Single & Council Assignment Loot Systems
When you’re talking about loot systems you’re almost always doomed to failure because no two systems are exactly alike. In an effort to provide useful information it is my intention to boil the systems I discuss down to a few key attributes to which anyone can relate to their guild’s experience.
It is best to start with one of the earliest forms of loot distribution and one that still gets a lot of use these days. This type I commonly refer to as “assignment systems.” There are essentially two major types: single and council assignment.
Single assignment is pretty straight forward in the fact that all loot is assigned by a single person. This is usually a guild officer but it doesn’t have to be. You’ll frequently find this system in smaller guilds that don’t do a lot of raiding or hardcore guilds that put a great deal of trust in their empowered individual.
There are a few obvious perks to this sort of system. More than anything it is quick and disrupts raids as little as possible. When an item drops the individual makes a decision and that is that. On to the next kill! There is no complex calculation or look up.
Single assignment can also lead to a better distribution of items for the guild as a whole. Perhaps it is in the best interest of the organization to stack all the best tank loot on a single character. This gives you a very powerful tank that might make raiding easier for the guild. It also places all your eggs in one basket.
Flexibility is another obvious perk of single assignment. Items tend not to fall into the hands of the wrong class. When a cleric asks for the best tank shield in the game the assigning individual can laugh and give it to a tank.
Morale can also be boosted with this type of system. When you’re assigned an item you didn’t just get it, you were recognized by an individual as deserving! This can really raise the sprits of the receiving member. This is where the positives stop and the negatives start to show through, however.
With single assignment morale can also be destroyed. While you might get a high by winning you will also get a low by losing. That means you weren’t picked and you weren’t deserving of the loot. Members tend to take this much more personally. This is caused by another fundamental flaw.
Accountability and transparency are absolutely absent in single assignment. No one else knows the machinations that the individual made to reach a decision. There is no accounting of it and there is no look into why. The decision simply is made and frequently unfairly.
While some may disagree with me on this point, assignment systems are the least fair of all. Due to the accountability and transparency issue you never know who got a fair shake. In addition to this you’re relying on the judgment of human beings to remember who won what, attended what and how often. Loot is rarely assigned by merit. More frequently you will see it assigned by visibility and popularity. Ultimately this leads to bitterness. With a council system some of this may be moderated but other problems crop up.
Shifting from a single to council assignment system gives a bit more transparency and accountability to your system. The different individuals may be better able to remember things as a collective and make better decisions. The issues with morale become less extreme as there is no single target to blame.
Where you lose out is still in the fairness category. A group, especially when you use the same group every time, is still susceptible to group-think, bias and mistakes. That is just a natural part of being human.
Another trade off with your council based systems is speed. All the speed you gain from single assignment is lost. Trying to get a group of people to agree on something can often be very difficult. You might reach a point where the council divides on a decision and feelings get hurt.
One final headache that council assignment brings to a guild is when there is a failure to follow the primary rule of “what happens in the council stays in the council.” Ultimately someone in the council will tell someone else who voted what and you get individual bitterness once more. No matter how much you think it won’t happen, it will.
In my personal experience I have dealt with both a single assignment (Blades of Wrath) and a council assignment (Silent Redemption) system. From that experience I can say with full confidence that they both were terrible.
In Blades the single system was abused frequently. I remember in Velious that the first set of plate arms went to a cleric, not a warrior. As you might guess, that cleric was the individual in charge of assigning loot. This is an extreme example of course but the system wasn’t fair. Favorites were played frequently and you weren’t rewarded for good attendance or skill.
Silent Redemption, my home for years, was just as bad. Our council system was terribly biased. Loot was generally assigned to “the old guard.” Anyone after a certain date was at a disadvantage. The system was so terrible that if an old guard member had been gone for six months and showed up for a raid they could win an item over a new member that had not missed a raid in those six months. As you might imagine that really upset new members. In SR’s defense, however, we went to DKP because of it. That, of course, brought in some of its own issues but that is best left to another article!
To sum it all up avoid these systems if you can. Even if you are the most unbiased and fair individual, and I consider myself one of those people, you can’t trust yourself. You don’t have a perfect memory. I know I don’t. You won’t always make the best choice and there are other options out there to help you do so.
One final thing before I get emails saying these systems work but you have to use a spread sheet. If you are tracking attendance and loot via spreadsheet you’re not an assignment system. You’re a form of DKP that I call “non-transparent DKP.” I’ll be covering that later and as always you make send your hate or praise to me via email or leave a comment here!
