Here, i'm trying to build a DKP system for my guild and i can't seem to find a good fit for us. I had this crazy idea and i'd like ppl to point out if any obvious abuses or loopholes it could contain.

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Introducing D.I.P (or Dynamic Item Pricing).

The idea is to have an item cost proportionnal to how bad it is wanted. Here is how the system works:

DKP can only be substracted during Raids (by buying loot), meaning your DKP can only go up before or after raids.

You gain DKP as Follow:

1.00 DKP Per hour of Raid.
3.00 DKP Per Guild First Boss Kills
2.00 Extra DKP for the week's "Progression Night"

Let's say we SSC and we hammer our heads on the wall for 4hours and finally kill 1 boss on the last pull.

That raid would be worth 9.00 DDP. (+9.00 DKP to everyone that was there or on WL (and avaible) for the whole 4 hours and bosskill.)

That makes progression nights more rewarding and gives motivation to kill bosses. gear_happy2.gif Also detach the DKP earned from the loot itself.

Handling Loot:

When something drops Loot Master (not directly in game loot master... but someone in charge of loot) call ppl to express their intentions. People can reply in tell to the Loot Master 2 things: Need or Want. Or remains silent if they do not wish to get the loot.

Need = Willing to use DDP to Trump loot in his bags (highest DKP Score wins.) His DDP will be substracted with the Item's price.

Want = Willing to use /random to decide where loot goes. Winning loot with this method cost no DKP.

If everyone replies with "Want" then Loot Master call them out to roll and winner takes his loot. It ends there.

If one or more person replies with "Need" then the DDP of the ones that replied "Need" is checked and highest DKP wins it.

Spending DKP once you won, or where D.I.P. comes in

When you won an item using you DKP to trumpt it in your favor. The price you pay is calculated based upon how much the items is desired by the raid. Hence Dynamic Item Pricing.

A full raid is 25. So 25/25 = 1 or 100% So Item cost will be equal to (X / 25) x Winner's DKP, where X is the number of ppl that desired the item.

It means if 3 ppl said "need" and 4 said "want" there is a total of 7 ppl that desired the item. So the winner has to pay 7/25th of his DKP to trumpt the item in his favor.

If i am the highest DDP with 22 points, Calculation goes like this (7/25)*22 = 6.16. So that item would cost me 6.16 DKP.

In short: I give away the same % of my DKP as how much of the % of the raid i trumped to get that item.


Exeptions:

So if Vengin called "Need" on something the whole raid would automatically say "want" so that he has to spend 100% of his DKP. So a Cap is needed..

Maximum % you can spend of your DKP = 48% (or 12/25) If more than 12 people wich to have said item, it's still gonna cost only 48% of your DDP Pool.

If only one person Said "Need" and no one else spoke, it will be treated as "Want" IE: No DDP Lost.

It seems to me, that without any penalty to those who flag 'Want', the people who dont genuinely want the item can force others to use more DKP. This is more of a case when each additional person flagging 'Want' forces the price of the item to go up an additional 4% of someone's total DKP as you only have 25 people in the raid.

My gut feeling is this is too complicated. If a raid member can't figure out when he's bidding how much it costs, then I think it's not a very good system.

I have no issue with awarding DKP based on time spent - I was in a guild that very successfully did it. But I think the dynamic pricing of items is not a good idea. Have a fixed price for items, and if you're worried about inflation making items out of reach for new raiders, have a weekly or monthly decay of DKP so that people can't hoard their points.

If people aren't spending DKP because the upgrades aren't enough (which I think is what you're trying to get through with the Need/Want), then offer a partial rebate on DKP for upgrades.

But my bottom line is: simplify, simplify, simplify.

What happens if 2 people are tied? Or a Hunter 'wants' a rogue dagger and has more points? In addition to the above concerns (want = more points spent) things like this need to be worked out in some way. Item priority is pretty important. My guild uses a not-so-great bidding system, but officers have the right to smash unreasonable bids, and do so fairly responsibly (imo). Really, the bottom line for any loot system is that the majority of your players are okay with it. If everyone agrees that it works, it usally works

Well a priest saying want on a 2h axe to pump prices is gonna be discredited and not counted into the price calculation. there is a cap also at 12/25th so if more than 12 ppl said either need or want 12/25 is still used.

Also, saying "need" as priority over saying "want" even if person sayign "want" has more dkp. Reason for this is that by saying "need" you agree to spend up to (but not necessairly) 48% of your DKP to trump everyone else. Saying "want" means you aren't willing to spend dkp on it.

We had a Fixed price system in the past and even with offering items at 25% of their original cost ppl were still passing and shards were still made. Healign druids passed on many Malfurion's Blessed Bulkwark they could have used to level faster and farm more consumables in TBC. That's the reason behind the "Want" system where you are willing to pass till it default to you (or win /roll against ppl saying "Want" as well) to avoid spending DKP for items.

