Before we get too far along into DKP based raiding in the expansion, I'm trying to get my guild into a zero sum system instead of the open bidding system that we have been using. Among the many issues to solve in the proposed transition, how to deal with learning nights is one I'm looking for advice on. By learning nights I mean nights when you run a raid and get zero or very little loot. I've read various information on zsDKP and am familiar with the terminology, but haven't found any real detailed examples on how this issue is dealt with. Anybody willing to share how their guild handles these types of raids, I'd love to discuss it. Any other experience about a transition from open bidding to zsDKP would be great to hear as well.

One thing that worked for my guild's zero-sum DKP system was to pool some % of the points spent into a bank and then pull points out of the bank for wipe nights. The exact % can of course be adjusted, but it was never enough that anyone felt slighted and we always had enough in the bank to make players feel that it was worth attending wipe/learning nights.

We also zero our DKP by week, not by raid, and use "incentive DKP" for raids that are progression nights, not on farm, and for turn-ins. We use the Immortality RMS which after a little tweaking has made everything incredibly easy.

What my guild did before TBC was use a flat zero-sum dkp system, then tally points allocated during progression time in another system. The actual amount of points someone had to spend was the combination of the two, though an item's value would only be subtracted from the zero-sum system.

With this "incentive DKP", are you just adding points into the system or are these points effectively subtracted from farm raids when you zero your DKP by week?

Sirloin is a lazy rot. :P

When we were raiding pre-TBC we would give out a large learning bonus for raids where we spent time learning a new boss. We also gave double DKP for a first kill on a boss.

After a couple nights of learning went by, we'd do an adjustment to the system where we took the amount of DKP paid out for learning divided by the number of people in our DKP system and subtracted the result off of everyone in the system.

Positive points of the system:
-Can pay out DKP for effort in a zero sum system
-People not hitting learning encounters or aren't actively raiding have their DKP slowly degrade
-Pretty easy to do with most DKP tracking systems
-Its easy to understand and predict for people that aren't administering the system

Negative points:
-Requires a large number of people in the system to be effective (ie. if you've got 40 active people and you're rotating them through your learning nights pretty consistently, this system won't work)
-A bit of the learning DKP is lost when you make adjustment (depending on how you look at it)

Kinda hacky, but it worked alright for us.

**deleted, didn't have anything to say and pressed post accidentally**

We used an open bid system pre-TBC in our old guild, and when half the people split off to form a new guild, we decided to use a zsDKP system.

Basically, we don't smooth DKP for 25-man raids at the moment. We do keep track of attendance and people with <75% are not allowed to bid for loot, regardless of DKP (unless no members >=75% bid). We run with a relatively tight crew, around 32-33 raiders now, and it's noticeable who shows up for progression nights and who doesn't.

I'm considering doing a DKP smoothing, but I'm not sure if it's worth the extra effort for us. After all, with us running 2-3 learning nights a week out of 4, if someone misses more than 1 learning night a week, they might as well not show up if their only motivation is loot. With a larger guild, it might make more sense to do a DKP "tax" on those who don't show up for learning nights.

We're using Progress and Regular DKP on our guild, which basically means that when we're doing a raid, if we're on farm bosses, have a set hourly DKP and set DKP values for the bosses. If we're on progress nights/bosses, we have a multiplier for the hourly DKP and for the boss DKP, that way in the end, all the DKP is calculated accurately, not at the raid level, but actually at the hourly level.
We use gsDKP.Com which is a system created by myself and is free for the public. It supports progress raids and Zero-sum, so if you want, you can play with it and see what fits your guild for yourself.

- Giantskull

The info so far has been great, and based on that I want to expand a little.

1. If you do give out extra points (that will of course be taxed back later) for showing up to a learning night type raid, how much should you give each person in relation to how much you charge for items?

2. Also since I'm getting ready to price items, what kind of value spread across all possible loot should you see. I know for example on the EJ loot system posted on these forums, they list having increments of 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150 (which sounded good for easy division among 25 raid attendees).

3. Lastly, is it a good assumption to assume with a value spread like the example above that you would see a normal distribution of items and values, with few falling into the 50 and 150 categories and the most falling into the 100 categories.

I just want to make sure I keep the number conservative (and I know the numbers aren't the real important factor, it's the ranking) after experiencing our open bidding system getting very very inflated after a couple years of use.

As for pricing, I'm always a fan of pricing based on ilvl and slotvalue, adjusted a bit to take into account that certain items are seen as "more valuable" than others. That way there's not as much subjective judgement going into pricing. If you have a chest that drops with an ilvl of 110, and your slotvalue for chests is 1, then the item goes for 110 dkp. If you have an 110 ilvl belt that drops and your slotvalue for belts is 0.5, then the belt is 55 dkp.

I think number of sockets should be a factor in determining item DKP value as well.

I don't want to derail the thread, especially since you seem pretty happy with a zero sum DKP system. But let me throw out a non-zero sum system I've used in the past that worked quite well. I'll summarize it, and if you have any interest, just PM me.

- We accrued DKP by time spent raiding - 1 point per 30 minutes of being in the raid. Extra points were paid for being signed up, for being on time, and for staying to the end. This prevents the issue of learning nights being the time when people don't come, because you're always accruing DKP (and in fact, when you're spending a couple of hours trying to learn an encounter, you actually earn MORE DKP than when you go in and one-shot the boss).

- In order to prevent inflation, when an item was up for bids, you could only bid one of three bids: all, half, or min. All and half bid use all or half of your DKP obviously. The min bid was there in case you were below zero points, or if something was going to be melted otherwise (that is, you couldn't bid "min" to be a cheapskate; if your DKP was less than "min" you could only bid "all").

- We had an open bidding process: when an item dropped for a damage caster, the GL would open the floor for bids. People would bid in vent or in raidchat, and you were allowed to change your bid at any time - so the person with the most DKP could ALWAYS bid "all" to take the item if they tried to bid low and were outbid. Though this might sound unappealing, it made things interesting, and led to a number of people bidding all when they really wanted something, forcing lots of churn in who got the goods.

This system turned out to be quite effective at combating inflation (you could hoard DKP but if you bought something your total was chopped at least in half), and it kept people coming back to learn new encounters. It's not a zero-sum system, but it didn't require any bookkeeping or adjusting of DKP to maintain a zero sum, and from my experience with it, it worked as well as any other system I've seen.

Hah, this is pretty much exactly what we do (I dubbed it "payday zero-sum"), including my writing a custom "weekly payday" dkp page so people could track what their paycheck was looking like.

Works really well so far, and deals with every issue typically associated with zero-sum.

Well, people earn "raid credits", which just determine how much a piece of the "total item cost looted" pie they get. We never actually give someone DKP other than on paydays, so it's impossible for anything to go non-zero-sum. If someone shows up for 2 of 5 raids, they get 2 raid credits when everyone else gets 5. We dole out raid credits per hour, so partial raids are broken up at that granularity. Also, we multiply 30-day raid attendance by raid credits before summing, so it's not linear -- people with better attendance get disproportionally more points.

Another thing that is possible to do besides decaying point values and what I did for RMS immortalityguild.com was to add the ability to set each zones DKP cap so that players couldn't earn points beyond a certain point to help cut down inflation. I made it so it can either check against your current DKP overall or just that zones DKP for comparing against that zones cap. For the incentive part RMS has the option to do the readjustments to keep the system zero sum, so when you are adding raids and setting an incentive for that raid it is keeping track of the amount of adjustment that is needed to keep it zero sum. So once a week I just zero out the points and people with bad attendance take a bigger hit.