Mojofabulous

I came here looking to see if a thread had been made to discuss ideas about how to resolve dkp-related issues regarding 25man loot being purchasable with badges. I was unable to find such a thread and so have decided to make one. If this is considered unneeded or out of place, my apologies.

The problem related to being able to purchase Tiered loot with badges dropped in 25-man content manifests itself in guilds using a DKP system to distribute loot. There are those willing to save badges to purchase tier pieces in order to save dkp for offset pieces. This gives an inherent dkp advantage to those passing on tiered loot to have first dibs on non-tiered loot. Sure they will get the tiered pieces slower, but they are gaining dkp from the people who DO purchase the tiered loot as well as having access to the harder to obtain offset pieces. Meanwhile the people who purchased the tiered loot(and lost dkp as a result) are rewarded with no dkp when those who gained the same piece through badges obtain said loot. You could try to force tiered loot on people of highest dkp, not allowing them to pass. But there's so many flaws to that it's not even worth considering.

One possible solution is to remove the dkp cost of all tiered loot. But this gives a disadvantage to those who require offset pieces in place of tiered gear of lesser quality. Obviously no system is 100% fair and some people will always have to purchase more loot than others. But trying this solution would make for some pretty large and unfair gaps for certain classes/specs. Imagine, for example, if such a system were in place today and you were an enhancement shaman. Tier 6 loot has always been considered inferior for enh. shaman dps.

What I'm looking for is suggestions to compensate for the future change other than "go to loot council." I'm a big supporter of properly done loot council systems. But lets face it, many guilds are incapable of producing a fair loot council system. DKP is unlikely to disappear after this system goes in to place, so we need a way to make dkp more fair/trackable as a result.

 

Sydane

The most simple solution is just to have separate lists for Tier gear and non-Tier gear. This works best with a suicide kings style system or variant, but can work with any system. The problem already exists today as plenty of classes can get superior gear from badges or arena to the existing tier pieces. Having Tier gear available for badges allows people to fill holes caused by an evil RNG, and will result in raids gearing up fast as a whole.

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

Ragnor

What we did for sunwell was put set gear on a separate system to non set. It worked pretty well to discourage hoarding and get people taking set upgrades as they dropped if they were upgrades without negatively effecting their non set dkp.

Everyone decided on their primary spec (main spec), we gave out the set loot based on set dkp for main spec use as priority. If no main spec needed the item we gave out offspec for free (you can loot council offspec to people that actually respec often or you can ffa roll it between hybrids, whatever).

You're basically turning set gear into a simple rotation system modified positively by attendance without the drama of loot council and totally independent from non set gear

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

www.retpaladin.com

 

lynzh

Where are you reading about this? I can't seem to find any info on 25-man tier loot being purchaseable through badges.

 

Ambika

I've seen that the 25mans will give Valorous badges. Does that mean everyone n a raid gets the badges or only a select group of people?

 

Prinsesa

Screenshots of the level 80 Badge vendor showed Tier 7 tokens buyable for badges. I believe it was showed to cost something like 75 Badges, but then I don't know how many Badges each Naxx boss drops.

Don't quote me on this, but as far as I know everyone gets their share.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

elsirad

At some level, you devalue tier pieces in your DKP system to match the new lower value on the pieces. Splitting into two DKP lists allows this to happen (but is not required) - since tier DKP is worth 0 outside tier pieces, the "value" attached to tier DKP is freely floating from other DKP items.

But I'm not sure why this is a big deal. If 75 badges is the same investment at 8 as 70, a dedicated player could grind out 75 badges fairly quickly and gear the guild up faster. Your hypothetical example, in which people who prefer to wait for raid tier pieces get the first tier pieces, and those who do choose to grind badges for tier pieces receive the first off-set pieces, appears to be the optimal loot distribution.

 

Prinsesa

It's similar, but not quite the same investment. The Badges used to buy the T7 pieces only drop off the T7 bosses. 80 Heroics have their own tier of Badges and Badge loot, and so does T8.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Roywyn

I don't really get what the problem is?

You can spend your DKP on tier gear and buy off-set pieces with emblems.
Or you can spend your DKP on off-set gear and buy tier gear with emblems.

If the system is deemed unfair for those people who spend DKP on one type of gear, couldn't they just spend it on the other type instead?
The market solution would be lowering the cost of tiered gear if people truly don't want to spend DKP on it.
Or in a bidding DKP system, their price would automatically decline if people don't want to spend as much on it.


