such a wide variety of players. Ultimately all of the problems of personal loot felt like it created a better social environment. If we have to keep the current system can we get anything to exert control and smooth out these frictions? Trying to ask players not to roll or to trade items they won is very frustrating.
I mean it sounds like your guild’s social atmosphere is to blame vs the loot system itself. You have the option to use something like RC loot council to help run a loot council or make it a guild rule to pass on all items, have your RL loot them, and then decide if alts can roll on an item or not.
We shouldn’t need to use a bunch of add-ons and force people not roll on items to fix a problem caused by a lack of controls in the game. That’s not a good solution. This is an MMO. Its an inherently social experience. The lack of social interaction tools in the game is ridiculous. Have you ever had to try and use the in-game calendar to set up events? Have you noticed the dire lack of guild options and controls? If we need to fundamentally break how people experience a piece of the game to solve a problem that means that piece of the game is broken and needs fixing.
The important thing is to just be clear and consistent. I try to avoid doing loot council stuff since it tends to be nitpicky and can easily form into drama even if its “fair”. That said for my guild we run a system where we just free roll if the item is plausibly an upgrade, trinkets and weapons tend to be under scrutiny among the raid at large, but I avoid having hard rules on them since its just something to discuss if its a problem. The big one though is that we just keep a spreadsheet at the start of the patch to see who has tier and who doesn’t and those who already have 4 set can’t roll on further tier(ie lfr->normal->heroic token upgrades) till their token is done for the raid at large.
I’m sure the loot system could be improved, but the same could be said for older systems too. I’m not fond of personal loot making armor stacking beneficial and its always tilting to kill a boss and get 4 rings/necks/cloaks which is likelier in personal loot due to loot tables. Masterloot seems excessive for most groups it isn’t really needed except for the highest end and the highest end has ways to imitate it.
I don’t have any particular fix to suggest. I’m not a designer, its not my job, but I can identify that something is wrong and there is a problem that I would like some sort of tool to address it. I would like it if we didnt need to cobble together some solution with add-ons to a core part of the game.
So there’s layers to this. You’re talking guild(it sounds like), this is a guild leadership issue, the guild needs to lay down ground rules its member follow. If your guild leaders say “Hey, Alts can come to the raid but mains take priority.” then the bloody alts need to pass on all gear for the mains, you threw in “anybody else” there so I assume you’re talking about your low performers, but again, this is a guild issue, if you have low performers and you don’t like them getting loot over better members, then you either A) Boot them, or B) don’t bring them to the raid. All of the loot in the raid is tradable, and it seems like the entirety of this post is your guild’s inability to manage how to raid with people who think other people don’t deserve loot for whatever reason.
Personal loot is/was better in pugs. In guild groups people were mad they couldn’t trade items that weren’t an upgrade because the ilvl was higher. Loot was not freely tradable with personal loot.
This version of group loot they’re using is 100% better for organized guilds/groups focused on progression short of Master Loot, which we’re not getting back because rotten players ruined ML for everyone… All raid loot is tradable in raids in Dragonflight.
I’ve re-read your post like 3 times, and I’ve just come to the conclusion you’re raiding with disorganized guild/pug hybrids that makes for a miserable experience.
I def think Personal loot is better for pugs/disorganized groups as people just get mad at Blizzard instead of mad at each other, but if they brought back personal loot and made it freely tradable you’d probably still run into the problem of your awful raid groups being terrible people to one another about who gets what.
My TLDR Advise: Find better people to raid with consistently.
Sounds like your guild has maturity and responsibility issues.
Before I stopped raiding this tier, the rule until everyone had 4 set was 4 set took priority over ilvl, and once we cleared AoTC alts were allowed in but alts couldn’t roll over mains still trying to gear. Literally zero drama, zero problems.
I can remember a guild I used to play with long time ago… back in TBC. we were raiding Kara… every time a boss would die, everyone would group up and start inspecting others looking to see who would get the most out of the gear that dropped… no one say I want that or I dont get this or that… it was player1 would get the most out of this what do you guys think and so on… i miss this kind of team work…
its people… no matter what loot system there is we will always have people that don’t care about others and will take anything they can. master loot was the worst for this, even though I know it could be used for good things too…
So you’re suggestion is your raiders suck and should get bent? Great suggestion real helpful. Your only actual suggestion being the same problem as before “don’t interact with fundamental systems of the game and create some cobbled together behavioral system”. What?! I’ve never thought to just ask people not to roll before! Or its just stupid that we should need to take 3 - 5 minutes after every boss to be figuring out loot and I would like a fix in the game itself. What an outlandish idea asking a game to be better. Say like having a 4th option above greed and below transmog as an alt roll, solving half the problems. Wow what a concept.
