Schadenfreude Raid Loot Rules [UPDATED 01/04/10]

[Texaporte]

Here's a suggested addition to the Don't Be a Jerk rule:

- If you don't care about helping the raid, then we would rather have gear go to someone else who does care.

What I mean by this is that I want a minimum level of participation before I give loot to you. I want to make sure that it will get good use. If you walk into Icecrown Citadel with a few blue pieces, but you play your ass off and know how to play your class, I would like to reward that effort over someone who walks in with so-called "welfare epics," a haphazard spec, no enchants, and empty gem slots. That's a dead raid spot, and I'd rather help you improve in every other way before the purple loot tries to shore up a leaky foundation.

This is a somewhat harsher rule than before, so I invite discussion on it. My idea on execution is:

0) If you want advice, ask anyone - we'll either give you advice or tell you where to go for good advice.
1) If you want enchants, ask the raid - we'll give them to you, often on the fly.
2) If you want gems, ask the raid - we'll give them to you, often on the fly.
3) If you want flasks and food and other consumables... that will probably require advance planning.
4) If you just don't care, don't feel offended when we don't give you free loot. This is a team game and everything we do is for the sake of the team.

[hung]

Careful with modifying the loot rules though... its a slippery slope when you start talking about 'performance-rewards'.

@ point 0: I feel that making it a problem player's responsibility to seek out help is unproductive. Saying 'we'll answer any questions you ask' isn't going to help someone that doesn't know what questions to ask in the first place. We've been flooding the boards with starter guides, which is a good resource, but I don't know that they are reaching the target audience. Suggestion: take a straw poll before raid to see how many guildies regularly read the forums.

@ point 1&2: Do we actually have people that mismanage their gear? Like you said, that's a very easy fix. If we have such raiders, I think they should be called out to rectify the situation before a raid starts. A quick AH run takes what... 10 mins?

@ point 3: I agree this is an issue. We've been relying on a few folks to provide all the consumables. It is my impression however, that those generous souls do this willingly, for the benefit of the raid.
We could instate a 'raid tax' to pay for it. Suggestions: make master looter be the only looter (and a non-tank). This person would loot every corpse, and deposit the gold made in raid (vendor trash, etc) into g.bank. Raid leaders can use gbank funds to repay consumable makers.
I would much rather pay the guild for my consumables than be required to provide them myself.

Bottom line: I think a number of people are getting frustrated with the lack of progress we have been making in ICC. While this is natural, please remember that this is Blizzard's final challenge for us. I would not want to change our guild's identity (to something more hardcore than what we have already become), even for the sake of faster progression.

[Daewen]

If we really want to do better in progression, it needs to be more proactive than passive-aggressive. We have certainly, for weeks now, somewhat patiently pointed out without naming names that DPS is not up to par for doing the Ugly Twins on 25. That dying in fire and reacting slowly to hazards is past the point of being humorously predictable of certain people. And finally, that we have been more than fair in trying to get everyone into some raid who wants to raid and speaks up about it when they've been out for a while. And we have been that guild of friends that puts up with it, with ever-building frustration and ire, so that everyone gets to have some fun.

This is the point: 25-man, we don't have enough folk quite serious enough (in the 'hardcore' sense) to pull off progression there. And we have tried to shore that up with our gentle hints and suggestions and forum threads, and dragging people through 10-man for bits and pieces. But as we all know, gear < skill. Changing the rules to reward things differently isn't going to fix that, and those of us coming from hardcore raid guild backgrounds will caution that doing so will cause needless drama.

Those of us who want to really progress in ICC, should form an A-Team 10-man raid. That's how we did ZA, Ulduar, and ToGC. People who do not make the A-Team will either step up and improve their game (and ask for help rather than waiting for it), or they will be happy to live the low-stress life seeing what parts of ICC25 are easy enough on them.

[Texaporte]

What it comes down to is, I would like some way of rewarding effort. Not ball-busting effort like some of us put out, but even just the basics. Not dying in a fire, knowing what to do, etc. We don't have a way to reward effort in place yet, and if there's a better way of doing it, let me know.

