NDKP has this capability. I'm not sure if its still being updated, I haven't used it since before TBC.

True. And I'm probably considered a bit of loot whore by many in my guild due to that opacity and me being guild leader - when the reality is I've yet to loot a single peice of TBC loot that anyone else put in for.

But to be clear it's usually quite simple for us. Attendance and where the loot will have the best impact for the guild are the dominant determining factors 90% of the time.


And loot councils do offer some flexibility that's harder to have with DKP systems. Like defaulting a piece of loot to some one for a reason - recently we knew that we were still having problems with wiping to HKM because his ~10.8K special attack followed up by a normal melee ~8.5K crushing blow was *just* enough to grease spot our top warrior tank. So we were already looking for the best way to get our primary warrior tank another 500-750 hp when the news that flasks were losing 700 HP came out. In the abscence of any news about retuning encounters and the items upgrades not yet out there either this lead to me defaulting T4 helm token to him when the warrior one finally dropped for us the first time. I'd have also defaulted our first Panz'Thar BP and Maulgar or NB shield to him (if they had dropped - which they never have for us) but the updated items have come along since then and our problem is no longer a problem at all.

We are also currently giving a bit of priorty to one of our priests, who was one of our hunters who decided to change mains to help out our lack of priests problem.

Those kind of things can be difficult to deal with in a DKP system.

I actually did this for my previous guild's DKP system--we were using EQDKP and it was a pretty simple matter of writing a php script to make the appropriate SQL queries. Probably took about an hour to write and debug, all told. The problem was that some people actually ended up lower in DKP than they were before the recalculation, which would have, more likely than not, caused drama, so I let the idea drop.

There are probably as many variants on loot councils in practice as there are DKP systems, and as many band-aids on loot councils as there are on DKP systems. For example, my guild's loot council is heavily based on player's wish lists and rotation between classes to the extent that some class leaders publish distribution of every item that class can use in a raiding situation a month+ in advance and asks for feedback. We've made it work even with stuff like the rejuv gem, which ended up cooperating nicely with us by dropping at a reasonable rate. (We got 2 rejuv gems in one night once. Feel free to hate.) Non-raiding role items tend to get passed to the people who will appreciate it the most as it is, but that's specific to our guild's culture.

My feeling that unless all offset gear gets changed into an eventually guaranteed drop (a la heroic badges), that we'll be stuck discussing variant 21195 of DKP system/loot council/dice roll forever. (Note: I'm not actually advocating this, as much as i hate random loot drops, I can see why it's implemented in a subscription based game)

We had a similar problem back in Naxx days. We were using a variation of zero-sum fixed price system and we thought too many items were getting disenchanted. Basically the rational behavior of individual was not in the interest of the guild. As was mentioned in this thread, one will forego sidegrades or small upgrades to get the big upgrades.

Our solution was to create a two-tier zero-sum system, kind of a constrained bidding, having a primary and secondary point pool. If an item is uncontested it goes for secondary points, otherwise it's open for primary point bids. Essentially it's open bidding with the options of not bidding, bidding full cost in secondary points and bidding full cost in primary points. The points inside each zero-sum tier are distributed in the same way as we did when we only had one pool.

After we made the change we've rarely seen anything rot unless it was of no use. Initially players had a lot of concern because of the bidding system elements. The main concern being an item going for primary points one week and secondary later. In the end it is a trade-off between individual fairness and benefit for the guild and based on how it's worked in the expansion I can say that benefits outweighed the costs.

That's assuming the loot council isn't explaining the reasoning behind any potentially contentious drops. Often, all it takes to quell most speculation is to have whoever announces the council's decisions to give a short explanation of why the item is going to whoever is receiving it. It won't totally stop speculation (there's quite often factors that simply can't be spoken on vent without causing offense or argument), but a mature raid group generally won't dwell on such things unless the stated reasoning is decidedly spurious.

We tried out a zerosum fixed dkp system for some months but I was really happy when we switched back to open bidding.

I know almost everyone uses zerosum but I really can't see why. Open bidding leads to a system mirroring the real world in most ways. A free market where demand and supply sets the prices. Early adopters have to pay more but it's their own choice. If you don't want to pay as much you just wait for the second drop of something.

With open bidding the values of the items will be more correct, off-specs can get their equipment really cheap, everyone will take small uppgrades and not let them be disenchanted, it's much easier to reward wipe raids, no one can get a huge lead in dkp to take everything, and new guild members get to gear up cheap.

The only one small downside I can see is like someone said that it's known to happen that some people make deals to pass for each other, but if this happens often it can be spotted and punished.

And the most elegant thing about the open bidding is that it's such a simple system. No complicated rules or anything.