Somehow you read it 3 times misunderstood the situation and suggested the same thing a previous poster suggested. I don’t expect anything to come of this post, but I would like to see improvements in the current system. Cause there can be improvements.
I mean you don’t need the addons. Yes, the current system interface does not support a master loot-type system but you, the players, can create that environment if you can all agree to a common goal. It sounds like that is not the case given your guild is bringing in alts and having them take gear from mains. You could have everyone pass and then say in Discord “OK mains roll for Pip’s” for example. It’s as simple as that with no addon required. You say that the loot options are stifling social interaction, yet I can tell you right now what you are running into is a complete lack of interpersonal discussion within your guild to set expectations and goals that would incentivize (not force) guild members to be more considerate regarding loot and allow your guild to somewhat gear your raiders strategically.
I will say, that addons like RCloot council and utilizing WowAudit in conjunction with Droptimizer from Raidbots have had loot distribution be incredibly seamless for my guild. But the only reason my guild has been able to achieve that is that we set a very clear expectation with our recruits regarding the requirements for getting loot: ensuring you’re uploading a new sim before raid for the most accurate information regarding dps gains, and putting in an honest effort as seen by doing at least 4 keys a week for the first few weeks and doing your best in the raid; not parsing necessarily but doing what is best for the getting the kill even if it means you losing on damage to ensure we don’t wipe. Then we consider the numbers.
I would 100% agree that the fewer add-ons we have to use the better for something like this but it seems like your guild members are using that as a means to be greedy for loot. I’d say bring it up with your guild leadership and the rest of your guild regarding people being more considerate with loot. I also will recognize that I am coming from the perspective of being in a mid-tier mythic guild where we have heroic on the farm by week 3 and were reclearing the first 5 bosses of mythic for at least 6-7 weeks. But for the context of the atmosphere we have in our guild, after week 5 we stated that Heroic would not be loot-council and it is open roll via the in-game loot system including alts. But even then, we still ran sims for heroic so people had an idea of what people still needed and we had an understanding that if say for example a Main still needed a heroic brand, people on alts would pass for somebody’s main to get geared for the raid. And I will admit, my guild is full of loot-hungry parse monkeys (myself included) but we’re able to put that aside for the bigger picture because we have extensive talks about expectations because we wanna just have fun in our simple 2 night a week guild.
I can tell you right now based on how you are depicting your guild if we had classic masterlooter available in the game, your guild members would probably be just as frustrated at decisions made by your raid leader regarding loot distribution as they are with underperformers and alts stealing gear from mains. The fact that you are stating either jokingly, condescendingly, or legitimately " I’ve never thought to just ask people not to roll before!" implies to me that this has been brought up to your raiders and people disregard it. For our system, we do not typically take longer than about 2 minutes for the loot council to decide on loot, and by the time they are finished we are still clearing trash to the next boss. We also have an agreement that if people need to leave to get enchants or gems/upgrade their new loot that we ask people to wait until break if possible. Part of why we can do this fast is by having droptimizer sim data collated into WoWaudit where it will show raw DPS gains for each drop per boss, they can quickly look at the gains that everyone gets. We also are required to put in a note in RCloot council when we make a roll for an item such as posting the dps gain or if we say want the item specific for M+ but wouldn’t use in raid.
Again, it does require a lot of work for the individual raiders to run their sims correctly, get it posted in wow audit, and have relevant info ready to use when talking about loot and for our loot council to review this information early before the raid. We have a goal in mind and we work towards it even if the steps are annoying at times. But I’m not telling you this to say that your guild should adopt all these add-ons and whatnot to fix your issue. I’m more stating that even with all these add-ons, we would probably have people being hella disgruntled about loot if there was no genuine interpersonal discussion about expectations about getting loot and the atmosphere intended for the guild. The important thing that you can take away from this is that even with all these add-ons and our “cobbled-together behavioral system” is that it would never work if we didn’t talk with each other like people. Teamwork makes the dreamwork after all.
