Loot systems explained: I read 1,159 chat adverts to see which ones people actually use

In brief. I scraped 1,159 distinct recruitment and pug adverts out of one evening of LookingForGroup chat on Dreamscythe — both factions, four hours — and counted what loot systems people advertise. Soft reserve won, and it wasn't close. DKP — the thing that ran raiding for fifteen years — appeared zero times. The real split isn't between "good" and "bad" systems, it's between what a pug needs and what a guild needs: hard reserves showed up in 15.5% of pug adverts and 3.1% of guild ones, while loot council went the other way, 15.5% of guild adverts and 0.1% of pug ones. Pick the one that matches how long you expect these people to be in your raid.

I have been in exactly one guild that died over a loot system and about four that died over people. That ratio is the whole point of this post: the system matters much less than picking one that matches your situation and then not changing it in week six.

But everybody argues about it anyway, and most of the arguing happens without anyone knowing what the words mean. So here are the words, and then here is what people on live realms are actually doing right now.

What do the acronyms actually mean?

Here they are in one table, because that is what a table is for.

The rest of this post is about which of those is a real choice for you and which are museum pieces.

Which system do people actually use in TBC Anniversary?

Soft reserve, by a mile — 178 of the 1,159 adverts I captured named it, against 83 for MS>OS and single digits for everything with a spreadsheet.

Before the table, the honest caveat: this is one realm, one channel, one four-hour evening. Dreamscythe, LookingForGroup, both factions, 21:00–01:15 UTC on a Wednesday, deduplicated so a guild spamming the same line for three hours counts once. It is a snapshot of prime time on a busy realm, not a census. I would not bet the house on a number in the second decimal place. I would bet it on the shape, because the shape is not subtle.

Two things in there surprised me. The first is that DKP is dead. Not declining — absent. Eleven hundred adverts, dozens of them from organised 25-man guilds clearing Serpentshrine on a schedule, and not one of them said the letters D-K-P. The system that ran Molten Core, Naxxramas and Sunwell for a generation did not make it to the Anniversary realms.

The second is that only 236 adverts named a loot rule at all. The other 923 are people who assume you will ask, or who are recruiting rather than filling a raid tonight, or who ran out of characters in the chat box. Which brings me to the actual finding.

Do guilds and pugs use different systems?

Completely different ones, and this is the most useful thing in the dataset. I split the captures into genuine guild recruitment and everything else, then ran the same counts:

Hard reserve is five times more common in pug adverts. Loot council is a hundred and fifty times more common in guild adverts. These two lines are the same fact viewed from either end.

A pug's problem is that nobody trusts anybody and nobody will be here next week. So it uses systems that need no trust and no memory: you reserve an item, you roll against whoever else reserved it, the raid leader pre-claims the two or three things worth organising a raid for, and everyone goes home. Nothing carries over because there is no "over" to carry to.

A guild's problem is the exact opposite. It has twenty-five people who will be in the same raid in March, and it needs loot to end up where it makes the raid strongest, not where the dice fell. That is what a council is for. It is also why council is unusable in a pug — it is an instrument that runs entirely on trust, and a pug has none to spend.

So what is a hard reserve, really?

It is the organiser's fee, and in a pug that is completely fair. Someone has to sit in a city for forty minutes filling a raid, know which trash to skip, and eat the abuse when Vashj goes badly. Reserving the trophy for themselves is how they get paid.

The adverts I captured are unusually specific about which items. The same three names come up again and again on the SSC and Tempest Keep runs: Ashes of Al'ar, Belt of One-Hundred Deaths and Lightfathom Scepter — one mount, one leather belt, one one-handed caster weapon. That is a rational list. They are the items whose value is wildly out of proportion to everything else in the instance, which is exactly the set worth arguing about in advance rather than after.

The failure mode is hard reserve creep, and you can watch it happen in real time. A run advertises "DST HR'd" this week. Next week the same organiser posts "2 SR MS>OS w/ Mount and 100 deaths on HR" — a real line, verbatim, from my capture. Two weeks after that it is five items and you are farming for a stranger. My rule is simple and I have never regretted it: if the hard reserve list is longer than the number of loot councils in the advert, leave. Three is where I stop reading.

What is a soft reserve and why did it win?

Because it does exactly one job and does it without any software you have to trust. Before the raid, everyone names one item they want. If it drops, only the people who named it roll for it. That is the whole system.

It won because it fixes the specific thing that makes pug loot miserable — twenty-five people rolling on everything including items they will never equip — without asking anyone to remember anything, install anything, or believe an officer is honest. The bookkeeping fits in one website and one screenshot.

Two soft reserves is the standard, and I can put a number on that. Of the adverts that stated an SR count, the distribution was:

Two is the mode by a factor of three. If you are organising and wondering what to offer, that is your answer — offer two and nobody blinks; offer one and you look stingy; offer four and people assume something is wrong with the run.

What does the "+1" in "MS>OS+1" mean?

It means you have already won something tonight, and on the next item you lose to anyone who hasn't. Win a piece of loot, take a +1. From then on, a +0 raider beats you on a roll regardless of what the dice say — you only get the item if nobody at +0 wants it. Win a second, you are at +2 and you are behind the +1s too.

