Guild Launch News
REQUEST FOR INPUT: Alt/Main Functionality in Rapid Raid
I am currently putting the final touches on our Alt/Main functionality in Rapid Raid. I wante to run the overall functionality by you all to get your feedback and input and to help finalize the details.
Here is the gist of the functionality:
There will be a new page on the Admin->Rapid Raid tab in admin. This page will list all characters that are raid active, grouped by member.
When a character starts out it is neither a main nor an alt. It's just a character. An admin will be able to click on a character and make it a "Main", each main can have any character owned by the same member assigned to is an alt.
Regardless if a characters is a main or an alt all items and attendance will still be attributed to the individual characters in the raid data. This way you don't have any wierdness where a Mage with a Priest alt shows a bunch of priest gear assigned to a Mage. This means that the characters will still be self contained.
How Much DKP Do I have to Spend?
The Main vs. Alt distinction comes into play on the Members list, and on the Export page.
On these pages the following occurs:
On the export page, only the values for Main, with the contributed amounts from the alts, will be exported.
The members page will still show all active characters and mains, but will not show alts. Any character that is a main will get a "+" mark next to it that will link to a page that looks like the members page but will be filtered down to the details of all characters that contribute to the main's DKP, including the main. The main on the members page will show the cummulative DKP and attendance for the main and it's alts.
So, the members page might look like this:
Bob + Night Elf Hunter 50 -- 20 -- 30
Clicking on the plus will show this:
Bob Night Elf Hunter 30 -- 10 -- 20
Fred Dwarf Priest ---20 -- 10 -- 10
The end result is that only for the "how much DKP do I have?" is the main considered. This is because that is what really matters to the user. From an historical perspective you want to know who specifically received the item and how much did their alts contribute. This information is retained with our implementation.
Splitting Characters
There are some things that can occur that are not immediately inuitive. The most important thing to realize about Alt/Main settings is that one character is essentially spending another character's DKP, and might be spending DKP they don't have.
Because of this, the following is possible.
Bob + Night Elf Hunter 50 __ 20 __ 30
Clicking on the plus will show this:
Bob Night Elf Hunter 50 __ 0 __ 50
Fred Dwarf Priest ---0 __ 20 __ -20
Our system *will* allow you to turn Fred back into a main, but from the standpoint of the DKP totals he has negative 20 DKP because technically he spent 20 DKP that Bob earned. This workes just fine when he's an alt, but leads to the odd negative number when he's converted to a main. This situation isn't something we can handle in an automated way. Resolving this within your guild via requiring the person to dig themselves out of the DKP hole or by using the adjustment system to correct the DKP
accounting will be left up to you and your guild.
Adjustments
In our current implementation, adjustments are applied to the Main. This is the cleanest implementation for decay and other considerations, but can be tricky if characters are split apart. Again, this is something we can't automate our way out of, and the DKP admin will need to work it out if a split occurs.
If you have any questions or input, I'm all ears. I plan to finish this functionality tomorrow and Monday and to have it released next Thursday if the testing goes well. The underlying code changes are relatively minor because we've built the system in the background to support this all along but we have the flexibility to look into any input we receive still.
Thanks for the input,
Stephen
Here is the gist of the functionality:
There will be a new page on the Admin->Rapid Raid tab in admin. This page will list all characters that are raid active, grouped by member.
When a character starts out it is neither a main nor an alt. It's just a character. An admin will be able to click on a character and make it a "Main", each main can have any character owned by the same member assigned to is an alt.
Regardless if a characters is a main or an alt all items and attendance will still be attributed to the individual characters in the raid data. This way you don't have any wierdness where a Mage with a Priest alt shows a bunch of priest gear assigned to a Mage. This means that the characters will still be self contained.
How Much DKP Do I have to Spend?
The Main vs. Alt distinction comes into play on the Members list, and on the Export page.
On these pages the following occurs:
On the export page, only the values for Main, with the contributed amounts from the alts, will be exported.
The members page will still show all active characters and mains, but will not show alts. Any character that is a main will get a "+" mark next to it that will link to a page that looks like the members page but will be filtered down to the details of all characters that contribute to the main's DKP, including the main. The main on the members page will show the cummulative DKP and attendance for the main and it's alts.
So, the members page might look like this:
Bob + Night Elf Hunter 50 -- 20 -- 30
Clicking on the plus will show this:
Bob Night Elf Hunter 30 -- 10 -- 20
Fred Dwarf Priest ---20 -- 10 -- 10
The end result is that only for the "how much DKP do I have?" is the main considered. This is because that is what really matters to the user. From an historical perspective you want to know who specifically received the item and how much did their alts contribute. This information is retained with our implementation.
Splitting Characters
There are some things that can occur that are not immediately inuitive. The most important thing to realize about Alt/Main settings is that one character is essentially spending another character's DKP, and might be spending DKP they don't have.
Because of this, the following is possible.
Bob + Night Elf Hunter 50 __ 20 __ 30
Clicking on the plus will show this:
Bob Night Elf Hunter 50 __ 0 __ 50
Fred Dwarf Priest ---0 __ 20 __ -20
Our system *will* allow you to turn Fred back into a main, but from the standpoint of the DKP totals he has negative 20 DKP because technically he spent 20 DKP that Bob earned. This workes just fine when he's an alt, but leads to the odd negative number when he's converted to a main. This situation isn't something we can handle in an automated way. Resolving this within your guild via requiring the person to dig themselves out of the DKP hole or by using the adjustment system to correct the DKP
accounting will be left up to you and your guild.
