[Philistine]

Hi everyone,

Let me preface this with the fact that I have never written a raid petition and have only read a couple. I understand though that guilds put a lot of time and effort into their petitions and often have high hopes for what they perceive as justice being handed out in response to their petitions. I also understand that the petitions are very time-consuming for the server's volunteer staff to review, to the point of being burdensome. It is also my understanding that participating guilds would like timely responses to the petitions to better understand staff positions on rules, what’s OK and what’s not, to see there be consequences for material rule violations, etc, and server staff would like to receive fewer petitions. If my understanding of any of this is incorrect, please forgive me. With this premise in mind though, I thought I’d spitball an idea on how to help with both getting petitions resolved quicker and reducing the burden for server staff.

The idea is this: petitions related to a draft-eligible raid-encounter would be reviewed and addressed by a committee of one officer each from three draft-eligible guilds not involved in the petition. For example, if Riot and Kittens both petitioned Vanquish on a Lady M encounter, then one officer from TSS, AEGIS, and Lighthouse would review any and all petitions related to that encounter, as Riot, Kittens, and Vanquish would all be ineligible to participate in the arbitration.

The committee would be asked to review the petition(s) and respond within one week. Upon completion of the review, the committee would write a brief (ie, a couple of sentences) ruling outlining their findings and taking one of the following four actions:
• No action required – the issue(s) at hand was a “racing incident”, if you will
• Require Guild(s) X to concede the mob in question next cycle
• Require Guild(s) X to concede the mob in question for the next two cycles
• One of the above concession actions + escalate petition to server staff for review with a recommendation for a more severe punishment as the staff sees fit (ie, temporary bans, permanent bans, zone-wide bans, guild-wide bans, etc)

To ensure that the implementation of such a committee wouldn’t end up resulting in simply more inquiries being sent to server staff, I feel like the decisions would need to be binding and irreversible.

It is my understanding that the vast majority of petitions are likely to come from, and be directed at, the top 2-3 raiding guilds, resulting in a disproportionate amount of work being dropped onto the officers of the other draft-eligible guilds. Given this, I think a fair question would probably be, “Why would anyone in their right mind want to participate in the petition committees?” I propose that in exchange for their participation in these committees, the participating officers would conduct a /random after all petitions related to a single encounter are resolved. The winner of the /random would then be allowed to pick an encounter from the draft list for their guild/alliance to automatically get dibs on for the mob’s next spawn cycle, with a limitation on each encounter being eligible only once until all encounters have been selected. The winning guild/alliance could do with the mob as they see fit, including leaving it up if they so choose and/or can’t muster the force to kill it; the only restriction I’d propose would be that they couldn’t invite/allow members of the guilds involved in the petition to participate unless a server-wide raid is hosted for the kill. I show ~34 draft-eligible encounters, so while the top 2-3 guilds might cringe at giving away a Vulak, any individual encounter would only be taken this way on rare occasion. This would both provide incentive for draft-eligible guilds to participate in the committees, as well as a disincentive to submit inquiries, as doing so would cost the guilds a chance at an encounter next cycle.

If this were to be adopted, I’d propose a one-month trial period. This would be long enough for committee participants to get an idea of whether they feel they can do this in the long run and how realistic the one-week turn-around time is; for petitioning guilds to get a feel for how their petitions are likely to be viewed and learn to act accordingly; and for server staff to gauge whether it was having the hoped for impact of reduced petitions. At the same time, one month isn’t forever, so if it turns out not to be working out for any of the parties involved, just a few cycles later the process would end.

I’m sure this idea has many flaws. How can it be improved? Or is it just not workable?

If you're still reading this, you're a total trooper. Thanks!

/wall o’ text off