You've slogged your way through the darkest and dampest of dungeons. The dungeon boss, the most evil of masterminds for this specific instance's venue, lies newly dead at your feet. With a trembling hand, you reach forward to examine the corpse for the rewards of your conquest. Lo and behold, it is there! The item you have been questing for, the item that will increase your power ten fold and make you the envy of the lesser experienced members of your class. You reach out to take possession of it, to achieve your dreams, your glory, your birthright...
... and a gentle cough from behind reminds you of one undeniable fact: There are twenty four other people here with you who want that item just as much as you do. Time to divy up the loot.
Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, by their very definition are community-oriented games, so the issue of how to share the items and game rewards has been around since day one. In a single player game, its pretty obvious who gets the Master Sword of Mastery that just dropped off your slain foe - You, because of the simple reason that you're the only one there to take it. But in an MMO, where so many of the challenges rely on coordinated teamwork to achieve victory, things get a little more complicated. Let's take a moment to have a good, solid look at looting, after the jump.
You gotta roll with it, baby
Back in the beginning, after MMOs managed to crawl out of the primordial MUDs that spawned them and evolve fancy graphics and clickable interfaces, there was Meridian 59. As a person who played the it, I can officially tell you: No one played it. Ever. That is because it was less a game and more a chat program with a graphical avatar you can move around to different locations. MMOs didn't really hit their stride until Verant Interactive came along and established most of the rules of what we define an MMO by nowadays with a quant little title you may have heard of: EverQuest.
Long ago in the days of the original EverQuest, or EQ if you are hip and lazy, the looting system was as simple as can be. It was first come, first serve, and whoever grabbed the item first, got it. This lead to a lot of very inconvenient and irratating circumstances, not the least of which was putting in all the effort to kill a monster only to have someone else appear out of nowhere and swiftly steal your loot. This act quickly became known as "Ninja Looting", and to this day, calling someone a Ninja in an MMO is the equivalent of declaring them a theif, a scoundral, and saying some nasty things about their parentage.
EverQuest also introduced the concept of Raiding, which is basically getting a crazy amount of people together in order to all pummel on the same target. But as we already determined, having a ton of people working towards the same goal means that you need to have a system in place to determine who gets to claim the one item that drops. In order to facilitate this, EQ had a simple command line function that is the primary basis for looting to this day: /roll.
Typing /roll generates a random number between 1 and 100. If you have everyone who is interested in the dropped item type /roll, then the person who rolled the highest number wins. It was simple, it was straight forward, and gosh darnit, it worked for most situations.
Minus 50 DKP!
However, there were quite a few people who werent satisfied to leave their reward system up to chance. They reasoned that a random roll is too impartial: it doesnt take in to account how many times youve tried to get this item, or how much effort youve put in, running the same raid over and over again, only to die countless times and use up your money on repairing or replacing your armor. So an EQ guild called Afterlife came up with a system all their own, and named it Dragon Kill Points.
Dragon Kill Points (or DKP) is a system of rewarding the players for the effort they put in to the raid. While there are several varients of the system, the general philosophy is this: If you help to drop a raid boss, you earn a certain amount of DKP. You can then spend that DKP in order to claim a loot item you want. As you run more and more raids, you earn more DKP, and the person with the highest DKP usually gets the item, though ties are often resolved with the old standard /roll.
While the system isn't perfect, and sub-varients such as Zero Sum DKP go a long way to fix some of the issues, it does address looting a bit more fairly than the old "highest number always wins" way of doing things. the draw back of DKP, however, is that it takes a lot of out-of-game time and effort to manage a database of who has how many points and update it every time a new boss is dropped or a new item is purchased. For this reason, DKP systems are really only used with raiding guilds. So what about a solution for your every day party adventuring? As the years went by, and each MMO came and went, they all fell back on the standard /roll and left it at that. This was until World of Warcraft decided that they wanted to add in a more automated system.
In times of need...
In one of WoW's earlier patches, Blizzard decided to add in a new Need/Greed/Pass rolling sytem. Each time an item drops that is above a certain threshold in quality (no need to roll on junk, naturally), it will automatically "lock" the item so no one can pick it up, then pop up a box for all the party members that are near by. In the box, you have three options: A pair of dice that represents Need, a coin that represents Greed, and an X that represents Pass. Clicking Need is your way of telling the party "This item would be an upgrade for me, I need this item." Selecting Greed, however, tells the party "I would like to have this item, perhaps to sell or disenchant, but I dont really Need it." And finally Pass means "I don't want the item." There is also a timer on that box that slowly ticks down, and when the time runs out, it automatically Passes on behalf of that player.
The game engine then evaluates all the submissions from the party members. If anyone has pressed Need, they get priority, and it rolls a random 1 to 100 for each person that selected Need, and gives the item to the person who rolled the highest number. If no one selected Need, then it moves on to the people that selected Greed, and randomly generates their 1 to 100's, and gives the item to that winner. And if everyone selected pass, it simply "unlocks" the item so that anyone in the party can pick it up.
Using the Need/Greed/Pass system has the added benefit of being a deterent to Ninja Looting, as the item is locked in place until everyone has made their selection. Still, some people will still hit Need on an item that they dont really need, but usually that will be followed up by being ejected from the party and/or reported to a Game Master.
I have, however, come across many people that prefer to work around the Need/Greed/Pass system by having everyone in the party select Pass, so that they can all /roll on the item afterwards. This is pure foolishness. I have heard countless reasons as to why they chose to all pass, and not a single one of them holds up to any logicial sense. There is plenty of time on the built in timer for everyone to talk amongst themselves and decide who should have a particularly rare item, or if a Disenchanter should hit Need in order to claim and melt the item. All you succeed in doing by having everyone Pass is opening up the item to be Ninja'ed. As someone who has had this happen to him on more than one occassion, you have my warning.
In the end, though, however you chose to distribute your loot should be discussed and established before you even begin your instance run or set foot towards your quest goals. By making sure that everyone understands and accepts the way loot will be distributed from the outset, you will be preventing a great deal of needless drama and possibly an accidental Ninja'ing. Whether its by /roll, DKP, or Need/Greed/Pass, in the end everyone wants their fair share of the rewards that you, as a group, have reaped.