EDIT: Responding to this since I didn’t see this part:
So there are layers to this. Evalidge is right in concept but very much so telling people to get bent doesn’t promote the best guild atmosphere. Again setting expectations can help with this and guild leadership has a role in this. One thing that you can do for your lower performers is to have a discussion with them in a supportive way. Nobody likes getting told that they are underperforming, but after surmounting that awkward conversation you can then attempt to help them out, either by suggesting they look stuff up, try and run more keys to get gear that better fit for them, and be more open to ask for help. And then see if they are willing to put in the effort to be better. Guilds are in general made of players of different skill levels but the most important aspect is everyone is trying to put in effort. If you have somebody who after being told that they need to improve their gameplay and they are willing choose not to after being offered help and given time to make those improvements, then that’s when you give them the boot. Again it’s all about having goals and expectations clearly defined, being able to communicate with each other, and then removing people who are not willing to work with the goals and expectations.
we use rc loot council and all raiders insta pass on every item. alts and fill-in/bench players are allowed to roll for gear but only if no main progression raider needs the item. to keep it fair all raiders (main and bench) must submit a “wishlist” every week due 2 days before raid. the wishlist isnt just saying “i want this or that item” or “this is bis”. we use 2 droptimizer sims per spec. single target and a cleave/aoe drops that show the actual upgrade percentage of each item in the raid. these populate a spreadsheet that the council reveiw after each kill as we’re clearing trash to the next boss. just because you might click that you need an item you are only given the option to roll on it based on what information you submitted that week. its a pretty drama free way of doing loot distribution. and it helps to remove alot of the guessing and hoping when something drops. say a fyraak trinket drops this week and they give it to the ret pali then you know that the next one to drop will be your turn depending on where u are on the list. pretty simple
We use wowaudit - trials are not allowed to use it until they are promoted to core and can only freeroll when no priorities are selected or items are passed during their trial phase - basically, you can choose one high priority item and one low priority item per slot on the wowaudit wishlist, all loot gets passed to me (rl), and at the end of the raid, we refer to wowaudit wishlists and go by priority - all high priorities roll, then low priorities if there are no high or all high pass, then freeroll if low priorities don’t want it or there are no low priorities.
We’ve been using it all season as a new guild and everyones happy as it puts the responsibility on being able to roll on things on the people who use the system and fill out wowaudit weekly (no one can complain about favoritism since it has nothing to do with you or the officers.) It also forces people to not be able to roll on everything since you can only do a high priority on one item per slot.
I agree we need a change. We’ve been using RCLC for Dragonflight and while technically it works, it’s very stressful. No matter how particular and specific I make the loot rules, no matter how clearly I have the rules posted in the Discord, there’s always someone who should have read something and didn’t. It’s also a pain in the butt for picking up a new raider or a friend for an occasional run.
Telling new raiders “hey you need this addon, please pass on default loot frames” is fine if they have it installed already, but if you have to then wait for them to download it then the whole raid is delayed.
Constantly having to remind people to read the loot rules and pass on the default frames.
Constantly having to check that people have their addon installed and enabled and “guild groups only” unticked so that the auto-pass works.
Then there’s the human side of it, where there’s always going to be someone who wants to push the rules, someone who thinks they deserve loot more, someone who thinks the person who wins the roll doesn’t deserve it, someone who thinks our rules are too hard, someone who thinks our rules aren’t hard enough and don’t want to give loot to low performers (even if the low performers are the people who turn up 100% of the time and are always willing to sit out on prog).
It’s stressful and I hate it almost as much as the janky group loot system.
I want OPTIONS. I’m not saying “get rid of GL” because I’m sure for some groups it’s ideal. I want to be able to choose between PL, GL, and ML. I want to not have to rely on addons and herding cats just because the game designers have chosen to deny us control of our loot system. Every loot system has its flaws, I want to be allowed to make an informed choice of which flaws I am going to deal with.
Yeah nothing makes me madder than rolling for an item to roll 96 loose to a 97 and see the winner already has said item and just takes it to either be a jerk or to give away or sell off…
It’s so annoying… Thought the loot rules was if you already have an item of equal or higher value you can’t roll?