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[quote="Jakkal"]I forgot to mention in that example that sparkles dropped a rogue only spell that was really important to our class balance. So it was kind of a kick in the teeth in that regard (I was lucky enough to get it off Tharridon oddly enough).[/quote]
Tharridon was sharing some of the loot tables from other raid mobs in regards of dropped abilities and augments, and it was intended. I don't remember if it was the same for Alagan or not.

EQ2 handled this very problem by making a lot of high end loot "Heirloom." For those of you who hadn't played, it basically meant that it was account bound. Even after you equipped a piece of Heirloom gear on one character, you could still put it in your shared bank and then use it on another character.

[quote="Koralith"]EQ2 handled this very problem by making a lot of high end loot "Heirloom." For those of you who hadn't played, it basically meant that it was account bound. Even after you equipped a piece of Heirloom gear on one character, you could still put it in your shared bank and then use it on another character.[/quote]

I think my issue with a system like that is that it removes the personalisation and relationship you have with your character as it just lets you hand any old top end raid items to a gimp alt who was power levelled and still has level 30 Vol Tuniel gear on if it even got that level loot etc.

I see it as a more personal entitlement to that specific character that actually was part of a raid effort to take down a mob, that character played an integral part, while the recipient did nothing, no teamwork, no effort, no risk, just gets handed top end raid loot items and that bothers me for some reason.

We always talk about risk versus reward and how we despise instant gratification but I think in some ways, this is part of that type of mentality because we got used to exploiting a system that was never intended to allow us to pass raid loot.

After thinking about it a lot more and trying to look at it from other angles, I am still of the mindset that it is cheating, even if you were the one who played that character, that character is the one that deserves the loot. If the alt wants the loot, then the alt should participate in the raid and earn the loot, which is more ways gives greater challenge and accomplishment since the alt is usually in poor gear and lacks spells/abilities to contribute properly.

I don't see this problem existing for us for quite a while either, as it was top end heavy and we all start from level 1, none of us are going to grind out 12 max level alts in full raid gear with 3-5 times a week raiding schedules any time soon, so the alt problem won't exist for a pretty long time and therefore the exploit should in my opinion, be fixed and reverted to locked loot to those that participate in earning it.

I'm sorta with you Kilsin, but there are plenty of times when a raid can't happen w/o a particular class. I'm totally against free loot for people that weren't even there, but should the Blade of Johnslaying just rot if there's an alt, or even better, a main that can use it but said main is logged in an alt so the raid can happen? Not sure...

If the option was there to somehow transfer loot and let the guild itself decide, that seems best to me. EQ2-style heirlooms seems like a good choice.

Yeah, I think the option to reward the player should be there, preferably with a /give command and not the roll loot bug. If the majority of players in a guild decide against it, then that guild will lose their players if they try. And there were plenty of people that were against it, so I don't think it would really be a problem for a guild to make raid loot rules in that regard.

Our guild, for example, had rules that it would go to players that were in the raid first, and only rot loot would be offered to others, and those others had to be raid ready characters. And then if absolutely no one had a raid ready character, I'd usually just take it and sell it for the GH fees. APW mitigated this a lot because lowbie characters, quite literally, could not even enter.

[quote="Jakkal"]APW mitigated this a lot because lowbie characters, quite literally, could not even enter.[/quote]
*cough* Caravans *cough*

Seriously? that was bugged too?

Hnnnnn.

I was never a fan of the loot bug. A lot of the problems I had with it had to deal with the alts getting played more than mains. Yeah sure we may need Jakkal as a tank to do the raid but what happened was it was always needed therefore the rogue was hardly played which wasn't very fun for her. Never really seemed fair to other melee classes when jakkal would play tank and win a piece of loot on rogue that hardly got played for the raid. Wasn't really fair for her either though

You run into problems when you actually have new tanks/healers show up who get benched on some fights because there gear isn't up to par. And it was a circular problem. Main tank A gear sucks so he goes to do something else and we take an alt tank. New tank gear drops the main tank is now off grouping and we successfully geared another alt. Yay!