Also, only a few pieces are sold for emblems, two for each tier.
You can buy the 10-man set gloves and chestpieces, and the 25-man shoulders and leggings for emblems.
10-man gear costing 10-man/heroic emblems, 25-man gear costing 25-man emblems. Headpieces are not for sale.

The tier pieces cost 60-80 emblems, other items cost 25-60 emblems if I remember correctly.
Each boss, each event I've seen so far drops one emblem. Everybody loots one emblem.

In addition, Sartharion in the Chamber of Aspects drops a bag which contains 5 emblems and can be looted by one player.
I'd guess that other one-shot raid bosses could drop a similar bag.


I still don't get what the issue is.
You could change the topic title to "25-man off-set loot purchased with badges, problems and solutions?" and just get everything backwards.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

kaib

Atm the stuff is reasonably expensive, it's not like you can throw around with badges early on in wotlk. The rings/trinkets/weapons are obviously very good as well and this system of having set items avaible for badges at a higher cost then comparable badge items is a good idea as it fixes a string of the same set item dropping. I would expect that 25 men bosses drop 3 set items again and usually it's not a big problem to get the tier items from that, goes fast enough. But if something just doesn't drop for a while, that's a great alternative and at 75 badges it's quite costly, at least early on.
And later on in the expansion, who cares for T7 set items really?

The only thing they need to watch is that when a new set becomes avaible and they want to offer those tokens for badges as well, they most likely have to increase the price as the more raiding/farming has been done, the less valuable badges become. If mid expansion set items are on a vendor for 75 badges, I would guess most raiders just buy them immedialty as by then they will have a large stock of badges.

 

• Ungeir

Well, with tiered badges it's not really possible to stockpile badges for future content.

We discussed this issue as well (dkp bought Tier pieces vs badge bought), but with a slightly different angle.

Early on in the expansion, when we will just be getting started in the new raid instances, some people will be grinding the badges for the available tier pieces. Other people, probably those with less available time in-game, will not. Since we won't use dkp for 10-man instances, there could be some resentment from those who have grinded badges to fully gear out on vendor available gear, when people without any vendor bought badge gear /roll on tier pieces. For example, if said tier piece along with vendor gear could give someone a set bonus. There is a couple of scenarios as well with the potential for a bit of disagreement on what's fair and what's not. In the end, we didn't think it was necessary with rules or anything, since anyone who is an ass about loot in a 10-man introductory raid is just gonna get the kick.

The availability of quality badge gear at launch, and the better loot from heroics, than we had back in the beginning of TBC, does mean that it will be much more possible to gear up outside of raids, which will have an effect. Usually we've seen that when the raiding game matures, non-25-man loot becomes obsolete. Whether the existence of a 10-man progression will change this remains to be soon. But at least in the early tiers, gearing up outside raids will be a large factor in progression speed.

This means that guilds who have a lot of people without daytime jobs will be at an advantage, as opposed to the situation in a "matured" raiding environment, where being online every evening is enough time investment to stay at the cutting edge. This is compounded by the fact that the 24/7 players (students, unemployed, financially independent, etc.) are the ones to hit the level cap as well. So I think we will see the early raiding scene on most servers will see some guilds at a further progression level than they normally would be.

But as time goes by, I think we will again see badges become mostly a mechanism for plugging the odd geargap and for gearing up alts. It will be interesting to see if there is a badge upgrade scheme introduced - since otherwise heroics will be nowhere near as popular as the WotLK matures. Instead 10-man pugging will probably become vastly more popular.

 

Korhaug

I think it's a pretty good system, and it complements the RNG nicely. People can take both tier gear and off-set gear from both emblems and drops, and at 1 emblems per boss I think inflation is pretty far off.

Don't forget, this is not the lvl70 BoJ that you can theoretically farm endlessly, and easily farm 50-60 per week. If they're only dropping from the bosses in that raiding tier you can only get ~15 per week by clearing Naxx (and Sartharion?). That means you need 4 weeks of clearing naxx just for one item, more for a tier piece.

 

Akka

I'm not really fond of the idea of buying set items.
I prefer to see the item itself being the reward for killing the said boss. Badges tend to blend all bosses into generic "2 coins of a tiered money", while set pieces dropping from specific bosses tends to push people to reach and beat them.

Badges are great to get "catch-up pieces", but I don't think that "buying" something will ever be as rewarding as getting a very particular item out of a very particular boss.

If violence doesn't solve your problem...
... you simply haven't been violent enough !

