DKP In Game Integration

skrewler · 06/07/07, 1:40 PM

My guild will be venturing into SSC soon, and we've pretty much decided that we'll be needing to use DKP in there to nurture progression and avoid any drama. Officer loot has been used in Kara, Mag, and Gruul.

We were thinking of using EP/GP for awhile, but it became apparent after reading some threads here on EJ that it awards "casuals" too much. We want the hardcore players to be awarded what they deserve. We were very impressed with EP/GP's in game integration though, and wondering if there was any other mod that:

-Awarded DKP based on time intervals
-Awarded DKP based on boss kills
-Supports standby DKP or -
Could give individual adjustments
-Zerosum

The ace addon DKPMon with Bidder looked nice, until I saw that everyone in the raid had to have Bidder installed. I see that being an issue.

I looked thru these forums for a good hour looking for an answer, if I missed an obvious thread I apologize.

Nomad_Wanderer · 06/07/07, 3:55 PM

You can't bid with zero sum. Zero sum requires fixed prices. We use the Warmath DKP mod to calculate and add the item price to our tooltips.

We then use 'even earnings' and weekly payouts. In other words, attending a raid 100% earns you a raid token. At the end of the week, all DKP is added up, and divided by the number of tokens. You then get your 'share' of the DKP for the week.

This sounds like it's a lot of work, but it's not that bad.. and is a fair way to distribute zero sum dkp. (other wise it's a luck based thing.. where you get more DKP depending on the loot that dropped that night, so that you don't get an unlucky night were 90% of the loot was sharded..).

When it comes to who gets a chance to buy the item, we use the Classloot addon, which quickly notes who is primary/secondary on items.

With these two mods, we can just keep an excel sheet with the Current DKP up, and then ask for whispers (from the people that classloot says are eligible) on who wants to buy it.

If no one wants it for their primary class role, we offer it up to offspec for free. For example, I'm a holy priest, but by our 9th or 10th kara run, I was starting to get free caster DPS loot. This helped me stay motivated once I got my healing gear out of the instance, and also when it comes time to solo, i'm not using crappy gear. The idea is that having hundreads of shards in the guild bank really doesn't help people..

One thing about offspec = free is that Hunters and rogues need help in identifying what's offspec...

One bad thing about zero sum is that it takes people getting items to get dkp. If everything gets sharded/offspec'd, or you spend the night learning, no dkp.

We were going to try and add to our system and make DKP pools for the different instances/ outdoor bosses, so that a night of learning earned you a raid token that you could use to get a share when the loot did start dropping.. but never got that far..

Right now, we are just monitoring who is showing up for learning nights, and who isn't.

Another question you should ask is if you are going to refund upgrades... If I buy the nightbane healing staff on monday, and get lucky on thursday with a mag kill that drops the mag healing staff, do I get any type of refund, and only pay the difference in the two items?

The problem the refund system tries to avoid is people hordeing DKP, trying to pass tiers, or instances.. It's also more fair.. everyone pays the same total for the same loot.

Proeliata · 06/07/07, 4:17 PM

Originally Posted by Nomad_Wanderer

You can't bid with zero sum. Zero sum requires fixed prices.

Zero sum means that whenever the price of an item is subtracted from one person, that amount is divided by the number of people in the raid and that number is added to all of their DKP totals. There is absolutely no reason why you couldn't do this with a bidding system.

EDIT:

The OP's stated goals of:

-Awarded DKP based on time intervals
-Awarded DKP based on boss kills
-Supports standby DKP or -
Could give individual adjustments
-Zerosum

are, however, incompatible. Zero sum awards DKP based on items looted, not on boss kills or time intervals. If your concern is incentive DKP for learning nights, a zero-sum DKP system could be finagled to make that work, but it's a non-trivial solution at best in most cases.

Edit 2:

I suppose I may have misread "based on." It's only incompatible if you are awarding DKP for every hour spent, or for every boss spent. If you want to somehow factor in the time spent or whether a boss was killed into how you divide up a looted item's cost among the raid attendees, then that's possible, and fits under the "finagled to make that work" part of my previous edit.

Nomad_Wanderer · 06/07/07, 4:23 PM

Someone has recently cleaned up the wiki article on DKP too (looks like febuary).. That's where I was quoting..

But you're right.. Zero sum doesn't automatically involve price controls.

skrewler · 06/07/07, 5:08 PM

You're right that it wouldn't be zerosum using a time interval based DKP award. It's just, I'd really like to reward people for time spent learning encounters. There will be a lot of it, and without some kind of incentive for sticking around for wipes I'm worried that some may become burnt out.

The EP/GP mod is just awesome, but if only it were EP - GP based..

