DKP/Loot management during raids

[impishfae]

This one is a bit left field, hence the General Chat forum.

Now we have DKP running for the guild, the actual mid-raid management of who is/isn't eligible to bid for loot is proving to be quite time-consuming. (Easy, but a bit tedious).

Background: we use a time-based, capped DKP system. Loot has a fixed price. Loot is offered to those eligible, from the posessor of the highest current DKP value, downwards. If more than one person has the same DKP total, then we /random between them.

Most of our core raiders attend every raid. So there's a significant portion who have the same amount of DKP.

When a loot item drops, the loot officer needs to check the current DKP value of everyone who's /raised for the item, work out who has the equal set of highest, then let 'em know who gets to participate in the /random.

We're using the DKP List Updater tool of yours, but the list is quite long to search through, and I'm told our loot officer mainly leaves a second PC set up with the EQDKP site open on it.

So I guess this is a bit of a query/suggestion post.

I tried loading up EQ Looter, since that might at least get us a nicer mechanism to filter out the entire guild dkp list back to just those who have /raised for an item, but it vomits and dies when trying to connect to EQDKP with a 'Unable to Load dbexpmysql.dll' error.

I thought maybe DKPList Updater could have some sort of filtering mechanism added to it? (at start of raid just select the set of people on the raid and display only those, so at most we only have 24 in the list. Ideally it could also read in the chat channel as it goes past and filter down to just those in the current bidding round. Not sure if this is possible) At the least it'd be handy if DKPLU also read in the 'class' field off the standings listing and displayed it too, so we can check that people are bidding for items they can actually use.

Or maybe we should just suck it up and get used to the extra overhead.

Suggestions welcome! (From everyone, not just beleagured Lokorin. I'm so demanding, I feel guilty. )

[Lokorin]

First: EQ Looter is old and will probably not be coming in from the cold bar a rewrite.

DKP List Updater is really old too, I actually don't even have access to the Delphi IDE any more (in which the program is written). The good news is that the list updater employs a home brew template system, so the part that is displayed in EQ2 can be altered by anyone by altering the templates. The filtering has to be done on the EQ2 side, and I barely knew enough about the EQ2 GUI to add the tab, let alone build a filtering function. So this question has to be answered by someone more adept at the EQ2 GUI.

The good news is that the EQ2 GUI seems fairly advanced, and if I recall correctly the DKP data is just dumped into a data structure of some sort, it is not hard coded to be displayed in a certain way (I hope).