Hey folks!  We're rapidly approaching a long-overdue revamp of the event / DKP system.  I'll write down what we've come up with based upon your requests in the past, then if you have any ideas about what we're proposing or if you have proposals of your own, please post them!

Event Templates

Guilds often go through the same encounters frequently, and don't really think of them in terms of “where” they are, primarily, but “what” they're doing.  For example, an event is more often thought of as “Ikkinz Trials” than “EverQuest: Gates of Discord: Ikkinz.” 

The details of these events are static.  The only thing that changes between occurances is when they happen.  So under the new system, you'll be able to save an event as a template.  Once you've got templates available, when you're creating a new event you'll see a drop-down with all of the templates you have available.  If you select one, all of the details of the event, except for the date/time, will be automatically filled in from what you saved with the template.  This includes the Game Area, the descriptive text you typed in previously, priority, who's invited, and the raid point value, if one was entered.

You'll also be able to edit existing templates.

Event Requests

Often, especially in larger guilds, people can get lost in the mix.  They have needs for flagging and questing that may not be current priorities for the guild as a whole.  Under the new system, members will be able to request events, assign a personal priority, and event admins will see these as essential News Submissions are seen today.  They will be able to approve the event and dictate when it will happen.

This one wasn't so much a feature request as it was something that we've found guilds coming up with systems to do it on their own (forum posts, external scripts, etc).  We hope to make it easier and more integrated by making it part of the service.

Loot

One thing that's kept us from moving forward with loot tracking is that we've had a mindset that somehow it just had to tie in with the guild bank system.  The spiderweb of coding and schema that would be necessary to support this would be nightmarish.  Worse, the guild bank system, with the requirements to enter data in the fields for specific values for attributes like strength, dexterity, etc., ended up being more a pain in the arse than just providing a text area for people to enter whatever they want to.  If there'd been a way to search for items by the values entered in those fields, it might be a different story, but nobody's ever requested it and it never happened.  So, why continue forcing entry of it?

With that in mind, ignoring the bank system in order to support tracking of raid loot is the route we're going to end up taking.  When something drops, part of the event follow-up will be the ability to tell the system about it.  You'll be able to say “Shovel of Paladin Smacking” dropped, and if it's dropped before and the system knows about it, you won't have to do anything more than that.  If this is a first-time drop, you'll be provided the opportunity to tell the system whatever you want to about it.  Up to and including linking an image from something like Lucy or wherever, or just entering the stats yourself. 

At this point, you will be able to specify what the item is generally worth in Raid Points/DKP.

Once saved, instances of drops are tracked.  So when an item drops three raids later, a tie between the description of the item and the instance of the item that dropped on that specific raid is created.  On this instance, you'll be able to track who the item went to, how much they paid for it (if you use Raid Points/DKP), and any additional notes you want to enter.  The Raid Point/DKP value will be auto-filled when entering info about a drop, but you will also be able to edit the value of an item at the level of a drop.  So while the Shovel of Paladin Smacking may generally be worth 20 points, it may have been decided that ShadowKnights should always be able to get the item for 5 points.  You'll be able to edit this at the drop level, without modifying the original raid loot template.

You'll also be able to say that an item was awarded to nobody (say nobody wanted to spend raid points, or nobody wanted it just because it, well, bites).  This will feed the reporting system as well, so you'll be able to see how many items have rotted.

You'll also be able to edit the templates.  So when the next expansion comes out, say, “Shades Of Impishness,” and the Shovel that drops off yard trash mobs makes the last expansion's raid-level drops look pretty pathetic, you can decide that the old Shovel is worth 10 DKP / Raid Points from this point forward. 

Event Follow-Up

The current event follow-up system allows for saving a narrative of the event as a whole.  The new system, bolstered by the raid loot drop tracking, will be able to automatically link items that dropped on the raid, freeing the event admins from having to do double-entry. 

Summary

In all, aside from administration of events, the proposed system opens up the possibility of extensive DKP / Raid Point tracking.  Reports could be made available under a new content type that shows raid point standings and drill-through to see who's won what by either the person (click person's name, see where all their points have been spent), item (click on an item, see who's ever won items of this type and how much it cost them), or event (click on the event name and see all instances of the event, what dropped, etc).

We'd really like to hear what you think of this proposal, and if you have ideas of your own, we'd love to hear those too.  This is the biggest content-level rewrite we'll have done to date, and we want to make sure that we get the most of what everyone wants to see.

Because of the size of the changes, they'll be hitting live in stages.  The first that will be seen will most likely be the Event Templates, and we'll move on from there.

Arathel had a nice requirements document she wrote for me on a DKP system... I'll see if I can find it and post it here. Some of what's in there might be helpful to look at when approaching this project.

for the Events i would liek to beable to click on some1s name on my Raid Attendance page and beable to see what evetns they have mised. so that if it was a misstake and i dont have to go around searching threw all my events to find out which one they  didnt get the points for.

on my site i use the dragon point standing thing and it tells u the # missed/signedup for and if its saying they missed a raid rather then have to search all my raids i can click on there name and it will say something like

Raid History for Daeaorn
Kaeasora 5/7 unattended
PoValor 5/20 attended 6 DP's awarded
The Hole 6/1 attended 6 DP's awarded
Lake of Ill Omen 6/10 unattended

something liek that would make it easy fpor me to go back and if i did make an error thats an easy fix because i can go to Kaeasora for 5/7 and go to Daeaorn and fix it. Thats what i would liek to see. Becasue a few of my members are marked as unattended events and i have to search all my events to find out the ones they signed up for let alone missed and a few times i  have missed thee name or i forgot to do a follow up on a raid but it took me forever to find it.