It could be viable if everybody had everything they'd ever loot from MC, so that you all went in on a mostly even footing, but that doesn't take into account dispparate attendance in MC.
What might work would be to start a second points tally for BWL and then only apply negative amounts from MC to it. So you can carry debts over but not savings. We know how many points people have earnt/spent in BWL. We know their overall points total. We could do this in a kind of simple way.
How it would fit in with the EQDKP website, I have no idea (my guess - not at all) but it would basically cap points earnt in MC at exactly points spent in MC, which would have the added advantage over a hard cap of automatically adjusting for the varience in required Class point spends.
just create 2 DKP systems. Granted the biggest issue you have is that there will be less motivation to go back to MC cause they dont benefit from it for BWL but it would fix the problem with people going to MC to pad their pockets for BWL.
How bad is the skew at the high end? I'm trying to get a sense of what exactly you're talking about and how it came to pass. It's still zero-sum, right?
Have you had lots of raiders go very negative and then quit WoW/leave the guild, effectively introducing inflation? Where did this huge gap in your system come from?
For approximately 6 months we had a rudimentary DKP system based on attendance, but we were forever tweaking the incoming points to try and balance things. We also recorded things just with update posts on the forums after each raid. It was pretty basic and a bit shit.
So we changed to a tweaked version of your system and EQDKP, but to avoid pissing people off we ported over our old standings. We kept the sum at zero by adding all the points in the old system, dividing by the amount of people in it, and deducting that from everyone's total, and added that as a manual adjustment on EQDKP. So some people were on +800 from the off.
Then recently we went on a recruitment drive and got a load of new people in, who have of course consequently run up huge debts. There is ~2500 point gap between top and bottom which is only likely to increase. With BWL/A'Q upgrades costing between 75 and 200 points this sort of gap will be insurmountable even over a period of many months unless we implement caps.
Ideally we'd do it like you guys do based on lifetime eanred, only of course we have no record, and herein lies our dilemma. We need the gap between rich and poor, old and new, to be able to be closed in time. But if we can't figure out a good way of putting in caps on zones it won't happen.
EDIT: Maybe worth pointing out that our item values are our own and are roughly 2 x the EJ ones, so our ~2500 gap would be your ~1250 gap.
Well, another way of looking at it, is that the gap's importance will fade over time.
Right now, if items are worth 200 each and some people are +600 and some are -600 that seems like a huge difference. But if the -600 people only started raiding 6+ months later and thus have less Earned DKP, maybe that's only natural?
Over time, the +600 people will get more loot and trend downwards, while the -600 people will hardly get anything except rots and trend upwards. They'll never really meet, but the impact of that gap will shrink as more and more points enter your system.
When Player A has 2000 Earned and 1400 Spent, and Player B has 400 Earned and 1000 Spent, that seems like a tremendous gap.
But now let's say A and B both raid equally often for a full year. If, in January 2007, Player A has 6000 earned and 5600 Spent and Player B has 4400 Earned and 4700 Spent, is that as big a deal? By then items will be worth more, of course, so what might be a six-item gap today will be a three-item gap in a year.
Even without any sort of caps.
---
Anyway, with regard to implementing caps, I'm not sure why they have to be retroactive. Ours weren't. When we decided to cap MC at 1500 JP, some people were already at 1800 or 1900. Their JP didn't change retroactively. We could have done that, but that seemed unfair to me: People attended raids on which they needed no loot, with the expectation that they would be earning JP that they could use on items they do need, from other zones. People may mave made or changed RL plans to accommodate that, and otherwise made sacrifices to come, when they would not have done so if they'd known no JP were being awarded. Retroactively taking that away is not something I wanted to do.
Caps don't need to be retroactive to work. Just figure out how much a player should have to spent to get all possible upgrades from MC under your system, adjust upward a bit to incentivize people to continue to come after they have all their loot, and then that's your cap.
If someone was at 1900 when the 1500 MC cap went in, they enjoyed some benefit, but that's fine... they've earned that benefit. The important effect of the cap is that now people under the cap can earn points faster than their predecessors, since things are being split fewer ways, and the gap-closing can begin.
I run our guild's zero-sum DKP system with an Excel chart. Every time I feel ambitious, I add some more automation.
What I recently added was a automatic normalization to 0 by uniform addition/subtraction. New members are simply added so their current RP is 0 (alternatively, you could add new members at the guild average and forget the normalization, but I find the enforced 0 a bit more informative on people's actuals standing in the guild, and the extra bookkeeping is trivial).
