Duodecimal

I'm an officer of a guild and the leadership tasked me with designing a DKP-type system for review and adoption. Currently, there's a short class leader debate to determine eligibility followed by /random, which works because our raiding pool is fairly small right now and made up mostly of long-time guildies. We decided we wanted something that'll appear less arbitrary and luck-based for when we start getting more newcomers in the guild.

Also, our guild is not hardcore. We're more concerned with raiding for the sake of raiding rather than progression, though many of us do want to progress.

This is what I came up with. The purpose I had in mind was to encourage consistent attendance and balance newcomers with established raiders. New raiders won't be eligible to compete for loot until they had attended X raids, at which point they'd be promoted to the bidding-eligible raiding rank. I've been tracking attendance for the last month so that we'd have a baseline to get everyone started with.

Attendance-based bidding lewt points system

Raiders are awarded up to 3 lewt points per night:

• 1 for being present on time at the start
• 1 for being present when the raid is called for the night
• 1 for being present for at least 60% of the raid's duration

Earning 1 lewt point in a night grants 1 attendance point in a separately tracked pool.

Our ranking system requires a minimum time investment of 9 out of 12 nights per 4 week period, or a full week of 3 full nights in a row (9 lewt points), whichever comes first. This eligibility requirement translates into a rolling point ceiling. When the 13th raid night's points are added, the 1st night gets moved off the spreadsheet for archiving. On the 14th raid night, the 2nd night gets archived, and so on. So, there's a rolling maximum of 12 raid nights, or a 36 lewt-point rolling ceiling. Attendance points are never expired or reduced.

Random BoP epics are biddable items, in a two-round secret auction. Tokens are not biddable and the process for those is described at the end of this post. We will designate two auctioneers at the start of the raid in opposing classes who generally would never compete for the same item - e.g., Warrior/Mage. If the primary auctioneer happens to want to bid for an item, the secondary will be whispered the bids instead.

Bids are 2 points minimum and must be an even number.

After 10 or so seconds, the first round is closed and the auctioneer announces the high bid. If no one bid, the item is /randomed and the winner pays 1 point.

If no one /randoms, it gets sharded for greed roll at the end, or it gets awarded to a non-ranked or point-impoverished raider. They will still have 1 point deducted from their total, even if it takes them into negative points. (This 1 point minimum might get adjusted higher due to the smaller raid sizes leading to higher chances of only 1 person wanting the item).

Once the high bid is announced, the second and final auction stage begins. Once those 10 or so seconds are up, if anyone whispered bids higher than the last high bidder, they are announced with their winning bid cost. If no one outbid the first round high bid, or if only the first round's high-bid outbid himself in the second round, the first round high bid wins.

If more than one person are the final high bidders, the tie is broken by their Attendance points. If they have the same number of Attendance points, they /random for it.

Tier token items are not bid on but are allocated based on Attendance points, except, in our case, for tanking gear, priority for which goes to maintank/offtanks. All tokens cost 4 lewt points. If the only person who can use the token doesn't have enough points to cover the cost, they just go negative.

I think it'll be rather frothy - a full night is over 8% of the point cap, and bidding is relatively expensive, so newcomers won't be shut out for long and ancient raiders won't have a stranglehold on every drop due to an inflated point pool. A catastrophically high bid will be more or less erased in two or three weeks. Poor raid contributers will likely get passed over for raid spots, and we've talked about having a lewt council made up of two class leaders and one of the GMs to resolve conflicts after-the-fact (i.e., off-spec rolling against better suited raiders) and extract 'fines' of some number of lewt points from people bidding on items they won't get as much use out of.

 

Emkama

We have had numerous issues with DKP in the past, pre TBC and will always have issues, however since we're trying to get the unforunate casual raiders in our guild to WANT to progress, we've implemented an attendance based DKP system.

Raiders are awarded points as follows:

.5 dkp for being on time ready to raid at the start of each raid.
1 dkp for boss kills.
1 dkp for each hour of learning a new encounter. **until it's been cleared**
.5 dkp for being present at the end of the raid.

We use DKP merely as a priority tool after attendance is checked. All raiders are required to have at least 55% raid attendance during the past 60 days before becoming eligible to receive any loot. If more than one person is eligible, DKP determines who gets the item. There is no bid system, you pay for the item based on a predetermined value. Positive and negative DKP are merely have a relation to how long we've been in each instance. New instances generally start out in the red as people acquire items, but farmed zones tail in the green.

If 3 people want a specific item, and 2 people are below 55% attendance, and one is above, regardless of DKP earned, the person with higher attendance gets the item.

We also award dkp and attendance for anybody that is online for the raid. If more than 25 people of the required classes are online at the start of the raid, we invite them to the raid group, and they wait outside the instance until they are called up, and their direct raid participation is determined on knowledge of the fight / class leader's decision on rotation.

