Funny you ask. We're looking to create our own custom JP tracking program, and several people have already agreed to take up the cause over the summer.

I just finished reading through the 7 pages of this thread (I would've read the old one too, but it seems to have been lost), and I don't think my questions have been answered. I AM, however, very tired, so it's possible I've missed something.

As a bit of a background, I'm the officer of a fairly new guild that was formed from a raid alliance between two guilds. We're still working out a lot of kinks, and suddenly DKP problems are looming on the horizon, and as I'm one of the officers that's more interested in making this work from a mathematical standpoint, I thought I should at least attempt to figure things out. We've inherited a fair chunk of your raid/DKP policies, but I figured I'd go to the source to try and figure out some of the intricacies and see if they can work for our guild.

One of the biggest problems that's come up for us recently deals with the forcing of items. In order to prevent DKP whoring, we had been planning to operate on the principle of forcing items to the raid member with the highest DKP for whom it is an upgrade. So far this has not been an issue given that there has always been someone that's wanted pretty much any drop. However, we are coming across a problem where, for example, our mages and priests simply do not feel that some of the pieces of their Tier 1 is an upgrade to them over what they already have--whether it be another item that dropped, say, in ZG, or a piece of the Tier .5. Opinions are pretty much split on how to deal with this. A few options have been advanced:

1) Robes of Prophecy drop. All the priests but 1 have it. That 1 priest has the Virtuous Robe. He feels that the Robes of Prophecy are not an upgrade for him, and what's more, he can put forth a coherent argument to back up that opinion. Force the Robes of Prophecy on him regardless.

2) Same scenario as above, but instead of forcing the robes on the priest, allow him to say no, disenchant the robes, and give him last priority on his Tier 2 robes.

3) Same scenario as above, but without a penalty.

Scenario number 1 seems like the most viable in terms of across-the-board fairness to all raid members, but it also seems extremely unfair on a personal level--if someone will never use a given item, is it "right" to force them to spend DKP on it? At the same time, scenario 2 is a bit of a pain in terms of keeping track, potentially months down the line, of who took what. Scenario 3 has its faults as well--if a player does not take their Tier 1, that means that they are wearing an item that they did not acquire on the raid when time comes to the Tier 2 robes dropping, and thus they have priority over all the priests who ARE wearing robes they paid DKP for to our raid.

This leads into another problem--given that we are a growing guild and are still experiencing a lack of membership in certain classes (ironically, including rogues, how did THAT happen?), it is very possible that when we hit Razorgore in a couple of weeks, a few of our members may have been raiding with us only for a week or so, and therefore those who have been with us for months might feel it a bit unfair when the new players have priority on the bracers that he drops. Although I personally have no issue with that, what sort of argument could I make to someone who feels that is the wrong way to go about loot distribution? I have been thinking of perhaps instituting a trial period for every new member of the raid, avoiding that problem altogether.

It is, as I have mentioned, quite late, so I'm sorry if my post seems overly rambling--I will probably read it in the morning and wonder what I was thinking, and why I forgot to include whatever might be evading me at the moment. In any case, thanks for reading through, and if you can offer any thoughts on this situation, it would be extremely heplful. The more information I have, the more balanced my final argument will be about the steps we should take.

You'll find that when new people come in they'll go very negative very quickly. Sure, they might be in line for one piece of Bloodfang when it drops by virtue of being on zero when others are slightly negative from looting Tier 1, but it won't take more than a couple of MC runs for the new people to plummet. I don't think that will turn out to be much of an issue.

Anyone who doesn't have a tier 1 piece will be full pricing tier 2, meaning they'll quickly drop in points. But in the case of chest pieces, or really any end boss loot, you can make it so that people who skip lesser tiers have secondary priority.

We have a list of items that we don't default to people in blues or generally let people skip on if it's contested. It's pretty much just Nef and beyond, plus Chromaggus weapons.