It exists to fix the one thing plain MS>OS is genuinely bad at: dice have no memory, and a raid does. In a straight roll-for-everything run, nothing stops one person with a hot night taking four items while eleven people take none, and that is not a hypothetical — it happens roughly as often as you would expect it to, which is to say often enough that everyone has a story. +1 does not make the rolls fairer. It makes the evening fairer, which is the thing people actually cared about.

It is a modifier, not a system, which is why you almost never see it on its own. In my capture it showed up in 16 of the 1,159 adverts, and 14 of those bolted it directly onto MS>OS — written MS>OS+1, no spaces, as though it were one word. One guild spelled the whole priority chain out properly: SR > MS+1 > OS, which reads as "reserved items first, then main-spec rolls with winners pushed down, then anything left". That is the clearest statement of it I saw all evening.

Two things worth knowing before you agree to it:

• It prices every item the same. Your +1 costs you the same whether you won a tier chest or a green-quality-adjacent ring off the second boss. Take something marginal early and you can lose your actual best-in-slot at the end of the night to someone taking a sidegrade. The polite move is to pass on small upgrades in the first half of a +1 run; the impolite move is to take everything and then complain about the system at 11pm.
• It is tracked by one person, in their head or a notepad. There is no addon enforcing it and no log of it. That is fine for a three-hour run and completely useless as a guild's standing policy, which is exactly why +1 lives in pug adverts and not in guild ones.

If you are running a pug and cannot decide, 2 SR, MS>OS+1 is the closest thing this game has to a default. It is what most of the raid has already agreed to somewhere else this week.

Is loot council actually as sinister as people say?

No, but it is only as good as your officers, and there is no version of it that survives bad ones. Loot council means the officers look at what dropped, look at who is in the raid, and hand it to whoever makes the raid strongest. Done properly it beats every other system on progression, because it is the only one that can act on information — that your third healer is about to reroll, that the tier piece completes a set bonus tonight, that one of your hunters has attended every single pull since February.

Done badly it is three friends distributing loot to each other, and everyone can tell by about week four.

The thing that makes it work is not the rules, it is saying why, out loud, at the moment of the decision. Ten seconds in raid chat — "Boomkin, because it's a bigger upgrade there and Ret is getting the T5 shoulders next week" — is the entire difference between a council and a cabal. The guilds in my capture that advertise council clearly know this; one of them literally sells it as "transparent mod" in a chat advert with no room to spare, and another calls itself "a low-sodium, sweaty adjacent semi-hc guild", which is the best three-word description of a functioning loot council I have read.

Why did DKP disappear?

Because its main advantage stopped being an advantage. DKP's pitch was that it made loot objective and rewarded attendance — you earn points per boss, you spend points on items, the spreadsheet is the referee. In a 40-man guild in 2006, with no addons worth the name and a raid roster the size of a school class, that was genuinely the best available answer.

Two things killed it:

• Raids got smaller and shorter. Twenty-five people raiding six hours a week do not generate enough loot events for a points economy to mean much. Half the fun of DKP was the auction; there is no auction when four items drop.
• ThatsMyBIS did the useful half for free. TMB gets you the "objective, decided in advance, no arguing on the night" part — everyone lists what they want, weeks ahead, and loot goes down the list — without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet or explaining decay to a new recruit. It shows up in 4.7% of guild adverts, which is small but is seven times its rate in pugs.

I miss DKP a little. I do not miss explaining DKP to a new raider a little.

Which one should my guild use?

Match the system to how long people will be in your raid, not to what sounds fairest. Here is the decision as I would actually make it:

1. One-night pug? SR, two of them, MS>OS+1 on everything else, and hard reserve at most one item. Do not overthink it — you are optimising for filling the raid in twenty minutes, and that line is one people already recognise.
2. A recurring pug with the same faces? Same as above, but drop the hard reserves as soon as you can afford to. The moment it is the same twenty people every week, HR is you taxing your friends.
3. A guild on farm content? MS>OS is fine and costs nothing to administer. Save your officers' attention for things that need it.
4. A guild on progression? Loot council or TMB. This is the one case where the ability to direct loot at a problem is worth real money, and the two systems differ mainly in whether you would rather have the argument live or in a spreadsheet three weeks early.
5. Anything semi-hardcore with a two-night schedule? TMB, honestly. It gets you council's outcomes using time you have already spent, which is exactly the trade a short-hours guild wants to make.

And whichever you pick: write it down, put it where recruits see it before they transfer, and do not change it mid-tier. Every loot system in this post works. Changing loot systems in the middle of a progression tier works in none of them.

How do I check a guild's loot system before joining?

You mostly cannot, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. A loot system is a promise about behaviour, and there is no log entry for "the officers were fair". Our directory will show you a guild's loot system when they have said what it is — 40% of the recruitment adverts I captured mention one at all — but that is their claim, not a measurement, and it is labelled as such.

What you can check is the stuff underneath it, and it correlates better than you would expect. A guild that clears the tier in two nights and has the same twenty-five names in every log for three months has, empirically, a loot system that works — whatever it is called. A guild whose roster churns 30% a month has a problem, and the loot system is either the cause or a symptom. The guild directory reads both of those out of public logs, so it is at least something nobody can write a nicer version of in a trade chat advert.

The honest summary: ask in the trial. Ask who decides, ask them to describe the last contested drop, and listen to whether the answer has a reason in it. That ten-second answer tells you more than any system name ever will.