TLP Guild loot rules

If you can't trust your guild leader or officers then what's the point?

The worst part about being in a loot council guild is that means you have a set of officers who either 1) doesn't grasp how much time their wasting to correctly determine who should win a piece of loot or 2) poorly assigns loot because they don't waste the time needed to correctly determine who should win a piece of loot.

It's just really bad once you get to expansions where you're getting multiple drops every 15 - 20 minutes.

I've seen a lot of systems but blind bids where winner pays +1 of second highest is still the best in my book. Yerm does raise an interesting idea of the auctioneer getting a buddy to bid up someone whose winning just to knock off more of their DKP but... honestly, all things considered, that one pitfall to me is better than the pitfalls of the other systems, and ultimately it's still on every bidder to not bid more than they're willing to pay. So I see it as a pitfall, but a tolerable one for me.

On selo most of our warrior tanks refused to bid on loot because they were waiting for later tiers and I even brought it up to you. We still beat it.

And also my point wasn't that you NEVER funnel tanks. It's that you balance it with everything else. You can't only funnel tanks just like you can't complete ignore them either.


edit - for the record, I thought the faceless selo loot system was excellent and I frequently bring it up (and danxor's bid thing) as a model I recommend to others. That environment went against my "usual" complaints about people feeling left out, despite the most easy server to be left behind on, and it showed with having too many clerics while every other guild in those eras was desperate for them and similar instances. So nothing here is selo hate.

I was making a joke about OGC people telling us we would never beat UF without funneling tanks and test server.

I think you absolutely never funnel tanks if you are DKP guild.

Open Bid DKP with a DKP wipe & a "re-seed" at the start of the next expansion with a Level raise.

Re-seed calculated on last 60 days RA with a bonus for the last 2 weeks of the prior expansion's RA - to incentivise people to play rather than slack off for the last 2-4 weeks.

Best system I have seen used on a TLP

It encourages a "spend it or lose it" mindset so your raiders are focused on gearing up rather than going around in crap gear hoping to save DKP for some single uber item - by preventing hoarding those uber items dont sell for stupid dkp making it much more competitive to get one.

But no loot distribution system is ever going to be perfect and what suits one guild won't suit all of them.

Loot councils are only as good as the people running them, they are therefore either the absolute best system or the absolute worst as the officers can "stuff" tanks or key classes quickly to make progressing through expansion fast & make your "farm window" longer, but they depend on trust while DKP systems are better when you have a guild made up of people who haven't got a long term relationship with each other.

Here's some common advice from someone who isn't only a EQ OG

If its for your class and you don't get it when your the only said class there, you are getting robbed.

If items are being sold from those raids by the guild and your not getting any split you are getting robbed.

All closed bidding is a trash system anything that has to be said behind all backs is obviously exploitations of your guild members preying on a type of player that exist in MMOs. If your this type of player to wonder why it's quiet it's because your the one getting played.

Guild Progression should be played in this order.
First Raids All tank gear goes to main tank/s regardless of how many tanks come.
Open DKP, Open Bid, Tracked on guild site for all players who attend
Add more wife healers for poor raiding habits!
Rinse and Repeat on Xpac

I prefer closed bid with no expansion wipe.

Expansion wipes might be ok for hardcore guilds...but you get this issue where people stop showing up towards the end of expos in most guilds. I also simply like buying more items in some expansions rather than others.

Every problem that exists with closed bid exists with open bid -- unless your guild is so corrupt they literally ignore your bid tells. There are 2 main differences with closed bid:

You don't get any heads up when an item is about to go super low on closed bid.

Its far less time consuming and chaotic on closed bid.

If you use bid systems I think its important to apply social pressure to not bid people up just help them compete over other items in the future. Titt for tat also helps (bid them up if you see them do that to someone else -- and let everyone know that's why you did it).

The system works best when certain classes have priority on certain items IMO. Like rogues get daggers unless none of them need. Light touch is good with this one. It also takes a certain level of game smarts to know why certain classes and people want certain items at certain times, and how legitimate their argument is.

for example Baton of Flame is Velious BiS for ranger, but not monk. However, not every monk in your guild is gonna get better than Baton in era -- so restricting to ranger is not a great move. Especially considering how well Wurmslayer performs.

I appreciate that you created a new account to post this rebuttal of closed bidding. I like it because in it you advise funneling "...to main tank/s regardless of..." and then in the same paragraph you seem to be short healers and need people's wives to play them. I'm sure it's just a coincidence though.

Depends on what your guild expectations are. Funneling to tanks makes a lot of sense if your guild goals are all about clearing endgame content as quickly as possible. If you're a leveling guild that raids occasionally, it doesn't.

And you have to be realistic about your problems, too. If you're wiping to Rallos because the tanks just can't sustain, then gear the tanks. But if your guild's problems are more about not meeting the required DPS thresholds, then funneling to tanks isn't the solution.

I'm in favor of keeping loot open to as many people as possible unless there's a clear and compelling reason to restrict it.

Nah, still not needed. We cleared everything on Selo without funneling after luclin.

I really liked the Selo loot system (which we still use on Bertox). If I was running a guild in early era EQ the one thing I'd like change is an automated bot system in Discord to do the auctions, that auto-closes auctions much faster than I manually closed them on Selo. After the first few months of Selo we were frequently doing raids where we were just clearing trash while I did loot, or where later on we were waiting for TBs etc, so taking a few minutes to get bidding done was fine. But in early era with serial batphones where being stuck "on the corpse" while something is up in another zone is a real factor, I think you'd want to speed it up a tad.

As for the question of closed bid safety, I will say on Agnarr we used this system: Closed bid, 2nd price auction. That means I send a tell with a 100 bid, you send a tell with a 150 bid. High bid wins, you pay the next highest bid +1 (101 in this case.) While for the first few expansions we would just post who won and the price they were being charged, later on we started to post in the award message in parentheses who the bidder was that bid 2nd place. We felt like this was a decent audit, like if you felt that a vindictive officer had just "made up" the 2nd place bid to screw you out of DKP, you could immediately check it by asking the guy we disclosed "Hey did you actually bid 100?"

Even without that, to my knowledge no officer ever messed with bids in that guild that I'm aware of, a couple officers did mess around with loot rules mid raid, which caused a ton of drama. That's another reason on Selo we stressed really early on that officers couldn't "legislate on the fly" with creating special loot rules. On Agnarr a lot of those special rules got spun up by someone who had found a sort of loophole in the system, so an officer would pass a rule to block it. But the cost of having officers legislate new ad hoc rules mid raid, is always much higher than just letting the loophole finder benefit from it that one time, and cleaning the rules up later. Process wise you (as guild leadership) always look terrible when you change rules mid raid.

Even without disclosing who the 2nd place bidder was, I think there are ways membership can kinda discuss amongst themselves if you really think bids are being messed with. And if it ever comes out definitively, the guild is going to basically implode. So the risk to the guild of officers messing with the bids, in my opinion, is high enough that most decent guilds won't have officers doing that.