Honestly, in many cases, going from t1-->t2 isn't such a huge upgrade that it's worth worrying over. You really do want people replacing their blues with t2 epics before people upgrade their t1 epics to t2 epics. You can easily clear BWL in full tier 1 (though you definitely do want a couple of tanks with a bunch of Wrath and such) -- it's the people with blues in their slots that will hold you back.

Yeah, we generally do this for Nef plus the second half of AQ. It was a more recent innovation, after we'd been running BWL for 4+ months already. When we were all starting out in the zone, it was a nonissue. But when you have some guy at 7/8 who's been killing Nef for 5 months trying to get his breastplate, having it defaulted to a newcomer who's still wearing half blues is unwise.

Basically, to some extent, it depends on how progressed and well-geared your guild is. When everyone is still gearing up, you want to give blue-->t2 priority for efficiency reasons. Getting the blue items out of your raid is the #1 priority. Once the overwhelming majority of your raid group has epics in most slots, however, there's much less reason to do that. If a guy goes blue-->t2 and then you disenchant an MC drop the next week because the guy with the blue was the only one who would've needed it, you haven't gained anything except some irritated veterans.

We just force looted Tier 1 onto anyone who didn't have it. MC gear is seen as "the base level" for raiding for us, given our progress. (Nefarian farming).

It's the only fair way to do it - although the screams from the mages could be heard from miles way, at least the upgrade system makes it less painful for them.

Yeah, we introduced an upgrade system specifically so that forcing some questionable tier 1 pieces on people (which all later got buffed, so good thing we did!) wasn't such a kick in the balls.

It's still nearly impossible to get our Mages in Arcanist. I think we've half-priced every Arcanist drop except the leggings.

And these guys have Vestments of the Shifting Sands, Robes of the Archmage, Flowing Ritual Robes and other stuff.

As a matter of fact, the average member in our guild has superior non-set items from 20 mans, PvP, and crafting. Luckily this isn't so much of a problem with our Hunters due to the very strong 8 piece set bonus, but Arcanist does not bode well. Same with Prophecy and Felheart. :(

Sooo basically what you guys are saying is "You can make some of the people happy some of the time, but you can't make all of the people happy all of the time." :)

Edit: Rereading the earlier responses, I think perhaps I didn't express my concerns adequately. The problem is not that new people who are higher in DKP have priority on Tier 2 because they're higher in DKP, but it is that because they have no Tier 1 gear in any slot that they have priority on Tier 2, a problem which will continue regardless of how low they sink in DKP if the other members of their class picked up the pieces on a run with us.

Of course, this may all very well turn out to be moot given that we're unlikely to be getting very far past Razorgore anytime soon and by then, theoretically, people will be more or less outfitted in Tier 1...

Regardless, thanks very much for the advice, it will come in very useful.

There are two key points:
1) DEing an item with even marginal use to someone present in your raid group is dumb. Would you DE it if the item were entirely free, with no strings attached? If not, then it should get looted. DKP shouldn't get in the way of efficient allocation of loot.

2) In a zero-sum system, something that affects everyone equally has no long-term effect. If every single mage has to loot, and pay for, Arcanist, then everyone is on the same footing relative to each other. Problems only arise when people start worming their way out of looting the pieces, gaining an advantage in the process. I could go into the EJ database right now and subtract 100 JP from every single raider, and it would change absolutely nothing, because it affected everyone equally. People need to learn to understand that, even though it may feel in a particular situation their points are being wasted, the net effect in the long run is nil.

In my guild, we put a cap on how far negative a new member can go before they lose priority on looting based on not having a raid bought epic in a given slot. A new member can loot 2-3 good items right off the bat before they will need to earn a few weeks worth of points to get far enough out of the negatives to get priority again.

Oohh, that's an excellent idea. Because I think that a lot of our members are concerned with newbies waltzing in once we're doing well in BWL (which, in all honesty, may be a while, so it may be silly to argue about it, but I suppose it's good to have a strategy in place for edge cases.), and picking up a bunch of shiny new loot just by dint of coming in with no gear, which doesn't seem fair to those who've been working hard with us prior to that.

