My Dragons
Loot Rules!
One of the problems for guilds that raid regularly is dividing loot. The really tough part in WoW is the prevalence of "Bind on Pickup" items, because it means that the decisions about who gets to roll on an item have to be made right then, and preferably fast so the group can get on to whatever's next--it takes hours to go through Molten Core anyway, no one wants to make it longer by arguing over every BoP item for five minutes.
As a result, guilds (starting on Everquest and continuing into the present day of MMORPGs) have developed a vaiety of systems1 for the fair distribution of loot. While these systems are all better than slinging accusations of "ninja" around and wrangling over whether priests can use +shadow damage gear while Ragnaros despawns at your feet, they do have drawbacks. These have been thoroughly described elsewhere, so I'm not going to go into them here. My goal is to come up with some other system, hopefully with fewer flaws. Therefore I present the Loot List.
First, set up rosters by class within your guild (or whatever group of guild you regularly raid with). You'll need some specialized and combo rosters as well, such as a "Shadow" roster for warlocks and shadow priests, a "Ranged Weapon" roster that's mostly marksman hunters, a "Tanks" roster for protection warriors and other specs that can tank, and so forth. Put these rosters in order in whatever fashion pleases you2, and make a note of how many people are on each roster at inception.
Then (preferably in advance, but a good lootmaster can probably do it on the fly) come up with categories of loot. The more detailed you get, the better; categories like "cloth armor" and "swords" are vastly inferior to "cloth armor with +shadow damage" and "1H swords with +agi", and so forth. Then you make up rules for which rosters are eligible for each kind of loot. Sample rules are along the lines of "The rogue/hunter/druid roster is eligible for armor with +agi", "Those with low fire resist are eligible for +fire resist gear", and so forth.
Now, armed with your rosters and categories, head into the instance. When a piece of BoP gear drops, you look at the roster that's eligible for it. First person on the roster gets it, and the "insertion point" moves to the next person. If the person who's the insertion point doesn't want or need the piece, keep going down the roster till someone does, skipping those who are not present or who have already gotten a piece since the last time the roster reset. If no one on the primary roster wants or needs it, you have several options: make it an open Greed roll, have a second tier of eligible rosters, whatever you like. When everyone on a given roster has gotten a piece, start over from the beginning.
The reason I told you to keep track of how many people there were on the roster at its inception is because you'll need to know when a new person joins it. She gets a position on the roster such that she has to wait through as many people as the last person on the original roster did before she gets an item. This way new folks are at precisely as much disadvantage as whoever ended up last on the list originally was.
I believe this system has some useful points. It eliminates entirely the weird but fairly common accusation of having hacked the /roll utility; it rewards people to precisely the extent to which they show up, because the more often they're on a roster the more chances they'll have at good loot. At the same time it doesn't totally screw newbies or casual players and prevents the problem where you devote all the good tank loot to one guy...who sticks around till he's got the set and then goes to join a guild that's got Naxx on farming status.
Now I realize this is all a little confusing, so I'm going to present an example. It will be in a seperate post, so stay tuned!
1: Most of them are called "DKP" or "dragon kill points", because the original system was developed on a version of Everquest in which there were only two instanced monsters, both dragons.
2: A few that come to mind: Alphabetically or the reverse; in order of time /played; senority in guild; in order of points if you're migrating from a DKP system; by random /roll.