 

Arakan

I doubt that will be the case in WotlK. I see the new tiered badges as a result to many suggestions done on the loot table system. At the rate they will drop, they will allow you to get pieces without being completely dependant upon rng. Besides, the new spellpower change will make less drops useless for your raid. So as a whole, the system has changed. I find it a really good change, that will allow me to get my gear, even if I have bad luck. (for example, my paladin had a streak of no tanking drops in 5 months. Where they did drop, people that were with the guild longer got them)

So in essence, the boss itself will drop those instant gratification items, and the badges take away a bit of the bad luck streaks.

 

Kandir

A strategy for gaining an early dkp advantage over your competitors is to initially pass on set items and hoard DKP for the juicy stuff. Because (your) set pieces drop at a much faster rate, you can snatch up some prized items early on, then switch over to rolling for set items. This behaviour will only be compounded if people can buy set pieces with the new badges. That's the situation. If the rare offset items are also available from the badge vendor, the problem won't be as great of course.

Splitting set and non-set items into separate DKP pools seems like an elegant way to avoid the above problem. Bit of extra administration headache, but will probably result in a more even loot distribution.

 

Anedris

Seems to me this is just the ancient problem of camping - people have always passed on upgrades because they have their eyes on a more flashy item/legendary/whatever. That's just an issue every DKP system has to deal with somehow (usually with some kind of penalty for hording points or by handling the most valuable drops through loot council).

Those people saying dedicated players will grind out badges and complete their gear sets faster, remember that the 25-person badges drop ONLY from 25-person content. This means that it will not be possible for players to gain these badges outside of raid times (unless they killed a 25-person boss with another guild or something). Those with time to burn will be able to scoop up lots of the 10-person badges and upgrade their gear that way (since they drop in heroics) but the 25-person badges will be strictly a raiding reward.

 

Derrek

The problem with DKP is that is awards attendence, not necessarily performance. If you're set on DKP, then there will always be those that wait for the next big, shiny item by hoarding points and not progressing now. Splitting into buckets helps this out (different tier buckets, token / non-token buckets, etc) but it will still happen. Chest token the last to drop? Well, save up DKP now for that chest. Now at least, the hoarders can 'buy' the chest piece after enough kills and don't have to hoard your DKP as much.

I personally like the 25man badge drop for tiered items, it 'fixes' the situation of only 6 defender shoulder tokens dropping off of VR after 15 kills. (Which happened to our guild). If you've averaged clearing half of SSC / TK each week, that would be 5 bosses worth of tokens. It would take 38 bosses in the tier to be killed for ONE piece of equipment. That rate of badge earning only fixes bad RNG rolls.

 

Sydane

Our guild has gone 10 weeks without even one [Gloves of the Forgotten Protector] drop. In that time those people have accumulated 80 badges from the first 4 bosses in Hyjal, which would be enough to buy the token from the badge vender. I think the biggest and best change to remember is that people won't be farming 5 mans for those badges, they only come from the 25 man content. So they will provide you a means to fill a hole about once a month and keep progression from being gimped by the RNG, but it's not going to quickly slant the gearing in favor of people who can farm more on off hours. If anything, it should be more conducive to people spending their dkp slots as they won't have to hoard for that one piece, because they will know they can eventually get it from the vender no matter what (because there's plenty of offset pieces on the vender too).

Empathy does not imply approval.

 

tedv

A lot has been written on loot systems already-- there's half a dozen threads in the archives on this. Let me summarize the basic conclusions that are (for the most part) agreed on.

A) If your loot system ever causes even minor upgrades or situational gear to get sharded, it is broken.

The purpose of loot is first and foremost to help your guild kill more bosses. If you're sharding loot you could use, you're just crippling your own progression. All loot systems that distributes all the loot are superior to all other systems. Yes, this means /random is better than zero sum fixed price systems (what most people call "DKP"). The needs of the guild come first, so if you can't come up with anything better, at least pick /random and call it a day.

As far as Mal'ganis Horde goes, here are the loot systems used by the top 6 guilds:

Elitist Jerks: /random with peer pressure
Aurora: Auction
Juggernaut: Loot Council
Aftermath: Auction
Serious Casual: /random
Giant Censored Robots: Auction

Note that it's impossible to shard useful loot in any of these systems, unlike zero sum fixed price. The easiest way to create a system that shards loot is to add a cost to looting items that raiders cannot influence. Fixed price obviously does this, but so do abominations like Suicide Kings.

B) Given that everything is distributed, pick the simplest system that minimizes guild drama.

Even though there are wrong loot systems (fixed price, suicide kings), there's no one right loot system for each guild. Pick the one that causes the least complaining. I've been using an auction system for over 3 years and I cannot remember a single instance of loot drama based on the auction in all that time.