Of course, going down the path of greater complications isn't entirely desirable, but if it keeps the peace... :)

After running our DKP based on your original zero-sum system right from the start and tweaking it where necessary over the last 11 months (ie adding caps, doing res-items by council, adding a fair way to add new members who already have raiding gear, etc.) we have bumped into a general problem for which a solution does not seem so easy. Maybe you experienced this problem too and already solved it or maybe we can share some ideas.

It basically comes down to the problem of non-raid items (PvP, ZG, AQ20, Quests) being nearly as good or even better as raid items. Like most other raids we dont recognize non-raid items and our item pricing is of course based on the original lvl60 dungeon items (Scholo, Strat, DM) versus the MC items, because at the time we started raiding there was nothing else available. Therefore MC items are rather pricy upgrades (from basic blues to epic) while the MC to BWL/AQ upgrade range is relatively small, just as in your originally published item values (T1->T2 are mostly one or two upgrade steps, regardless of what your actual DKP value stepping is).

If I remember correctly, the first instance of this problem came up when players who had a TUF already did not want to get MC weapons like Earthshaker because the TUF was either better or just as good as the raiditem drop which would of course cost full DKP (upgrade from non-raid item to raid item). Their argumentation was sound and therefore we did not force them to loot the inferior raiddrop and the problem seemed to be solved when those guys later happily looted stuff like Finkle's or Spinal's.

Fast forward to 8 months later where we have Nef on farm status and Blizzard has constantly pushed sub40ppl raid items quality via ZG, AQ20, DS2 and PvP (coming in 1.11). Due to some normal player fluctuation and the random loot system we still have some players who have not yet looted a raid item on some item slots and are using a non-raid drop instead.

This has lead to some recent loot problems, for example when Dragonfang Blade dropped and neither Rogues who are using the Qiraji Sacrificial Dagger for their offhand nor Hunters who are using enchanted Bone Slicing Hatchet or Warblade of the Hakkari were willing to pay the full DKP price (for going from no item on the slot to a BWL drop) for such a small item upgrade. Something similar happened when Dragon's Touch dropped and most casters were already using Touch of Chaos without having gotten a wand drop in the raid before (those who already got a Crimson Shocker and only had to pay the upgrade price even if they werent using the Shocker, also due to having a better ZG or AQ drop, werent happy either but able to suck it up). On one hand I can understand this kind of thinking from the viewpoint of a single player but on the other hand (as a raidleader) I am worried that the possibility to skip whole slots will lead to a huge DKP imbalances (for example on cross class items) and hurt the raid due to missing upgrades. In addition the players threshold willing to upgrade from zero to a raiddrop wont really improve (of course there will be better items in Nax but those items will cost even more than the BWL items today, due to the linear loot improvement).

So much about the problem. As I said at the start of this posting I am still looking for a good solution without integrating each and every outside item into the DKP system. The best I came up with until now is to evaluate the non-raid item the affected player is using in relation to the regular raid items and book a fake item purchase (called 'Outside Item' or something) while adding the same amount of DKP (via an individual adjustment) on his DKP account prior to booking the actual item purchase (with only the price difference of the fake and the dropped item). This only had to be done once per slot, ie on the first occurrence of an upgrade from a non-raid item to a raid item. The downside is that this will only work with a capped zero-sum system (which we got) and that it is some not so small amount of work and could become quite some hassle.

If each and every player were already using a raid drop on every slot (as it might be in EJ by now) this problem would be nearly non-existant due to the working upgrade system but unfortunately this isnt the case with us and therefore the initial 'upgrade' cost seems to screw the whole system when potent item alternatives are so easily available. I dont think this effect only occurs in our system but is rather a basic flaw of zero-sum DKP and therefore every opinion of yours should be valid and welcome.

Yes, this certainly has come up for us, and continues to do so in some cases.