Adjustments
In our current implementation, adjustments are applied to the Main. This is the cleanest implementation for decay and other considerations, but can be tricky if characters are split apart. Again, this is something we can't automate our way out of, and the DKP admin will need to work it out if a split occurs.
If you have any questions or input, I'm all ears. I plan to finish this functionality tomorrow and Monday and to have it released next Thursday if the testing goes well. The underlying code changes are relatively minor because we've built the system in the background to support this all along but we have the flexibility to look into any input we receive still.
Thanks for the input,
Stephen
Can't you just give us a button for "merge alt DKP to main"? That way if someone decides to make their main their alt, and an alt their main we just change it and hit the button.
You have the alts tree'd under the mains already and you have the dkp merge functionality.
or would it be to hard for you to make it that intuitive?
You have the alts tree'd under the mains already and you have the dkp merge functionality.
or would it be to hard for you to make it that intuitive?
Woothdye wrote:
If that's how you choose to handle alt/main switches then yeah you can use the merge functionality. The point is that not everyone will want to do that so I'm not going to automate it. I'm going to leave it to people's discretion to use the tools, like the merge functionality, that they have at their disposal to work out splits and such.
-Stephen
Can't you just give us a button for "merge alt DKP to main"? That way if someone decides to make their main their alt, and an alt their main we just change it and hit the button.
You have the alts tree'd under the mains already and you have the dkp merge functionality.
or would it be to hard for you to make it that intuitive?
You have the alts tree'd under the mains already and you have the dkp merge functionality.
or would it be to hard for you to make it that intuitive?
If that's how you choose to handle alt/main switches then yeah you can use the merge functionality. The point is that not everyone will want to do that so I'm not going to automate it. I'm going to leave it to people's discretion to use the tools, like the merge functionality, that they have at their disposal to work out splits and such.
-Stephen
We have one situation where there is a husband and wife team and he has claimed her character so he can sign them both up for raids. Currently this shows as an alt sign up which is fine. However, it sounds like this really wouldn't work well for us under this concept right? She would need to make an account and claim her own toon and he can still sign her up if he has permissions to do so?
Well you already have the merge functionality so if you just change the way it retrieves the character information and presents it (as you will be doing most of the coding for that anyway) you could just incorporate it into the already existing merge function. So we'd have a whole guild merge option and a single character merge option.
I have no idea how you would present it to us except in a collapsible tree or in a table,which would be one huge table for big guilds.
Even if we choose to use the guild merge option we will still need to either assign all characters as admin before we use it or merge single character DKP.
I have no idea how a guild that runs EPGP would want to handle their DKP
I have no idea how you would present it to us except in a collapsible tree or in a table,which would be one huge table for big guilds.
Even if we choose to use the guild merge option we will still need to either assign all characters as admin before we use it or merge single character DKP.
I have no idea how a guild that runs EPGP would want to handle their DKP
-Deja- wrote:
This wouldn't effect that. So long as you don't go into admin and explicitly define them to behave as an alt/main group where the alt contributes DKP then this functionality won't be involved. So, it shouldn't change anything about how that husband and wife team are operating.
In other words, from the standpoint of this functionality, a character is not an alt just because a person has more than one character. You have to tell the system "I want these characters to contribute DKP to this other character" explicitly.
-Stephen
We have one situation where there is a husband and wife team and he has claimed her character so he can sign them both up for raids. Currently this shows as an alt sign up which is fine. However, it sounds like this really wouldn't work well for us under this concept right? She would need to make an account and claim her own toon and he can still sign her up if he has permissions to do so?
This wouldn't effect that. So long as you don't go into admin and explicitly define them to behave as an alt/main group where the alt contributes DKP then this functionality won't be involved. So, it shouldn't change anything about how that husband and wife team are operating.
In other words, from the standpoint of this functionality, a character is not an alt just because a person has more than one character. You have to tell the system "I want these characters to contribute DKP to this other character" explicitly.
-Stephen
We don't use a DKP system, our looting is purely based on a master loot need/roll basis. So far all I'm seeing are benefits for those that use DKP (unless I'm blindly missing something, which is quite possible) so I'm just wondering if there will be any benefits of this new addition in areas other than DKP and Rapid Raid.
Goldstryke wrote:
Not really. The only way I could see the DKP system being useful to a guild that doesn't use DKP is keeping track of deposits and withdrawals in the guild bank in a separate pool and link a screen shot of the pools. You could give each Item a point/gold value and have a credit system. You would have to put the whole guild in an event and just clone the event every time you update the log. I haven't figured it all out yet but it makes a credit system for the guild bank a visual thing for the guild members and they can easily how many credit point they have.
You could then use the merge functionality to merge alt/main credit points
We don't use a DKP system, our looting is purely based on a master loot need/roll basis. So far all I'm seeing are benefits for those that use DKP (unless I'm blindly missing something, which is quite possible) so I'm just wondering if there will be any benefits of this new addition in areas other than DKP and Rapid Raid.
Not really. The only way I could see the DKP system being useful to a guild that doesn't use DKP is keeping track of deposits and withdrawals in the guild bank in a separate pool and link a screen shot of the pools. You could give each Item a point/gold value and have a credit system. You would have to put the whole guild in an event and just clone the event every time you update the log. I haven't figured it all out yet but it makes a credit system for the guild bank a visual thing for the guild members and they can easily how many credit point they have.
You could then use the merge functionality to merge alt/main credit points