In this setting DKP buys you the right to loot first instead of loot itself.

In the event of 2 ppl saying Need having the same DKP, they both /roll and winner wins..

With your "need" and "want" outcomes, it seems like a slightly more complicated version of an iterated prisoner's dilemma. I'm no game theorist though, so I'll leave someone else to tell you what that means. However, here's what common sense gives me:


Basically, let's say you have 3 hunters on the raid. 2 of them are good friends, and they don't particularly like the third guy. Assume for the moment that the third guy is slightly ahead of them on DKP.

A hunter item drops. The two friends suspect that the third guy is going to "need" it (since it's a nice fat upgrade for him), and they don't really want it...but they go in as "want" anyway. He pays 3/25 of his DKP. He's behind both of them.

Next hunter item drops. One of the two friends wants it; he gets his buddy to agree to sit this one out. The third hunter, who knows something fishy is going on, decides that he "wants" it.

The friend who wants it can now either (depending on how bad he wants) "want" it, with a 50% chance of getting it for free (up from 33%, cause he had his friend sit out...the third hunter's always gonna have a 33% chance if it's something the other two can even use in the slightest and he "wants"), or "need" it...and it'll be guaranteed his, for only 2/25 of his DKP.

Obviously on a single item this makes little difference. But for those 3 hunters, the one who they don't like paying 50% more in DKP every single time is going to add up pretty quick.

So basically, collusion and having lots of friends is the way to go in your system.

If we keep track of who says "need" and "want" as part of the tracking data of our raids, we could see who's always wanting personX's loot and then sanction such behavior i guess.

This could be avoided simply by only letting certain class/specs "Need" on certain items. Other classes/specs could only "Want" on them.
As for the blue rogue. Lowest item level currently being used in that slot wins it? Abusable in and of itself I admit, but you got to trust your guildmates with something, don't you.

That sort of behavior is just not permitted in any system we are to use.

As for Marks hunter A having more DKP... well he does have more DKP thus earned his loot. Historically our guild has never been pushing class specific loot. We are serious casuals in that way... Further progressed horde guild of the server, yet we're just gonna enter SSC in 2 weeks (just got both Nightbane and gruul so not enough keyed just yet)

But seeing as this item as a high popularity it's gonna cost a bigger portion of his DKP, where rogue b with blue shoulders will probly get a T4 soon at a low cost. Making less of a dent in his dkp.

Or you could design a system that isn't inherently vulnerable to collusion, since proving collusion can be very difficult.

I don't understand the purpose behind two elements of your system:

- Why make the price proportional to someone's current balance?

- Why make the price proportional to the number of people interested?


There are a million ways to abuse this system, but even more fundamentally, I don't see what goals you are trying to accomplish.


If you want people to pay more for high-demand items than for low-demand items, then institute an auction. You've taken a half-step toward auctions with the bidding need or want, but people are able to "bid" and affect the price without ever putting their own points at risk. Someone with a low balance has a huge incentive to "want" everything just to make things more expensive for others. In an auction system, people are kept honest because they can only drive the price up by putting their points at risk.

I'm not sure it's even possible to design a system that encourages colluding more than this one. The risk is incredibly low for the winner (unlike a bid-based dkp system, colluding doesn't make the intended winner incredibly vulnerable to having the item taken for a slightly less low price), and inflating the prices of items other players get is perfectly safe, as there's no situation where you'd be forced to spend dkp on an item you don't want.

The reason behind it was to accomplish this:

1) DKP earned is not tied to loot drops (or other's DKP spent). Why? because then we had trouble filling up the raid on Progression nights where you would pay more gold for consumable and earn little to no dkp. Also, if you had low DKP you had no shot at loot and not a big dkp gain either. So ppl just come on farm nights...

2) Situationnal Upgrades at low cost even for very good items. (IE: Very good Feral gear all ferals have and Resto druids don't wanna get because of dkp cost ends up in shards)

3) Fixed prices means that dkp buys you loot. We want dkp to buy priority to loot instead of loot itself.


If we remove the whole "want" part and just leave the if you are the only one going for it, it's free?

I'd phrase it slightly differently, and have made this point in DKP threads in the past:

People will generally act selfishly (note that this does not preclude doing things like passing to let someone else get an upgrade due to it being a bigger upgrade - selfish altruism is a pretty reasonable economic concept) and designing your system around how people *do* act will be far more successful than designing it around how you wish they would act.

(Note that I don't think there's anything wrong with collusion or any other abuse of the system *within the rules*. Counterfeiting money is wrong; cutting the best deal you can is not.)

