Saturday, April 21, 2012

Dkp

my guild has just started using a form of dkp to try and keep loot in the 25 man raids as fair as poss. we dont want some person coming into the raid first night and taking the loot on a roll over a raider who has sent the last few nights learning the fight.

at the moment we are using this first week to build points up and next week we use dkp to bid on loot. we are unsure the best way to carry on and do the actual bids though. we have 3 ideas that seem popular:

1 we set a dkp value on every type of drop and the person with the highest dkp who wants the drop gets offered, if they take it then we just deduct the value from total dkp, if we have 2 or more on same dkp then they roll between them.

2 we have blind bids and have a max of 3 bids per person to master looter. at the end the master looter says joe blogs won 85 dkp.

3 we have an open bid system and you all bid in raid chat then people just drop out of race.

if any bid is tied then we will just revert to standard dice roll.

can you guys please leave me info on the pros and cons of each bid ystem as you find them in your guild so we can have a bit more experience to help us choose.|||I have done 1 and 3, so I'll tell you what can happen there

1) Person 1 sits in all the raids, gets ahead of the rest of the pack and basically can get any first drop they ever want. If an item isn't popular anymore due to having dropped 5 times, you're still asking 5-8 people if they want it, which wastes time. It'll also mean that most of the loot is winding up on a single person, rather than spread out through the raid mostly.

3) Items can get damn expensive. We have a minimum bid on or 200 tier items. I spent 1300 and 1500 on T5 shoulders and Pants.

In a way this is good, cos this'll clear out excess DKP right fast. In a way it's bad, as people don't like spending 900 DKP for something that goes for 200 3 weeks later.

We don't do ties - first to bid a price will win the item at that cost if someone doesn't raise the bid by a minimum of 10.

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Personally, I prefer fixed prices due to avoiding much whining in terms of cost. But, to be fair, the other one will have loot spread out more evenly across the raid. If you spend 1300 for a tier part, you can be sure it'll be a while before you get something again when the average night will get you around 100-150 DKP.

And, as items devaluate in terms of 'value' - ie, the people mainly interested in it have it and the people who are bidding only want it for an offspec - the lower price denotes that as well.

The most important part is to be clear on your system, have one system and stick to it. I may not be a huge fan of bidding, but my current guild uses it and it works for them, so I'm not going to be throwing a hissy fit about it. If it works, it works.|||i dont like fixed prices.

1 : those who want the item first can pay more, those who are patient can pay less. i like that.

2 : after the 10th drop, nonne needs it any more. but some people may want it for pvp / offspec / minor improvement. But they still have to pay the full price ?

3 : setting prices for every item is alot of work.

just make open bidding. it is fair, everyone sees what is going on, prices regulate themselfs. if you want to be the first with T6 soulders, so be it, but it will cost you. fair IMO.|||I've experienced various forms of dkp... most important thing to remember: no system is perfect, or perfectly fair. There will always be complaints.

The big choice you are facing is bidding vs fixed price.

Bidding:

+ Variable pricing. If something is just a slight upgrade, somebody can just bid a little bit. If a new joiner is hoovering up the loot that nobody else wants, they don't get stuck on -1000000 dkp for the rest of their life. Market forces decide values. Some things consistently go for a lot, others don't, largely determined by how useful they are to how many people.

+ Tends to keep everybody within a reasonable range of each other. If somebody has built up a lot of dkp, the chances are that they will spend a lot to win something, and it all tends to balance out through market forces.

- Variable pricing. Some people will find it unfair that the first people to get an item pay more.

- Open to manipulation. People can form cartels to take it in turns to get things at minimum price. People can deliberate bid so as to strip somebody of most of their dkp, in order to get a future drop. I'm sure folks can think of other ways ;-) This is the biggest single problem with any bid-based system.



Fixed prices:

+ "fair", as everybody pays the same for the same gear

- Somebody has to decide the prices. This can be done based on ilevel, which leaves some items vastly overpriced when Blizzard has got their points allocation wrong. Or it can be done by a committee, who may have limited views of what the "correct" itemisation for some classes is. However it's done, there will probably be moans.

- No way for people to pick up items that everybody else already has cheaply. This may be perceived as unfriendly to people who don't attend Every Raid Ever, in casual guilds.

- Items that are small upgrades for people, or upgrades that are likely to be superceded, will tend to be disenchanted to save dkp - even though having them equipped by somebody would benefit the raid. A way around this is upgrade pricing - complicated to administer, but in my view almost essential to make a fixed-price system work (otherwise, for example, who is going to spend dkp on T4 shoulders when they might get T5 shoulders the following week)

- Potential for inflation unless incoming and outgoing dkp are not carefully balanced. At an extreme, zero-sum systems ensure that no dkp ever enters or leaves the system, thus banishing inflation / deflation, but this also makes it difficult to award or deduct dkp for anything other than boss kills, which makes it unsuitable for some guilds.

