Raid Loot Policies and why this shit needs to change, now.

[Setup]

From a man-hour perspective, a more responsive policy would mean every server crash followed with an hour of labor for someone to sort out the loot. Not just clicking some command, but talking with the players, evaluating the evidence, etc. It's basically another full time job in addition to whatever GMing they're doing with 10,000 players.

I agree it would be nice not to lose a bunch of loot like we have been, though.

[Lorilay]

From a man-hour perspective, a more responsive policy would mean every server crash followed with an hour of labor for someone to sort out the loot. Not just clicking some command, but talking with the players, evaluating the evidence, etc. It's basically another full time job in addition to whatever GMing they're doing with 10,000 players.

I agree it would be nice not to lose a bunch of loot like we have been, though.

And yet every other server manages to do it. If we don't have enough GMs to handle supporting the player base, then we should recruit more GMs.

[Vorfidus]

From a man-hour perspective, a more responsive policy would mean every server crash followed with an hour of labor for someone to sort out the loot. Not just clicking some command, but talking with the players, evaluating the evidence, etc. It's basically another full time job in addition to whatever GMing they're doing with 10,000 players.

I agree it would be nice not to lose a bunch of loot like we have been, though.

And yet every other server manages to do it. If we don't have enough GMs to handle supporting the player base, then we should recruit more GMs.

You say this now, but did you ever stop and think? If you recruit a bunch of GMs and then IMMEDIATELY give them all power like that (to spawn items and such), what do you think is gonna happen? You're gonna have entire guilds running around with spawned Thunderfuries. Lol...

[Garfunkel]

And yet every other server manages to do it. If we don't have enough GMs to handle supporting the player base, then we should recruit more GMs.

And how many players those other servers have? How many active raiding guilds?

Do we want the GMs to hand out loot just because someone wrote a ticket? No, they must double check that it's a genuine ticket and that the boss actually dropped the loot claimed. Can they do that from server logs and if they can, how long does it take? Or do we just accept screenshots? If we do, brb learning Photoshop. I think Setup is being very generous in his estimate of just one hour after crash - I wouldn't be surprised if it took longer.

Of course it would be fantastic if loot lost to a server crash could be gotten back but I'm not going to hold my breath for it nor am I going to throw a temper tantrum if it doesn't happen.

If we don't have enough GMs to handle supporting the player base, then we should recruit more GMs.

You say this now, but did you ever stop and think? If you recruit a bunch of GMs and then IMMEDIATELY give them all power like that (to spawn items and such), what do you think is gonna happen? You're gonna have entire guilds running around with spawned Thunderfuries. Lol...

That's a good point as well. Remember what happened on K a little while ago when an improperly vetted GM went nuts. I'd rather lose out on loot and raid extra than suffer the consequences of poorly trained/vetted GMs running rampant.

[Lorilay]

Other servers manage to recruit GMs that don't go crazy with their powers and manage to fairly restore loot that is lost or mis-assigned, so I don't see why Nostalrius can't do the same thing. You don't see guilds running around with spawned thunderfuries on other servers, and for good reason. I can't speak for Nostalrius, but when ED crashed and rolled back, they did have logs of what dropped.

At the end of the day, you need to have a GM staff that have the power of common sense and can make a judgement call on awarding loot. Using the server population as an excuse to have inadequate support is painting yourself into a corner. A high population is precisely why we should have a large enough number of GMs to support the population. I don't think Nostalrius is lacking on their GM management infrastructure, so I wouldn't worry about some new (or old) GM going crazy and trolling around. That happens on private servers extremely rarely and I've never seen it last for more than a few minutes at best.

[Imbaslap]

fix alliance trick or treatsplease. horde is getting all the candy and treats. /cry

[Ryvout]

On Ya Bike just lost eye from rag due to this, because it dropped and server crashed before it was assigned. It's really sad that this can't be restored due to this really bizarre policy.

I feel they should make an exception here. We lost rag loot last month ourselves. While it sucked we accepted that there wasn't anything the could do in our case. (Rag dropped no loot at all). However, a legendary item is pretty significant considering it is so rare. Besides most guilds open tickets anyways for events like this. Its not like there would be a less volume.

[Rylox]

Trade somebody 1 copper when you get an item and your character will be saved to server.
Not saying policy shouldn't change, but this would reduce amount of people needing help on crashes a whole lot.

[candyb]

I chip in a post to this post.
+1

and the trade 1 copper-trick helps, but only when you've actually gotten the loot.

[Vedeta]

Too much man-power needed.

We need to look both perspective.

This would be nice,

but imagine how many tickets they will receive and how many of them are really true.

And imagine analyze that data.

Would be great see a fix for this.