Thanks for the input, btw. I already have EQDKP setup with all the mods, etc, it's ready to go .. just I'd rather use an in game solution.

Karoshi · 06/07/07, 6:05 PM

Originally Posted by skrewler

You're right that it wouldn't be zerosum using a time interval based DKP award. It's just, I'd really like to reward people for time spent learning encounters. There will be a lot of it, and without some kind of incentive for sticking around for wipes I'm worried that some may become burnt out.

We'll start using a silent-bidding zersosum dkp in a few days which still rewards some extra points for stuff like progression nights and firstkills. Though points from outside the system isn't in the original meaning of zersosum dkp, I'm still quite sure that there won't be too much inflation (at least we hope so).
In emergencies it should be fixable by reducing the whole dkps by a percentual value.

Originally Posted by skrewler

I already have EQDKP setup with all the mods, etc, it's ready to go .. just I'd rather use an in game solution.

As I'm still familiar with it, I'll use EQDKP too, but I try to use as less possible sources for problems as I can. Raids will be exportet by CT_RaidTracker (two officers run it too, in case of disconnects, etc.). It's simple and doesn't involve any complicated addons and stuff like that - of course it's a (tiny little) bit of extra work, but I'll rather spend 15 minutes instead of 5 minutes pers day for managing dkp instead of being lazy and always living with the risk of loosing any logs because of addon-failures, etc.

If you still want to manage dkp ingame maybe check out ShowDKP or GetDKP (should be on Curse)

Theras · 06/07/07, 6:46 PM

Originally Posted by Nomad_Wanderer

When it comes to who gets a chance to buy the item, we use the Classloot addon, which quickly notes who is primary/secondary on items.

This is probably the most terrible mod I've ever seen. Having examined the list of items in-game for a while now, I sincerely believe that somebody just flipped a coin and decided, "This item is for X class." Here are some examples:

Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch is for Feral Druids. Protection Warriors and Paladins don't get to loot that.
Shermanar Great-Ring is for Protection Warriors and Feral Druids equally. Protection Paladins get scraps.
Gilded Thorium Cloak is the same as the Shermanar Great-Ring.
Barbed Choker of Discipline gets given to any of the three tanking clases with equal priority.
Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable is equally for Protection Paladins and Protection Warriors.
Wrynn Dynasty Greaves are just for Protection Warriors. Protection Paladins get second dibs.
Boots of Elusion are for Protection Warriors first, too.
Vambraces of Courage are for only Protection Warriors. If you don't have a Warrior, they get sharded.

I could go on. I mean, the idea looks great on paper, but in practice it comes out looking like the creator was smoking crack.

As for pricing alternatives, we use an in-house mod to price our items automatically based on item level. The mod itself isn't available for public release, but the formula is quite simple:

DKP = quality_mod * slot_mod * item_level^X / Y

Where quality mod and slot mod are ripped straight out of the original ilvl thread on the Raids and Dungeons board, X is 2, and Y is 1000. This allows smooth divisions in price between tiers of loot, without being excessive. More specifically, the X value forces item prices go up by 56.25% for a 25% gain in power, and the Y factor simply scales the values to keep them to a manageable level. For example, a Nightslayer Chestpiece will cost 7.144 DKP, a Bloodfang Chestpiece will cost 9.473 DKP, and a Deathdealer's Vest will cost 12.700 DKP.

Everything else is pretty standard fare ZS DKP rules, modified for what we want the system to do.

alkis · 06/07/07, 7:01 PM

Originally Posted by skrewler

We were thinking of using EP/GP for awhile, but it became apparent after reading some threads here on EJ that it awards "casuals" too much.

Actually what you read was people being worried that EP/GP might be awarding casuals too much. I doubt anyone of them tried it.

If you want to set a high bar for newcomers or casuals just raise your Min EP threshold to be around the % attendance you want (everyone below Min EPs is basically in second tier as far as loot priority is concerned).

Say you want 90+% attendance to be your top tier, with 10% per raid decay and 1000 EPs on average per raid then your Min EPs would need to be 8100. How did I come up with the number? Simple:
if you are at 90% attendance you should be roughly at Min EPs after every decay. So:

(Min EP + EP from raid * attendance) * (1 - decay) = Min EP

So in this case:

(Min EP + 1000 * 0.9) * 0.9 = Min EP <==> 0.1 Min EP = 810 <==> Min EP = 8100

By using Min EP this way you set a threshold for 2 tiers: your hardcore one and the casual one. The hardcore has always more priority than the casual one. You just need a tad more math to get to the min ep value in order to know where to draw the line. Luckily now you know how to do it, and you only need to do this once.