So I made a fresh chart today. It has no loot in it; I just started all the current members at constant values for lifetime earned and items looted. But if you poke around the Excel file a bit, you should be able to see what's going on.
Caps would be pretty easy to add in. On the whole, I find all this a lot easier than finagling pre-existing DKP systems to match your guild's particular rules.
Ok first of all I like to say that this system feels serious and well thought through and we're using it for AQ40 now in our guild.
Before tho in mc/bwl we used a bidding system with startbids pretty much like prices and it's been working pretty well but what I always aimed for with that system was more or less for it to be 0-sum aswell and that's why we're changing now for the new instance. One thing I miss doing from the old system tho is to award people beeing early or on-time. Or giving some kind of reward for raiding three nights in a row wiping on a boss. Just as a spirit buff :>
For me it feels a little unfair not to give any points at all to someone working on a boss but wasn't there when it was killed, and to give someone else who didn't work anything but was there on the kill. I guess advancing in the zone is reward enough but I'm just thinking if there's a way to have these kinds of bonuses, or substitutes for them, in a zero-sum system?
Best Regards
Chiana - Gm of Northrenders, Magtheridon EU
What is your present thinking about integrating twinks into the system ?
Iirc your twinks are regular and independent entities just as a mainchar. I never really liked that way of doing it because that would double the names on our DKP page (and require me to remember double the names for signups and stuff like that) and players would be unable to earn points for their twinks when using their mainchar (thus leading to them wanting to use only the twinkchar, after their main is decked out, and not using the char the raid needs more for the given raid).
But with introducing your instance based caps a single JP-system account for all of one players characters seems to be impossible. Therefore I was thinking about reducing the hassle and let twinks get their items (only if the mains dont want it of course) by providing two nexus crystals, using common sense and random rolls for distribution issues. Of course at the moment for us twinks are only an issue for MC and Onyxia but do you really think the full system is needed for twinks if they were only to get the items which were going to be disenchant, anyway ?
Originally Posted by Chiana,February 3rd, 2006 @ 7:32AM
For me it feels a little unfair not to give any points at all to someone working on a boss but wasn't there when it was killed, and to give someone else who didn't work anything but was there on the kill. I guess advancing in the zone is reward enough but I'm just thinking if there's a way to have these kinds of bonuses, or substitutes for them, in a zero-sum system?
Best Regards
Chiana - Gm of Northrenders, Magtheridon EU
yup, loot droped has allways struck me as a bad way of measuring effort and is the only reason I haven't tried steamrolling zero-sum into our guild. That said dkp is not everything and I can think of a number of ways of rewarding learning encounters without the bribe beeing dkp. some ideas include:
-prio spots to raids based on attendence to "new encounters"
-a hug
It took us many months to take down razorgore and attendence droped so low we couldn't fill 40 slots, that's kindof where I'm comming from with this. to prevent this to happen in aq40 we set up a new dkp pool and award a pretty high dkp/h and a "first kill bonus" just like we "solved" the problem with bwl. fortunate for us aq40 is a whole different story with a less steep progression in the begining and people are having so much fun it's a non-issue.
1) Incentive to attend wipes: We use the invite system for our incentives, rather than mixing incentive DKP into a zero-sum system, which only causes inflation. If you mysteriously are never available to help learn bosses, you aren't going to get a raid slot for when we're farming them, which means both less loot and effectively a loss of DKP.
2) Alts: No separate entries. Alts can only get loot that would otherwise get DE'd. If you want to buy an epic item for your alt, you can spend 15 JP to do so, regardless of the item (Nightslayer Gloves = 15 JP, Perdition's Blade = 15 JP to an alt). This cost reflects the loss of Nexus Crystals to the guild, and also discourages people from snapping up anything and everything without thought. Alternately, if you have 2 Nexus Crystals on you or in your bank and can provide them immediately after the raid, you can "buy" any rot with 2 Crystals, and no JP cost.
Originally Posted by Praetorian,February 3rd, 2006 @ 9:27AM
1) Incentive to attend wipes: We use the invite system for our incentives, rather than mixing incentive DKP into a zero-sum system, which only causes inflation. If you mysteriously are never available to help learn bosses, you aren't going to get a raid slot for when we're farming them, which means both less loot and effectively a loss of DKP.
Could you not just make a fake character in the system starting at zero and then deduct from him to award points to others for wiping?
Ok now explain to me how that would not cause inflation.
