For the first Raid Tracker post go here.

I spent about a week working on the new Raid Tracker and came to a few conclusions after going through hundreds of Guildwork sites looking at how they use DKP.

• Almost all sites use a sort of Attendance only system.
• People hate pre-populating events and items.
• Most people don't use the Bank feature.

This is what I intend to do for the new Raid Tracker.

• The "Events" and "Items" sections will be completely gone. New raids can be created on the fly without being bound to a specific event. Guildwork will automatically detect the last event with the same name and suggest values such as point value. The same goes for items. This means that there won't be predefined list of event and items values which might be slightly bad for point based systems, but since they have become the minority it is not much of an issue.
• Bank will be extracted into its own Guildwork module without any connection to the Raid Tracker. If a guild is using this feature of Guildwork they will be given the option to export it to Excel so they don't loose data.

If there any questions or suggestions feel free to reply.

OK let me see if I'm reading this right. please…correct me if I'm wrong

Basically you're doing away with "pre-created" events stored in the DKP, as well as "pre-created" Items lists in the DKP… and leaning more towards the "Attendance Percentage" based idea, rather then a "Points Based" system of DKP, Events, and Drops?

One big question is… how will this effect "Wishlists"?

Also…

This means that there won't be predefined list of event and items values which might be slightly bad for point based systems, but since they have become the minority it is not much of an issue.Stanislav

Actually… its kind of a big issue (at least for me), since for the last 4 years our LS has been on a point based system, and one of the reasons we jumped on the Guildwork bandwagon was the way your system was set up made it extremely easy for us to manage.

If I'm reading this all correctly… this not only eliminates all the work we put into creating our DKP, Events, and items… but it nearly kills our entire system of doing things…

I am not getting rid of point systems. I am just not designing the Raid Tracker interface around point systems. Everything except Custom will continue to work.

Yes I am getting rid of predefined Events and Items and if you spent a few hours adding 1000 items I am sorry. It is the very reason I am getting rid of it because I don't want people to have to do that.

This is how it will work.

Lets say you create a new raid and you call it "Nidhogg" and you make that raid worth 5 points and it had 10 participants etc.. Next time you are creating a raid and start typing "Nid" it will auto-suggest a previous Raid and allow you to basically clone it except for the participants. The same will work for loot.

Wish lists wouldn't be broken by this either. Users will now be able to add any item on the game to their wish list without you having to manually add it to the Raid Tracker. There will be a global "Wishes" tab that will show every wish and you will be able to filter it.

Hope that answers everything.

So now that our entire database of items and points will be eliminated, each time a drop happens, we need to assign it a new point value?
If so, will it store that point value? or do we need to do that each and every time?

Are you still including the "Everyone's Exempt" idea? Or will that still be something we can control by adding, instead of subtracting from…?

I love the Wishlist update. But now, it it pulls from EVERY item in the game, I'm foreseeing a LOT of labor on our part to keep people in check or are silly enough to add things that aren't even in our schedule of doing things…
Example: Person A puts "Aq.Abjuration: Legs" on their wishlist… and we don't even do Sky anymore. Going to be a lot of policing of people doing crap like that.
Hopefully, clearer heads will prevail.

From a systemic standpoint, having every item in the game makes it labor intensive for everyone… instead of just for the linkshell leader. From my view, this isn't an improvement. (Understand I am flying blind, as I cannot see what you are developing).

Even with a search function, many linkshell members (lets be honest) are lazy. They simply don't know what drops in the event they are doing. If they come to the guild site, they rely on the lists available in the DKP to determine what they can put on their wishlists.

What I would do is have a master item list on the back-end, and allow the guild to select which items show up on their raid tracker. Present the guild leaders with everything (in a managable form), allow them to sort and search, and have them activate it via a checkbox… or by moving it to an active list. (i.e. Everything presents on the left, active for the guild on the left). On the backend (now I don't know how complicated this is on your side or what the db structure looks like) you might be able to categorize the drops in some way: Weapon, Armor, Crafting, Upgrade, Misc. This would allow the LS leaders to limit their search by category when looking for items to activate for their guild.

Just a thought :-)

From a systemic standpoint, having every item in the game makes it labor intensive for everyone… instead of just for the linkshell leader. From my view, this isn't an improvement. (Understand I am flying blind, as I cannot see what you are developing).Aryianna

I don't understand what you mean by this? Every item wouldn't show up on the Raid Tracker. Every item just means when people add loot or wishes it pulls from a central database to provide nice icons and tooltips. You would never actually see a list of 10,000+ items. If you have 25 members and each has 2-5 wishes that means you have a maximum of 125 items that will show up on the Wish List view.

Even with a search function, many linkshell members (lets be honest) are lazy. They simply don't know what drops in the event they are doing. If they come to the guild site, they rely on the lists available in the DKP to determine what they can put on their wishlists.Aryianna

I find it hard to people there are people doing events and not knowing what drops they want. If people don't want to take time to figure out what they want then don't deserve to be considered for loot. I know this is my personal opinion, but I am going to insist on designing the system around it.

What I would do is have a master item list on the back-end, and allow the guild to select which items show up on their raid tracker. Present the guild leaders with everything (in a managable form), allow them to sort and search, and have them activate it via a checkbox… or by moving it to an active list. (i.e. Everything presents on the left, active for the guild on the left). On the backend (now I don't know how complicated this is on your side or what the db structure looks like) you might be able to categorize the drops in some way: Weapon, Armor, Crafting, Upgrade, Misc. This would allow the LS leaders to limit their search by category when looking for items to activate for their guild.Aryianna

There is already a master list on the backend and that is what powers the current DKP. While you may like this approach you are the edge case. Most people dreaded having to setup a whole DKP and choose hundreds of items and events to appear. After looking through over 100 sites using the DKP I have come to the conclusion that most don't want the master list and just want to track Raids and Loot on the fly. The other issue is that FFXI is also an edge case game with tons of events and loot. Guildwork has stalled out on the FFXI population and if I want to move Guildwork forward I have to give more consideration other MMOs such as WoW, SWTOR, etc… during my design phase. They want more simple user interfaces that require minimal micro management.

Hope that answers your questions.

Fair enough :-)

One thing that really needs to be realized all is heading toward the ability to have an automatic raid tracking plugin do the work for the leaders.

That makes a lot of sense thinking about it in that context.

I just started using guildworks and prior have my linkshells first few weeks on paper is there anyway to add events, attendance and drops retro so my books are official?