Intro:
We used to have a zero-sum DKP System, and while it served us pretty well in the beginning, later on we also had problems with Prot Warriors always being comparatively low and point hoarding. We decided to drop it and do something like a loot council, since we made too many exceptions anyway, like give Warriors priority for T3 over Rogues and Healers priority on T3 in the beginning while DPS got priority on T2.5 etc.
I was actually one of the point hoarders myself, and fared pretty well, considering that I was still among the best going into TBC both heal-equip and DPS/Leveleing-equip-wise, and I had 15-20% less attendance than some others with worse gear than mine.
/end Intro

What we've been using since then is a loot council, with attendance and items received being looked at when considering who get's an item.

I've actually thought about using the quotient of attendance (in hours, raids etc.) over items received (adjusted by quality, slot) as a measure to determine priority. This is actually pretty good if you want a linear loot distribution, because the average gradient of the whole guild is just that, the gradient of linear loot distribution graph (raids/ items ). (Look at the second graph here if you don't get waht I'm trying to say:http://padwen.tripod.com/ )
This is actually also pretty well suited for handling sidegrades like DPS plate for tanks, since you can easily just calculate a second gradient, of raids / sidegrade items received and not count sidegrades towards the main quotient.

It's certainly not a perfect system, but I haven't been able to think of anything yet that would make it worse than a zero sum system. It's far simpler than a zero-sum system with modifications for all the problems, and might be good for people who don't want the overhead of using a heavily modified zero-sum system.

And sorry if you consider this off-topic, but I think it fixes quite a few of the major zero-sum problems.

The idea of making main spec gear cheaper for classes that have multiple roles is not really something I am keen upon, what I'd rather do is have offspec gear cheap/free if nobody who will use it full time needs it.

We have a DKP system that we only really use for 25 man raids, but most of the time the items are not contested enough to really cause massive drama. I ran an officer council guild in the past, and have zero intention of ever repeating the same mistake again, even if a decision is perfectly fair and the awards would mirror the exact decision that DKP would make, on contentious items that a lot of people want you will get drama.

In both guilds I've been in that use bidding, there was never any fear of collusion being used to get cheap items. In fact, the first one actively encouraged it, half as "It's good to work things out with your class-mates" and half as "I dare you to even think you can exploit this system".

The thing is... Collusion is a myth. An item is either common (enough will drop for everyone) or rare (not enough will drop for everyone). There's no reason to collude on a common drop, since it should always sell for the minimum price. Telling someone "One of us should take it for cheap this time and the other will get it cheap next time" isn't collusion-- it's reaching the market optimum since you can virtually guarantee both people will their loot.

And for rare drops, you can't use the argument, "You'll get it cheap next time" because you don't know when the item will drop again. So there's extreme incentive to bid well above the "agreed" price, at which point you're not colluding anyway. Honestly, colluding with someone on a rare drop by letting them have it cheap just gives them more points to bid you up on other stuff, since the only people you can collude with are your closest loot competitors.

After a few weeks, the guild figured this out and most people didn't even attempt to collude anymore.

I agree that collusion isn't a huge practical issue. The blame game of assumed collusion and unfairness is though. Early in MC some classes had internal bidding agreements while others didn't. The perceived gradient and the perceived unfairness was the problem.

For me loot systems are almost all psychology. How to not have people kill each other and bust things over an item.

With TBC we revamped the DKP system and I think it was a good thing. Main issue with DKP was that people passed on upgrades to secure a better standing later on. That for us was a rather real issue and much more tangible than collusion.

Second issue was learning vs farm run attendance. DKP as used naively rewards drop value, not effort.

Finally due to zero-sum self-valuation you cannot, by design easily give away loot for free (to get to the hybrid off-gear question).

In essence you want both competitive bidding for highly desirable loot and basically free giveaway for common loot with some trivial means of distribution.

Trouble with loot council is simply that if people disagree, not DKP levels or the random roll is at fault, but one or more people. Needs a mature crowd for that to not be extra source of drama.

We ended up designing a non-zero sum DKP that actually doesn't reward drops or bidding levels at all. DKP comes from attendance, learning runs, bosses killed. So stuff like the advantage to be in raid when a bidding hike happens is removed and reward for stuff that should be rewarded can happen. People can opt to roll instead of bid, so there simply is no excessive sharding. If you want it for free you can have it.

That splits the common loot vs rare loot issue. Most common loot is just rolled on and everybody is happy camper. Rare loot is essentially distributed by levels of contributing to the raid as the DKP system is set up to valuate that. Every new tier of raid content introduces new DKP so there is no persistent inflation and new folks get a reset to compete for rare items.

Certainly seemed to work fine for that. Hybrid items from common loot is just rolled and people can easily get multiple sets without spending a single point of DKP and taking a disadvantage for primary loot for a main function.