The article has nothing to do with loot distribution...it is about deciding who gets to attend raids.

/facepalm

The other guilds on your server are probably very happy to get the members from yours who leave because of that. I know my guild is.

For casual guilds, loot council is very bad.

But some of the top guilds, e.g. Premonition I believe, go with Loot Council. For them, it makes sense because the loot if secondary to the goals of being first in realm/continent/world with boss kills.

Although this article has nothing to do with loot I wanted to comment on the last reply to this. My guild is a casual raid guild very similar to the one described in this article. We do mostly 10 mans and occasional do a joint raid with another small guild. We have done DKP and roll systems before but now we do loot council and the officers are very fair. We have not lost a single person due to this system and everybody gets geared up and is very happy. We have cleared 10 man Ulduar and 10 man Trial and have done many hard modes in Ulduar. This system is not for every guild but we have a strong core group and most of us have raided together for years (since launch even) and it works for us.

I would not generalize too much and say this system doesn't work. I think loot systems have to vary from guild to guild.

DKP in the case of this question would only relate to raid spots. Not loot. I still prefer the DKP system to a loot council as far as loot goes, though. I'd prefer to rely on numbers to determine who gets it than someone's opinion.

I'm a PuG raider, in general, in a casual guild too small to field our own raids. Sometimes we form our own 'PuGs' with my wife at the head (she's an incredible raid leader), and sometimes join up with others.

Last night, we joined with a 25-man ToC that used loot council. They hadn't raided in a number of months, and assured us they would be 'fair' when it came to loot distribution, and would take all kinds of factors- performance, attendance, etc. into account.

While slightly skeptical, we went with it.

She moved between 1st and 2nd DPS through the night, I was consistently top heals (for what it's worth, between 5-10% higher than the next person) and felt like I was carrying the healing- whenever I just stuck to my assignment, we wiped.

We took down only two bosses, loot distribution took a solid 45 minutes after each of the two, meaning loot council was going for half the 3-hour raid time.

Lots of lovely healer loot dropped, and I was passed over for each piece- often to a member of the guild alliance who simply wasn't able to keep themselves up through the fight, replacing a piece on-par with what I would be replacing. I'm technically undergeared for 25 ToC, and I would really like to get myself up to a spot where gear checks don't count me out.

I imagine it was discussed, and thought about, and all that, and in the end, the loot council did what loot council's do, and put the loot where it would benefit the guild/alliance the most, which was not with me.

The problem is that all I saw of it was piece after piece of fine, lovely pixels going to folks who just weren't able to contribute to the raid. To me, all I could see was a loot council giving loot to its buddies, and it stung, oh boy, did it sting!

As such, I won't be raiding with the group again, and I certainly won't be joining their alliance (being a mostly PuG raider this long makes me leery of joining groups where people in my position feel so shafted).

TL;DR: Last night I learned a little bit about just why it is that loot council is so nearly universally looked down upon. At least I got 'knowledge loot' of why, and now have the wisdom to avoid it myself.

@lano

Running loot council with PUGs seems pretty stupid, but if you were part of the guild passing you over for the underperforming raiders makes perfect sense, if their healing was low because of gear that is. why give you a minor upgrade when you could give another member a major upgrade and really increase the overall healing of the guild. Like I said using loot council when you have Puggers is stupid, it's unfair and likely to make people feel they've had their gear politely ninja'd but in a guild it can be a very good system for getting everyone geared which means more progress in content and smoother runs, it can also help create a tighter bond between guild members than the adversarial system of DKP

Also 45mins for loot distribution is stupid as well.

"knowledge loot" is half the battle