| Title | Farming Vader: the council of Not Being a Dick About It |
| Author | Rudy Basso |
| Posted in | Features |
| When | February 3, 2012 |
We're raiding! Or operating, I guess, as Star Wars: The Old Republic's end game instances are called operations..
Read the full articleI say you kick Sair's sorry ass.
Suicide Kings is an awesome movie.
MMO continue as appealing as ever, I see.
That loot system is both twisted and evil.
This post sort of unfairly penalizes the loot council, in a competitive game wherein there is only 1copy of the raid boss to kill for 1000s of players, a loot council can unfairly assign items in such a way as to make sure their guild becomes the best the fastest, and can then acquire a monopoly on killing that raid boss, preventing all other guilds from doing it. Which then in turn eventually gives everyone who was cheated out of their fair share, a massively increased share!
Additionally if you only had 8people a loot council would've been totally fine, because well, everyone knows everyone and it's not going to be hard to keep tabs on!
In certain competitive situations a loot council is STRICTLY the better option. Letting a coach decide who gets to play quarterback makes a bit more sense than letting the fans earn DKP by going to the games and then getting to play quarterback. Just like giving every single loot drop to some sort of maintank character for a week will allow the entire guild to earn loot more easily for the next few weeks and end up resulting in a total higher sum of loot earned overall.
With a suicide kings, or DKP system you can end up resulting in a scenario where the guild's best healer for example is wasting all his buy-power on damage boosting equipment for priests so that he can more easily power-level his cousin. If you had a loot council you could make sure he got some healing boosting items so that you would stop wiping out on hardmode.
It's not fair to strictly state that the loot council method is bad, and the other systems are better. Suicide Kings wouldn't work well in a raid of 100players. The article praises both DKP and Suicide Kings and just flat out slams the loot council. Sometimes even a corrupt loot council is better than a perfect dkp or suicide kings system. Not to mention that a proper loot council would still keep attendance sheets, they just wouldn't let people game the system with hoarding and rigged-bids. I was in a guild in 2001 which ran this way. We managed to get a
stranglehold on certain raid targets on our entire server, vastly
increasing the quality of loot for everyone at the cost of some minor
unfairness.
If the goal of the guild is to acquire server firsts, or win some form of competition, the DKP,suicidekings type system simply results in losing. Amongst slightly more casual players who don't need to be the best, DKP or Suicide Kings could easily satisfy the most people to the highest degree.
I'm loving this series dude. I've never given an MMO an earnest try - I feel like I'm getting some of the experience vicariously now.