The Black Company

[Joehunk]

So I notice that the activity on the forum here has cooled since the xpac, and frankly I am not surprised. The majority of players nowadays are hardcore into 5-manning, with PUGs, cross-guild groups, and ad-hoc runs being the order of the day. Having done some analysis on the subject, I can report that I find SK unsuited to this type of environment. Some specific reasons why:

- SK was never designed to handle inconsistent groups. If you have a big SK list for everyone you 5-man with, the lists start getting really weird if you only run with an inconsistent subset of those people on any particular run. If you run with only the bottom 5 people, no one can get to the top. If you run only with the top 5, no one gets to the bottom. And there is no clear cut solution to that, ESPECIALLY if this big group of possible 5-mans spans more than one guild.

- SK, although very lightweight, is overly heavyweight for 5-man instances. The rule, not the exception, is that only one person in a 5-man will even want a particular piece of loot. Therefore there is a lot of list cycling happening over nothing. Then there is the issue of how do you keep the list synched among people in different runs that may or may not be online at the same time.

Those are the 2 big ones. SK works best in a larger group with heavy competition for loot (i.e., many people want the same items), and the group is at least 50-70% consistent over time and does not oscillate.

Currently our guild is using random rolling, but we don't expect that to be sustainable long term. I am currently researching "wish list" based loot systems which are appealing to me for 5-manning because each person's wish list is his/her own and they can be mixed and matched in different groups without issues.

I'll keep you all posted on this. This may also mean that the SK mod goes back into maintenance mode, maybe until raiding starts again for us.
_________________

[Joehunk]

Please see the FAQ. SK has been able to handle simultaneous raids for quite some time. I had planned to make support for that more user-friendly and have not gotten to it yet, but the support is there.
_________________

[Joehunk]

Argh, must have messed up in the distribution; it was working fine for me. I will take it off and do some more testing.

Do you have an English client, or some other language?
_________________

[Joehunk]

See the "problem in 3.06" thread. Looks like I somehow managed to post the wrong zip file.
_________________

[Joehunk]

We are using SK so far in Karazhan, but I will have to reserve judgement as to whether it's necessary. On the one hand I like it because there is maybe stuff I would roll on "just because" if we were on a /random system, but I will pass to someone (who probably needs it more) to hold on for something I really need. On the other hand, Karazhan loot is only a teeny weeny bit better than the 5 man loot before it (and in some cases, worse) so it's the more common case that only 1 person in the raid (or zero) wants an item anyway.
_________________