[Tsquared!]

I'm a little confused. Are we talking about rewarding effort or creating an incentive for people to meet some type of minimum raid requirement (i.e., properly gemmed and enchanted). I think the two are different things. If you come into a raid and are missing enchants and gems (in my view, you are not meeting the minimum raid requirement) and should not have priority on loot .

Not standing in fires, etc....cannot be solved by changing loot rules and we must come up with an approach to remedy that situation separately. I think the reward (or penalty depending on your situation) is that you are given a raid spot on a progression fight until you are able to show that you have mastered the event (most likely through 10man, etc.). It should be nothing personal...there is a reason I have in my guild note "Icehowl's room mate" or whatever and I worked to overcome that after more practice...

[Daewen]

I think I kinda like the direction Tsquared suggests, and I think it does meet the other goal.

By having an "A-Team" raid doing progression, naturally because that group will down more bosses and get further in a week, there will be more rewards for that group. And if there's more than 10 people who have an A-game to bring, we can cycle them through, or maybe even manage as much success in A-team-alts.

This also doesn't completely exclude others trying to bring up their game, as we can still run multiple 10-mans, and with our 'excess' A-team players maybe helping out there, those other runs can still earn rewards via better performance. Sometimes it'll help to have a few experienced team captains moving the groups along.

Of course, rewards could be more than just progression-level epics. We have had some people express the interest in continuing Ulduar Hard Modes, Naxx Achievement runs, ToGC again, or S3D- really, when we do an A-Team run, we usually have some extra time for more than just randoms. Maybe if people named 1 other run they wanted, then doing that could count as a reward too.

[sphie]

I was the one who suggested this to Dom this morning. My intention wasn't to have performance-rewards. As much as I'd like some sort of loot system that isn't just rolling, I've been in the guild long enough to know that something like that wouldn't work out for our situation. I think Chuck and Tony hit the nail on the head. This isn't about rewarding people who do well, it's about making sure that people are prepared (this doesn't only mean gems/enchants, but also to a lesser extent talent and gear choices as well)

I'm a rather obsessive person. I try to perform the best I can in every situation. I endlessly read threads and run simulations to see if I can squeeze out more DPS. And for me that's fun. Doing the best I can and beating content. I don't expect everyone to enjoy this game the same way I do. In fact I can count the people who enjoy the game the same way as me on one hand.

But when I step into a raid with people who don't have their gear enchanted, gems socketed, wearing gear that isn't for their spec, or talented completely wrong, a little part of me dies. Actually I'm lying, a huge part of me dies. These situations happen a lot more frequently than people think. I only happen to notice this because I do a lot of staring at world of logs.

I also understand that we have people who play and raid occasionally for fun and for the social experience, but I really think the minimum amount of effort is still necessary when doing the hardest content in the game. The regular raiders want to progress. I feel it's a little selfish and disrespectful to the other 24 people in the raid who spend a lot more time playing. Of course we can't make anyone really care about the game more than they want to. So I think we can make the logical leap that if someone doesn't want to put in the minimum effort in gemming/enchanting/talenting, that it would be okay if they don't get the same priority on loot as someone who does care. Of course they can get the loot! But just if no mains want it.

[janin]

And who gets to decide who's "performing" and who isn't? I see problems down the road with this approach, as favoritism either real or perceived will cause the guild to fracture.

Another issue is that many of the "A" team only want to do the "A" content. This makes it hard for the rest of the guild to catch up. This happened in BC, and I can see the same thing happening again.

Adam

[sphie]

For the purposes of my suggestion, I was only considering basic things like not having gems socketed, no/blatantly incorrect enchants, and haphazard talent choices.

As for Adam, I agree that performance based metrics would be very subjective and is something we need to tread very lightly on. But it's not hard to see that performance is not up to par for our gear levels. We should probably discuss this in another thread though because this is a touchy subject for a lot of people an will generate a lot of passion from all sides.

[Texaporte]

The current resolution has been declined, and I'm fine with that. I'm moving this discussion to a new thread about how we can improve our raid as a whole, especially in terms of moving the bottom into the middle.