If this was a big issue, you could devise methods of having incentive DKP even in a zero-sum system. I've read of a few methods of doing that which are far simpler to administer than this system, and that still have the advantages of a fixed price zero sum system.

Obviously the bigger problem here is that your guildmates are such who only show up to clear nights, and the ideal solution would be to replace those that show such tendencies, but that's not always a viable solution.

Half-price off-spec or off-class gear? Make off-spec gear free if they already have an item for their spec in that slot? Force items if worse comes to worst?

Huh? I had thought that in a fixed-price zero sum system, the person with the highest DKP (who would, under some setups, also be paying the highest price) would get the item. How is this not DKP buying priority?

Well, that reduces the possibilities of collusion, but doesn't really remove them fully, especially in-class, which could give a whole class a leg up on inter-class loot.


Well, if you want to be POLITE about it.

Well even if you get a 100 dkp priced item 1rst or 4th, you still have a 100 dkp loss. So loot is cycled. you are always behind PersonA and before personC.

What i meant is that the more the item drops, the lower it's cost become (through ppl allready having it, thus not saying "need" / "Want") That way, you can have the choice of having it now or waiting for a better price.

First, as others have said, bookkeeping will be a pain. Every loot system I've seen whose actual item costs involves multiplying by a fraction have been too complicated, in that many raiders don't have a firm grasp on what items will actually cost them.

Second, there's huge incentive for low point people to bid "need" just to cost high point people points. When someone is low on points, the risk of winning an item is really low. If few people bid, the number of points they lose is paltry. If many people bid, then someone else will win and pay a lot of points. You'll end up with a group of point horders who only bid need on stuff that's really, really crucial and another group that bids need on everything and has a full set of common loot.

This is analogous to the situation in fixed price systems where four rogues would have six pieces of T1 and the other rogue is wearing blues from stratholme but corehound tooth and perdition's blade.

I believe the fundamental flaw in the system is the same though:

People don't know how much an item will cost them.

That's going to breed both anxiety and wide pricing fluctuations. It's not going to achieve the number one objective of a loot system, which is reducing drama. It seems like you want a system that gives people the option of getting undesired loot for a low cost, but still give them the option to lose a lot of standing for contested loot.

If that's your objective, why not go with one bid closed auction with no minimum bid?

• One bid encourages people to figure out exactly what an item is worth and bid that. You can't be "bid up". They know the maximum they'll pay.
• Closed auction means people usually don't know who the second place bidder was, so there's less drama from feeling like another person made them pay more.
• No minimum bid means that if something really is offspec gear or a downgrade that would be used 2% of the time, the cost to the winner is inconsequential.

Plus there's no multiplying by fractions.

If I were in a guild with this loot system I would roll 'Want' for every single drop, and so would everyone else, such that the price of every item that you 'Need' will always cost 48% of your total DKP.

An easy way to avoid the "fair weather" raiders is to base DKP earnings not on each individual raid, but on all the DKP spent divided by the number of hours spent raiding that week. You can also give bonuses for "non-farm" raids (e.g. count your progression nights as 1.25 hours per hour spent raiding), or reduce the hours "earned" for farm nights. That way, a person who only shows up for farm nights will earn less DKP overall compared to a person who only shows up for progression nights.

As for your system, another downside is that the first couple of drops for a particular item will end up costing more DKP than the last drops. Although this is kinder to new recruits, it further encourages point hoarding - wait and buy that super-rare item, then pick up everything you passed up earlier for lower cost. I don't think that's something you want to encourage. Also, your DKP cost is affected by your raid composition - does it really make sense that an item should cost more simply because you brought 3 rogues one week rather than 2?

To be fair, I honestly believe that 1 DKP is the optimal price for set gear in Molten Core. If stuff will drop so often that everyone can get it in a reasonable amount of time, the supply outpaces the demand, so the price will approach 0. It's not that the rogues were colluding-- it's that the other classes were paying more than the optimal price. Any item with "Class: X" has naturally restricted demand, so you'd expect the price to be lower.

How about keeping the same incoming (or Earned DKP) from the System in my OP,

But handling loot by having 1 round closed bids, with pre-collided fixed price set drops.

1) Non Token drops are 1 round closed bid.

2) Token always goes to highest DKP holder for a set X DKP. Unless he passes to the next in DKP Standings who gets it fro the same X DKP.

There really aren't any variable-price systems where player input determines the price which *aren't* susceptible to collusion in some fashion. The only variable price systems where collusion doesn't really matter use variables outside of the players control (time since last drop, time since first drop, whatever) - if a player can control the price of the item by their own behavior, then collusion is probably a usable tactic.

And if you're willing to go to what is, effectively, a rotation on class items by dint of admitting that collusion will occur, why not just use zero-sum which implements a more or less "fair" rotation?