the two clean bwl groups the same weekend thing is pretty impressive, grats. when we set that rule for sulfaras it was the shizzle which it's not now so might change that one. I guess invite systems are relevant to the discussion, you say you give priority to people that where there when you learned it, do you use a system to keep track of it or is it more along the lines of "don't invite leffe, he never came when we where wiping"?

I like the idea though, atm we have a short list of people with gear not accepted in bwl, these have priority in mc. then we got class caps and if there's too many intime of a class we invite the ones that has missed the most amount of raids (counted seperatly for mc and bwl). if more than one person has the same amount of "missed raid" points they roll. the ones that miss the raid gets a "missed raid" point. What I wanted to point out is that after reading what you wrote I get ideas of many different kinds of rewards systems that include those points aswell.

still, at this stage this is not really an problem, most people enjoy the raiding alot and come even without rewards. just trolling I supose ;)

Front page update, lazy ass.

Screenshots are on my comp at home, not at work!

I could only wish that we have too many people to go... we always have the opposite. ><

Well, each situation has its own problems.

The phase in between clearing BWL and two-grouping saw us with like 65-70 people wanting to come to BWL and having the gear to do so. I can freely say that that really is not a fun situation to manage, as a raid leader, or even just as a regular raider dealing with that competition for slots.

The fact that we can bring 60 or 70 people to any world boss to make up for our lack of skill makes it all worthwhile, though.

I laughed at this.

This thread has some invaluable points.

I'm just really happy that, by reading the common sense explanations here, and beating it into their heads, I have gotten the concepts of upgrading and item level superiority through to my raiders. (Our rogues have gone from babbling about NS cover being "the best headpiece in the game" to actually wanting Bloodfang hoods, yay)

We're in the process of creating a fresh zero-sum RPP system for AQ40. We used a tweaked version of zero sum for MC/BWL and learned a lot of lessons in terms of longterm RPP administration and some of the problems to avoid. Point hoarding is one of the biggest.

The forced upgrade rule that EJ uses, appears to me as probably the best solution to the point hoarding, passing on lesser item behaviour that many have mentioned. We had people passing on various bits in MC because they were saving up for BWL gear.

The main question in our discussion about forced upgrades, is how do you determine an upgrade?

When you factor in builds/eq and roles, surely it becomes a little bit muddled. Is feral gear an upgrade for any of your druids when none of them are specced for it? Or daggers for combat sword rogues?

Naturally, this point was raised by a Warlock. I'm like several of the guys in this thread, who wish they'd just sit down, shut up, and take the epics. But it is a valid point, in the sense that this is a system that we'd like to take up, but realise that for us as a guild, it may create several problems in terms of administration.

In a nutshell, it costs more. Once you've figured out the relative pricing of all the items that can drop in a zone, going from one epic to another will give you an overall increase in that characters gear. If the items in question truly won't help a person more than something they have already then perhaps you may need to reprice it.

A bigger problem can be going from really good blues to crappy epics, or waiting with your decent blues for the really good epics.
For instance an Azuregos kill a long time ago, Snowblind Shoes dropped, only clother wearer without epic boots was a warlock with Maleki's Footwraps.
Snowblind - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=40406
Maleki's - http://www.thottbot.com/?i=37222
Clearly, for a warlock there is almost no difference between the two, and the argument was put forth that it did absolutely nothing for him as all he did was cast shadow spells. But a warlock CAN cast fire spells, and anytime he would have to after that those boots would help. Also mana/5 isn't very good for a warlock who can just lifetap/dark pact for more mana, but now it is there, and it does help. So he was forced to loot them at full rather than they be disenchanted. In this case that one item does not help the raid much overall, but it does help the raid.

I believe it's best to explain to everybody that if they are forced to loot something they don't want to, they can just think of it as a 'downpayment' of sorts towards what they do want. With only the upgrade price to pay later it ends up the same, but that person is however much more stronger until they get what they want.

Now as far as rogues/druids/whatever go, I don't believe we force anything upon anyone that would require something radical, such as a major respec or playstyle change. You'd have to ask Gurgthock about exactly what that means.
Also, we never force shadowstrike upon anyone, ever.

Thanks, that was my instinct - you're not gonna force someone to pick up an item that's worth less than the one they already have. The items that are pretty clearly shit (and there's always some, damn you Blizz), just get priced bottom of the pile, and as long as everyone's got decent gear, they get dusted.

One thing that we hadn't really factored into the system was the upgrade pricing as you mention, and now that I think about, forgot to bring into the discussion.

Taken in the context of AQ loot (vast amounts of which probably remains unknown), am I right in assuming the basic thrust of the upgrade pricing is that you simply pay the difference when getting an item in the same slot as a current epic?

IE - if you paid 300pts for Ashkhandi, and DEoI drops, worth 400pts, do you just pay 100pts for it? Or does it simply apply to armour pieces?

Will do - it was fairly labyrinthian last time I checked :)