Raid Loot Bug

[Jakkal]

I am about to open a HUGE can of worms, so I apologize in advance if this spirals out of hand very quickly.

Anyone that's had the pleasure (or in this case displeasure) of being the master looter of a raid, probably knows how I feel about this subject. To me, loot is the root of all evil, it brings out the worst in players, and causes the most drama in guilds or raid teams.

I'm not going to preface this with some huge novella of how raiding works in VG, either you were there or you weren't. Suffice to say that gear was a big deal. In order to progress, no matter how good you were, you needed gear to get you by, so that you weren't a manasink to healers, and so you could pull out the DPS needed to get the job done, or to hold the aggro off the healers and the DPSers.

There was a notorious bug in raiding that my guild exploited almost every time. Does this make us cheaters? Maybe. But the developers knew about it, and did nothing about it, so it was just business as usual. I even bug reported it myself to the devs.

Basically the bug was thus: If you set the loot to rolling, then anyone outside of the raid could join the raid and roll on the loot and get it.

To a lot of raiders, this was bad because "you should only get loot on the toon that you're playing". To me, it was good, because it rewards the /people/ that are there, not the /character/ they happened to bring.

For us as a guild the officers, myself included, had to play our alternates just to get the job done. I often found myself either playing my paladin or my cleric (Sometimes dualboxing MT and MH) just so could kill the mobs. This means my true main, my rogue, got left behind. A lot of us had to do this just to make sure we had what we needed to kill the mob. So to me, rewarding the player was more important than rewarding the character. (I passed on healer stuff to the people that played healers as a main, but I still wanted the loot on my rogue for those opportunities I could still play her).

This also helped because it didn't force our players to get pissy that they couldn't play one of their characters that they're working so hard on getting up to snuff, to play a character that we need.

I imagine that this problem is going to be the same, if not worse on the emulator due to numbers and available classes. There are many raids where you need certain setups in order to succeed, if you don't have that setup, you can't do it. With fewer people and fewer class diveristy on the emulator, I suspect this will be a big problem.

If my raid needs my cleric, I would play my cleric, but I don't want to play him at the expense of my rogue. There was also the side effect that if I ended up gearing up my cleric, because we need him, everyone thought of the cleric as my main. And the few rare times I got to play my rogue (like Karax), my rogue was treated like an alt because my cleric was getting healer loot.

I would like to ask that the devs either don't fix this bug OR give us some equivalent so that we can still reward the player and not the character. I'm not asking that gear be made tradable, sellable, or anything that would put raid gear on the exchange. I would just like for us to be able to reward the players that stick it out and help us succeed without forcing them into a role they don't necessarily want to play.

[Xinux]

Just off the top of my head and thinking out loud (Disclaimer: This is only a thought and in no way saying this will be coded like this.) but we could make loot drops available based on account not character so say Uber Dagger of John Slaying drops and you are playing your cleric but really wanted to play your rogue you swap over and since your rogue is on the same account as your cleric it is eligible to loot the dagger.
Could also go old school EQ route after a certain amount of time the corpse becomes free for all and anyone can loot it.

[Kandra]

I think that bug was exploited by every "hardcore" raiding guild and not just yours Jakkal, I can say that my guild used it a lot as well even though some members hated it. But I also think that the exploit wasn't known to people that only joined the PUG raids. And you're right that loot was the biggest source to "friction" in the guild and constantly caused lots of discussions with big words.

I've been thinking of almost the same thing that Xinux said but more that it should be possible for us to implement bind on pickup to account (on the same server), followed by soul bind on equip. So you can loot selected gear on any toon and then send that to any other toon on the same account.
Yeah I know this will instead open up for lots of twinks, but it would at least get rid of the time sink that changing character and moving them to the loot was.

[Jakkal]

That's a good compromise I think, except a lot of us dualboxed so we couldn't have characters on the same account that we boxed. My cleric was on a different account from my rogue. Though I suppose I could roll them both on the same account here. Would it be possible to box characters on the same account? That might save a lot of headaches for the admin staff if it's possible.

[Xinux]

Trying to run two characters at the same time from the same account causes issues so no you can't.

[Kandra]

Not sure if it ever got turned in to a server configuration rule or not to log in multiple characters from the same account, but I know there were a discussion about it some time ago. It's not possible to multibox using the same account on New Telon at least.

[Jakkal]

Could also make it so the master looter can /give it to anyone, regardless if they were in the raid kill or not.

[Apaelias]

Boooo!!! hisss!!!

[John Adams]

Jak, if this is a "favored feature", it doesn't sound like a bug at all

I will offer that how loot is handled in code we control, I'm confident we can do anything we want - including custom (GM) commands that master looters or raid leaders (or even attendees) can use. Changing how the in-game UI works may not work for us, but we can offer all kinds of custom commands to do stuff.

Definitely a good topic, and valid points about lower server populations (potentially). The NOTRADE could be removed, with a NOSALE flag added to keep it off the Exchange, maybe? We got time, we can certainly come up with something.

[Kilsin]

I am kind of torn on this, we tried using this towards the end in Reverence and the majority of the guild rejected it and wouldn't take loot, they felt it was stepping over the line and believed that if you were not there on the characters that wanted loot, then you did not deserve it and I tend to agree with them.

I know it was widely used though and that the devs knew about it, but they knew about a lot of stuff and failed to fix or tweak them lol

I can see where it can be frustrating, trust me I can, I had shit luck on multiple toons with many raid item drops but I am still of the belief that this is pushing the "exploit" tag a bit too far and I would rather it got fixed and limited to people/characters who were part of the kill.

Edit: Spelling