You're telling me I could take this DKP system and convert it to zero-sum by creating an imaginary player entry "LOLVeryNegative" and giving him -14973.44 DKP? Sweet.
Award 5 points/hour per player for attending wipes, then divide the total sum of this award over the entire guild.
So if 40 people wipe for 4h you would have awarded a total of 800 points (each wipe-attender would get 20 points), if you have 80 people in your guild, everyone would lose 10 points.
If you don't have people who want to learn fights, who only want to be there for boss kills, kick their asses to the curb. If you can't do that, quit being a poser, use /random, and go back to UBRS.
Using participation points long term is the epitome of Mickey Mouse raid policy.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Award 5 points/hour per player for attending wipes, then divide the total sum of this award over the entire guild.
So if 40 people wipe for 4h you would have awarded a total of 800 points (each wipe-attender would get 20 points), if you have 80 people in your guild, everyone would lose 10 points.
Yes, that works better.
That's what we used to do, back in the MC/Onyxia days. That has some other problems with regard to how it affects new players who join the system at 0 after systemwide penalties have been assessed, but they aren't anything too horrible.
Originally Posted by Praetorian,February 3rd, 2006 @ 12:36PM
Yes, that works better.Â*
That's what we used to do, back in the MC/Onyxia days.
Yes we did. But aren't we talking AQ40 here? Unless this is some random, noob guild who didn't harden themselves by conquering MC and BWL old school, they have no business awarding people for simply showing up.
Tossing someone a bone just to get them to zone into an instance like AQ40 is just flat out embarrassing.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Originally Posted by Praetorian,February 3rd, 2006 @ 11:54AM
Ok now explain to me how that would not cause inflation.
You're telling me I could take this DKP system and convert it to zero-sum by creating an imaginary player entry "LOLVeryNegative" and giving him -14973.44 DKP? Sweet.
Heh. No I guess I explained that badly. What I meant (even though I didn't say it :huh:) was have that fake character attend as a 41st person to leech DKP, and then award them to people.
I dunno, it still might be wrong because I only just woke up. It's not something we do anyway. The suggestion above would be better I guess but I don't see the point.
Originally Posted by norg,February 4th, 2006 @ 7:14AM
What I meant (even though I didn't say it :huh:) was have that fake character attend as a 41st person to leech DKP, and then award them to people.
It's analogous to printing your own money. It's still the same thing.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
Actually, that brings up something I was kind of wondering. What is your invite system?
We came to exactly the same conclusion about using the invite system to reward and encourage attendance to runs with no RP reward (due to no items dropping). But coming up with an objective attendance-based invite policy is tricky.
We simply give invites (within a class) by attendance over the past month. It's gotten us this far, but certainly has some problems (unstable, can heavily penalize short absences).
Also, the goals of having a reward for veterancy, and of having no barrier to entry seem to conflict (although I realize this probably isn't a factor for you guys).
One of the most objective invite policies I've seen is to prioritize by earned JP. You say I need X of Y class, and pick the tops in that category. In practice you end up with a good cross section of the most experienced players. I'm sure there is some subjectivity in effect too, say when a person needs special leave (baby, travel etc)
crappy troll knocked out the DSL now it takes 2 minutes to get to tits
EJ, can you clarify an aspect of your upgrade system?
Some people in my guild have stated that when an item is bought for upgrade cost, the full dkp cost of the item is divided up between the other raiders. I don't really see the logic behind that system. It seems like a pretty good way for the rich (those already in tier 1 and doing BWL) to get richer, while the poor (those in blues doing MC) to get really poor.
What? No. From my understanding, the amount of points paid at upgrade is what is divided, not the full cost. So if someone upgrades from a tier 1 to tier 2 chestpiece for, say, 25 points when the tier 1 costs 125 and the tier 2 costs 150, then that 25 points is divided amongst the raiders who are not under the cap threshhold, not the full 150.
Some people in your guild are pretty stupid then, I'm sorry to say. How is that zero-sum?
Look, it's simple. People get what others spend. Period. If I loot a 100 JP helm from MC, and then later upgrade to a 150 JP helm while raiding BWL, then the people on that BWL raid get 1.25 JP each. I spent 50 JP, so the raid gets 50 JP. Were the raid to get 150, you'd have 100 magical JP being pulled out of thin air for no particular reason.
Originally Posted by Lyta
I've been trying to concentrate on studying for my Proof Methods test tomorrow, and all I can think of is your hotness, radiating out from the pixels on my monitor, seared straight into my neurons.
02/02/06, 9:59 AM
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