Aphyrax · 06/07/07, 7:08 PM

Originally Posted by Nomad_Wanderer

You can't bid with zero sum. Zero sum requires fixed prices.

This has been answered earlier, but to elaborate some more. There are two aspects of a point system. How points are gained and how points are spent. Zero sum is about how points are gained. Bidding is about how points are spent. You can combine any method of gaining with any method of spending, although not all combinations may be sensible.

I raided with a modified zero sum bidding system for almost a year.

Proeliata · 06/07/07, 8:02 PM

Originally Posted by skrewler

You're right that it wouldn't be zerosum using a time interval based DKP award. It's just, I'd really like to reward people for time spent learning encounters. There will be a lot of it, and without some kind of incentive for sticking around for wipes I'm worried that some may become burnt out.

The EP/GP mod is just awesome, but if only it were EP - GP based..

Thanks for the input, btw. I already have EQDKP setup with all the mods, etc, it's ready to go .. just I'd rather use an in game solution.

Well, you could always do some variation on Nomad_Wanderer's token/time system, although the more you increase complexity, the more of a pain it will be to administer properly.

Proeliata · 06/07/07, 8:07 PM

Originally Posted by skrewler

You're right that it wouldn't be zerosum using a time interval based DKP award. It's just, I'd really like to reward people for time spent learning encounters. There will be a lot of it, and without some kind of incentive for sticking around for wipes I'm worried that some may become burnt out.

The EP/GP mod is just awesome, but if only it were EP - GP based..

Thanks for the input, btw. I already have EQDKP setup with all the mods, etc, it's ready to go .. just I'd rather use an in game solution.

Well, you could always do some variation on Nomad_Wanderer's token/time system, although the more you increase complexity, the more of a pain it will be to administer properly.

Nomad_Wanderer · 06/08/07, 10:11 AM

Originally Posted by Theras

This is probably the most terrible mod I've ever seen. Having examined the list of items in-game for a while now, I sincerely believe that somebody just flipped a coin and decided, "This item is for X class." Here are some examples:

Moroes' Lucky Pocket Watch is for Feral Druids. Protection Warriors and Paladins don't get to loot that.
Shermanar Great-Ring is for Protection Warriors and Feral Druids equally. Protection Paladins get scraps.
Gilded Thorium Cloak is the same as the Shermanar Great-Ring.
Barbed Choker of Discipline gets given to any of the three tanking clases with equal priority.
Crimson Girdle of the Indomitable is equally for Protection Paladins and Protection Warriors.
Wrynn Dynasty Greaves are just for Protection Warriors. Protection Paladins get second dibs.
Boots of Elusion are for Protection Warriors first, too.
Vambraces of Courage are for only Protection Warriors. If you don't have a Warrior, they get sharded.

I could go on. I mean, the idea looks great on paper, but in practice it comes out looking like the creator was smoking crack.

It's more of a guideline than a hard/strict rule... The important part I forgot to include was that we group the classes into three groups, TANK, DPS, HEAL. We rarely shard stuff, as most loot does apply. Mostly we're sharding because of non applicable loot. Hunter/shaman mail dropping when there is no hunter shaman for example.

Same with the Warmath Dkp Calc mod... It's not perfect either.. There are a few items that are overvalued imo.

There isn't going to be one perfect easy to use all in one box mod/mods that perfectly fit your needs. You either need to change your needs to fit an existing system and it's mods, write your mods to fit your system, or use as many mods as you can that almost fit, and do some manual labor while playing.

Most people choose the first or the last one.

Nomad_Wanderer · 06/08/07, 10:13 AM

If you are going to do zero sum bidding, then I would like to stress the evened earnings idea.

It's not really fair that on SSC Monday, a contested item dropped that resulted in very high bids... and on Tuesday night (after reset), the same exact work was done (same bosses/trash) with not so much in demand items dropping..

The lower prices on tuesday mean that tuesday's people got paid less for the same work due to the random number generator.

Actually it's not jst with bidding, even with fixed prices.... by doing the DKP zero sum calculation for all the raids in a set at once, it's much fairer to everyone. For us Tuesday is payday, with Wed. beginning the next set.

Ridyll · 06/08/07, 10:27 AM

Originally Posted by Theras

Vambraces of Courage are for only Protection Warriors. If you don't have a Warrior, they get sharded.

.

The Vambraces were Class: Warrior until 2.1

Although I agree with much of the rest of your post, some of those items aren't very useful for any of the 3 tanking classes.

Malan · 06/08/07, 10:39 AM

Bah I can't read. Sorry Ridyll you're right

(I started to say the tooltip did NOT say warrior only)