C) Looting mistakes will happen. Try to minimize them by making the decision maker be the person who faces the penalty for a mistake.

An optimal assignment of loot for raid progression is a really hard problem (probably NP complete). Think of all the factors that go into assigning a drop. "This item is a bigger upgrade for the warlock, but the mage has higher attendance. It's the smallest upgrade for the priest, but he's the best player of the three. The stat allocation is better for the warlock, but there's are more comparable upgrades he can use that the mage can't. The priest hasn't looted an item in a while. And we'll want to stack priests for the next fight we're working on." How do you decide what's best for the guild in 3 minutes or less? You can't guarantee you've found an optimal solution.

Given that loot assignment mistakes will happen, the best way to minimize drama is to have a system where the person responsible for the mis-assignment is the person who bears the penalty for it. In a fixed price system, when an item is too cheap, the people at the top all get the item and other stuff too. If it's too expensive, it gets sharded and the raid suffers. In either case, the people who suffer (low DKP people or the entire raid) are not the people who made the mistake (the officers who priced the item).

This is why I personally favor auction systems. If you pay more than item is worth to you and keep someone else from a good item, it just means you spent more points than you should, so they'll get more items from you in the future. If you underbid an item, then your closest loot competitor just got a cheap item and saved on points. They will again use this point margin in the future to get more items that you would otherwise have taken. (Incidentally, this is why collusion doesn't actually work. All it does is give points to the people you are guaranteed to be competing with for loot.)

 

Cybelirrae

To save the administrative headache of 2 DKP lists for tier vs non-tier, you could just have a DKP system for offset pieces and do a mini-loot council for the tier pieces. But as Tedv so eloquently laid out there is no perfect system and any system that allows minor upgrades to get sharded is ultimately a partial failure. That is one thing that has always bothered me about our system, Mojo.

 

Korhaug

I seem to recall that at some point there was supposed to be one badge/emblem type for every gear tier (200,213, etc). However, recent reports indicate that there are only two types of badges - one for 10-man raids (and 5-man heroics) and one for 25-man raids.

If this is the case, won't it once again create the situation of encouraging farming of long-passed content? Encouraging people to farm Naxx-25 for badge gear when you're in Icecrown is better then encouraging them to farm Karazahn when you're in BT, but I'm not sure by how much.

 

RootBreaker

While yes, right now there are only two types of new badges, that's because all of the raid content is essentially the same tier.

When the Ulduar raid is released it will have new types of badges. There will certainly be a new type of 25 man badge, and the 10 man Ulduar raid will either drop another new type of badge or the same kind that drops in Naxx 25.

 

pope master

Its actually harder than NP-complete: its unsolvable. It depends also on vague notions of how well will a person utilize an item (i.e. rogue sucks so give the glaives to a warrior that doesn't suck). Does that difference make up for the actual item upgrade of the rogue vs. the warrior? For a lot of guilds it can also depend on attendance, which while pretty mathematical, predicting future attendance can often be a function of current loot distribution.

 

Korhaug

That's what I remembered (Ulduar-10 will drop the same tokens as Naxx-25). Do we have an official source for this? I realize a comment on Wowhead is not a credible source, but I couldn't find any official comment on the matter.


I think that all the variables can be properly defined and quantified, and statistically predicted to an acceptable degree, which would put this problem back at NP-complete. The distinction is irrelevant, though. No theoretical optimization algorithm will be applicable "in the field" (i.e. when loot actually needs to be distributed - when it drops). Even heuristics that attempt to produce an optimal-seeking solution are too cumbersome to implement, which is why no one even tries. I think this was Tedv's point, and we're just nitpicking it now

 

sovelis41

After making my raid group aware of this change after last night's Sunwell, everyone seemed extremely happy they were going to do something about the RNG streaks that exist in the loot system. While this may not completely solve all problems, there will always be outliers, but hopefully this will smooth it out a bit (even if it is only a couple pieces).

For what it's worth, we use a dkp-based auction system. The only problem with it currently is there is no raid attendance restriction (giving us a headache or two from time to time), but that will be changing soon. That's getting offtopic, though.

On topic, there are only loot concerns in guilds where the leadership allows them. You need to pick your system, make it as fair as reasonably possible, and keep it the same. If the tier piecs cost in the 75 badge range, you are going to have to do a significant amount of farming, and then decide between other possible upgrades. There will be those that sit on a pool of DKP and wait for Kel'thuzad loot, but if they never take upgrades, they might themselves left out on a progression raid because their gear is behind and are at the bottom of their class' performance because of it.

You pay for the whole chair, but you only need the edge.