- No real way for a late joiner to "catch up" and eventually be on an equal gear + dkp footing as their longer-serving colleagues. This sounds like a good thing on the face of it, but if a new player joins the guild in, say, SSC, and spends a year of dedicated raiding, should they still be last in the loot queue at Illidan?



If you're going to bid, IMHO the simplest way is to use secret bids where you only bid once, and the winner gets it for the second highest bid +1. If people bid and rebid, and pay the actual amount that they bid, then slowly bidding up prices will take forever. If it's done in public, the potential for manipulation (already there, but with some risk attached) goes through the roof.

If you're going to use fixed prices, I recommend a zero-sum system if your guild can stomach it. Decide prices based on ilevel (and slot), but allow flexibility for the officers to lower the prices of things that are being consistently DEed. If you're using fixed prices you should consider upgrade pricing (so that somebody winning T5 shoulders who already has T4 only pays the difference in cost between the two). Consider writing off very old gains and losses (>6 months, perhaps), to prevent enormous stockpiles of dkp or permenantly-bottom-of-the-queue woes.

Lastly, keep it simple, so that people can understand and trust it, and STICK TO IT.

HTH :-)|||We had a lot of loot issues.

We went to a staged type of dkp system, where a boss gives more dkp the first few times you down him.

That means the first few drops of an item, while costing more you will get more dkp from that boss.

Once the boss is on farm, dkp is smaller..and bids are smaller.

Open bidding, it works pretty good.|||We use an attendance/last loot ratio. All loot has the same price, but we use two lists. One for major upgrades and one for minor (offspecc, very slight upgrades etc). None of the members knows their "score" and everybody has a "wishlist" with the loot they want. The wishlists are on the website and officers handling loot simply click the item to see who curently has the best score in that instance and gets the item.

The downside is that people can gamble on nobody else having an item on major and grab it as a minor, but officers can overule it and nobody knows their score anyway and they risk competing with other classes that could use said item for an offspec.

I've used every type of dkp system, and this is by far the best I've seen. It can be exploited to some extent, but it's very easy to spot by whoever is handling loot. The biggest downside is that it takes a bit of programming to run the system efficiently.|||We use a blind bidding system. Minimum bid for MH/BT items is 10 for main spec, 7 for off spec. T5 instance loot is 7 and 3 respectively, T4 is just a free roll.

DKP for a night varies....10 for a normal night, around 40 if we down a new boss. People on standby get DKP as long as they're available....if we call out that someone needs a summon and you aren't online or on vent, you lose your dkp for the night. If I'm sitting that night, I'll just park my main at the stone and farm on my alt. We'll also have sitting people either run instances so we can get shards or farm (especially for fire cauldrons on Arch). Tie bids are rolled on.

I was in a guild where bidding was over raid chat....didn't like it as it took wayyyy too long and you can overinflate an item by bidding someone up to make them spend their dkp. I really like the way we do it since it causes you to really think about what items you're going to blow your wad on. Druid T6 helm went for over 300dkp the first time it dropped, I got the bow from Arch for 148, end game healing staff went for 320 or so.

This also helps you to bid your points wisely...there have been people who have bid over 100dkp on an item and the next closest bid was in the 30's.|||Giving dkp to people that had to pass makes leading a raid that much easier. As long as people show up and want to raid (and stay available) they deserve dkp every bit as much as those that got to raid imo.|||Although DKP is sometimes necessary for some loot distribution, I often see that ppl can use each and every system to manipulate and no DKP system is perfect like a few posters have mentioned here. I suppose its all about the skill a player has with how with how to use his DKP or if he is good friends with others in the same class etc...

Anyway personally I prefer the element of chance, after all this is a role playing game, and feel that even a new player to the encounter for the first time should at least have a chance to receive an award for the being part of the collective effort of an end boss encounter regardless.

So was just wondering if any one has experimented with using something like DKP role modifiers? Where there is a combination of both chance and DKP?

i.e if you had like 10DKP would add an extra +10 to /roll 100|||Our guild has a zero sum fixed dkp system. It works nicely, as long as people don't start to complain about items being expensive or not. The prices are generated by the dkp system I think, don't know exactly.

DKP is gained when people bid on items, it's a recycle system. So if everything is sharded or given to people for offspec, noone gains dkp. Works nicely, it encourages people to bid (i.e. people are pushed a bit).

But it all comes down on discipline and maturity imo. I think a big advantage of this system is that it's not much work for officers (it's all automated) and noone has to make up prices (which leads to discussion). And bidding, although I like it, most other people hate that.

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