This has helped a lot with attendance issues, and everybody seems happy with the system. It's fairly simple and doesn't require a lot of work to keep up.

Our DKP system's front page - http://www.tankthatass.com/eqdkp/listmembers.php

Note: New members must raid minimum 10 raiding days prior to receiving loot regardless of attendance.

 

Ragnor

First problem:
Attendance needs to be a % example: Number of raids attended / Number of raids since that member joined. A count will just mean old/original members get massive attendance points and forever have their pick of the loot.

Second problem:
Your lewt pts are not nulled or balanced at all in anyway, it will get inflated over time and old/original will have a permanent points advantage making your guild unattractive to new members and causing drama like....

Bob joins the guild raids alot gets all the gear he wants, naturally he's saving dkp at this point, John joins the guild 2 months after Bob raids alot gets all the gear he wants. 3-4 months have passed John is on 20pts Bob is on 100pts both have raided consistenly are fulled geared from instance A.

A new instance B comes out, going into B if you keep your current points Bob has a 80 point advantage meaning John knows can't get gear for 3 months even if they put exactly the same amount of time/effort into the new instance. John joins a different guild or xfers to a guild with a loot system that's more attractive to new members. Your guild thinks this is a pretty crap situation so they decide to use new points starting from 0 for the new instance and keep using old points for instance A, sounds good. However Bob has done #2131 runs of instance A he doesn't really enjoy going there much anymore, his A points don't mean anything (he has everything from there he needs) and A points mean nothing for instance B... he doesn't make an effort to attend raids of instance A, maybe he quests/pvp's/play's an alt instead or maybe he logs on late on those days. Instance A runs start to take longer as more players naturally do this, perhaps you don't have enough people to do instance A even though quite a few newer people still need gear and attunement kills from there.

Some situations to think about with the OP's proposed system ^

All loot systems are all inherently flawed, basically it's a matter of picking the one with the flaws that least annoy your guild members.

The universe is run by the complex interweaving of three elements. Energy, matter, and enlightened self-interest.

www.retpaladin.com

 

Zeilon

* Smaller guild with a somewhat high attendance requirement which is followed.

* Time based dkp rewards no matter the target.

* Dkp ceiling meaning that once you hit it you stop gaining dkp until you spend some.

* Hidden auctions where the winner pays 2nd bid + 1.

* DKP is awarded to people who are forced to sit out aswell.


Other than that use some common sense once in a while when someone clearly needs an item more, like a tank or if it's a MAJOR upgrade for someone.

Everyone chips in pretty equally so everyone is on the same page when it comes to what they deserve etc etc.


Easy system and it works really nicely.

 

Duodecimal

Good feedback.

1) Using a percentage instead of simple attendance points won't make much difference except to toss some people up or down somewhat randomly. Having long time raiders with a large attendance point pool also means it's much more likely they've already gotten the drops.

However, to correct an issue that will arise when we progress to the next tier of raids, I might track attendance points separately for each zone (Kara is one pool, SSC is another pool, etc). However, attendance points only count for tokens (5 slots out of 16 or whatever it is, and some tier items aren't upgrades), or for breaking tied bids.

2) The lewt points are rolling-capped at 36. I don't think you read through the entire post. If people begin to not show up for instance runs, the rolling nature of the point calculations means they'll lose points over time. If you used to have 100% attendance and maintain the 36 point cap, and then start showing up only two nights out of three, eventually your spendable point total will drop to 24 even if you didn't buy anything. If you stop showing up enough to maintain the minimum requirements, you'll no longer have the eligibility to bid on items even if you still have points, even if you used to be the one who attended 1,789 straight raids. So... I don't think the "second problem" listed applies for this system.

edit for zeilon -- One thing I forgot to mention was that all the people forced to sit out still get an attendance point and 1 lewt point for being there at the start of the raid.

edit for emkama -- I didn't calibrate this in terms of boss kills or if the place is already cleared because most of us feel that downing a boss is reward enough, and due to the randomness of who gets in each night (first come, first serve + balance requirements) clearing a raid one night is not guaranteed the next night for us. We have a lot of critical members with real life commitments that means they'll sometimes be unable to make it. So the whole focus of this system is encouraging and rewarding attendance. Tying points to boss kills in a sort of pseudo-nullifying scheme (i.e., award points only if something spendable drops) isn't as much of a factor due to that low point cap. Plus we sharded both of attumen's drops last night anyhow, so it would have been a wash.

 

Lua

Everyone receives some DKP if they're present at the start of the raid.
While learning a new instance its a time based reward system (every 30min +4 points)
In a farming instance we get points for killing bosses (8 per boss).
While people are trials, they cant get any items, if a member wants it.

People who are forced to sit out, but are bound to a nearby inn (or logging off in front of the instance) are receiving the same DKP as the people in the instance.

If an item drops, we bid with a priority system. Works pretty good =)