I began working on ZSDKP a few weeks ago and figured out that a key feature of the application would be its ability to scrape items from other sites like Wowguru and Allakhazam. The basic premise is that these sites provide their item XML data and I can just parse it to inject into my database. I would have loved nothing more than to use Wowhead but they do not give you a link (that I can find) to their XML data.

However, I quickly encountered a key problem: I wanted to use one parsing algorithm for all sites that would create the item based on my own field names. This meant I was susceptible to a key pitfall: wowguru and allakhazam use different XML structures from each other which is, additionally, different from the scheme I use.

Enter: XSL Transforms!

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This is not a particularly specific guide to any one MMO, just a suggestion to all the guild master and officer teams out there about what to think about as you plan and re-plan your loot systems. I will go through a few more popular systems for dishing out loot and discuss some of the pros and cons with these loot systems.

The loot system I plan to discuss is Zero-Sum DKP(with a focus on NDKP), bid dkp, flat rate purchase/most dkp wins, and loot council. The key thing to remember is that no one system is proven perfect. No one system will provide your guild with the perfect way of dividing out loot that makes everyone happy.

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