I would rather not do the encounter if someone is forced to play an alt over a main

[quote="Jakkal"]Seriously? that was bugged too?[/quote]
Bugged or feature, who knows? But you could use caravans to get in to a lot of place that would otherwise require special access. Only places that would port you out, like PotA was able to stop that.

So I've been trying to think of alternative solutions to this problem that would somewhat appease everyone, and here's what has been suggested by others, and what I've been thinking about. If we want to create a solution, we need to really figure out what the problem is to begin with. I realize that the problem itself might be guild dependant. A hardcore guild that selectively picks up players isn't going to have the same problem as a casual guild that will allow anyone of any class to join.

The reason this became so overused in Unleashed was the sheer amount of rot loot that was dropping from mobs, and getting months and months of rot loot when you needed the one super rare drop, it became less risk vs reward, and more "this is boring and it sucks". We got tired of seeing loot rot, and it helped appease our players to allow them to get a shot at something while still playing the classes we needed to get the job done. We had some players that had not won any loot at all for over a year because they had no raiding alts, and the one thing they wanted/needed, other people wanted/needed it too, and it never dropped. (I am not talking about Hydrazine if that gets brought up). I mean, no loot at all. Most of our players would not bother with that, and would drop the guild. And low numbers was a huge problem for any raiding guild on VG. The emulator is going to suffer from low numbers as well.

Another problem that Unleashed had to deal with was we would get new players getting tons of loot. We'd take them on our raids. They would get showered in loot because none of our old timers needed any of this stuff. And once they got all the rot loot, they suddenly found they've hit the brick wall of progression, they were now waiting in the same lines as our old timers but didn't have the patience or maturity to wait it out. They were suddenly getting NO loot, and were complaining when our other guys that had nothing for a year, were getting the super rare drops. They would game quit over this.

I realize that rot loot isn't going to be a thing for a while for the emulator, but this will eventually come up so we might as well knock it out while it's fresh on everyone's minds.

Based on the problems, here's some of the solutions we've come up with:

Loot Based Solutions:

Master Looter Give: Let the master looter /give to anyone. Probably the least liked solution when discussing it on forums, but I imagine this would be used by lots of people once loot starts rotting.
Heirlooming - A player can pass an item around to other characters on their account. Probably one of the better suggestions.
EQ2's Trade System - Masterlooter can trade it to the account of someone that was there.
Token Exchange System - Think Zaraj Arena. Go to enough raids, get tokens for kills, trade in tokens for stuff from an NPC. Such as runes or something, reward the players in some manner for going. Make it grindy but let players feel like they're accomplishing something. Let them trade in tokens for those rare drops they really want. If you've killed Shendu 1000 times, you probably deserve the warhammer. I feel like something like this will get people to help other raids, if anything to token grind. This system already exists in game in the form of city faction tokens, (You got plat coins off all caps named).

Some other thoughts:
Get rid of lockout timers - At Sunset, SOE sold lockout timer removal potions, so I don't see this being a big deal except, just don't have them, or make them a more reasonable time like 10 minutes - enough time for another guild to come in and make an attempt so one guild isn't farming it all night long. But allowing players to kill the same mob more than once a week, possibly several times on their raid night might alleviate some of the stress.
Allow More Loot Drops: Have the mobs drop 4-5 different items instead of the usual 2-3. This is especially true for mobs like the chickens. The chickens were the worst raid ever conceived. They were boring. They took forever. They only allowed 12 people. And they had 12 items on their loot table. I killed the chickens once a week for a year and a half and I still could not get the melee belt for my rogue. I conned one of the GMs into giving it to me after it finally dropped when I was on my cleric and it was going to rot (This was before we found out about the rolling bug). I was lucky that the GM gave it to me. We had lots of people that were not so lucky.
Increase Drop Percentage for super rare stuff: I'm not saying that the Warhammer off Shendu should drop once a week. But we killed him for a year and it never dropped for us. That's some bullshit, seriously. This is the difference between, "Take your lumps and earn it" and "Hey, buddy, keep wasting your time and pay for your sub." We had people quit the game in disgust over stuff like this.