Our prices for items were all established 15 months ago, relative to the blues that existed in the game at the time, before Dire Maul even. By those standards, a tier 1 piece being 100 and tier 2 being 150 made sense. Players would have been just as well off replacing a shitty Scholo blue with an epic as they would have been upgrading two t1 epics to t2.

But over time, obviously, that baseline has crept upwards. Blues from instances are better than they used to be, Z'G blues are excellent, and there are epics that are genuinely MC-quality or better available as well, both through PvP and 20-man raids. Now, suddenly going from an Eye of Hakkar (free) to a Barbed Choker for 150 points doesn't seem quite so appealing, when those same 150 points could get you three Bloodfang-->Deathdealer upgrades in AQ. If you were wearing a Mark of Fordring or something, then the Choker upgrade would totally be worth it, and that's what the pricing was originally designed around.

Here's the problem I see with your proposed "adjustment + fake purchase" implementation: It permanently skews loot order, and that's deadly to zero-sum DKP.

Take the following example:

Mage A and Mage B are both using Penelope's Rose as an offhand, and find themselves deep in AQ40.
They kill Twin Emps, and get the offhand. Mage A wins it, and pays 125 points for it.
Now Mage A and Mage B go to Zul'Gurub and kill Jin'do. Bag of Whammies drops, and is defaulted to Mage B since A doesn't need it.
Your system says "hey, that's a really good item -- it'd be worth 75 points in a raid, so let me adjust him by +75 and then charge him 75 for 'buying it'".
Next week, back at the Twin Emps, the offhand drops again. Mage B takes it at upgrade for 50 points.
Now, Mage A and Mage B have exactly the same item, exactly the same raiding experience, and yet Mage B has a permanent 75 point advantage over A and can probably take two consecutive upgrades before A gets any.

That is unfair.

Zero-sum DKP needs to be equal in its treatment in order to achieve an equitable result. I could go into our DKP database right now and take 100 points away from someone. Would that be unfair? Of course. I could also go in and take 100 points away from everyone. That'd be kind of weird, but would it be unfair? No. Because it affects everyone equally.

Our answer is to mandate looting of upgrades, with the understanding that the individual purchase may carry an excessive cost for the practical value of that particular upgrade, in the name of keeping a balanced system going forward. If it's not an upgrade, you don't have to loot it, of course. But if you have a Hide of the Wild and a Shroud of Pure Thought drops, you're expected to pay full price for it. As long as everyone does it, you'll be fine. It's only dangerous if people are allowed to weasel out of certain upgrades, giving them a competitive advantage as a result, and engendering resentment and similar behavior in others. If everyone has to eat the full cost regardless what non-raid item they're replacing, eventually (usually by the time you're moving into the later parts of AQ, in my experience) everyone will end up on even footing.

The real answer, however, is to post on the Blizzard forums and ask them to stop giving such good rewards outside of 40-man dungeons.

I once read a very strong thread advocating the use of DKP in 20 man raid instances. As Gurg pointed out, some of those 20 man raid epics have gotten amazingly good (especially the Ossiran loot- that stuff blows me away) and discounting item drops in 20 man zones because they're lol20man leads to problems as outlined above with the Mages.

To any new guild leaders / DKP admins: Using DKP in 20 man raid instances (particularly for the epic drops) may not be as "newb" as the R&D crowd would have you believe.

Exactly. We also bring along tons of non-EJ on 20-man runs, on a regular basis. The merits of tracking those runs are far outweighed by the administrative costs, at least for us.

It definitely depends on your guild progression, though. If we were just starting out now, we'd probably use DKP for 20-mans too. But when AQ20 came out, most of our raiding mains were just running the zone for skill books and maybe some CC rep, and some very specific upgrades (Ayamiss's bow for NR, and a bunch of Ossirian drops).

Yea, that's a good point. I guess it'd vary from guild-to-guild, but my point is that there are plenty of items in 20 mans that can could cause future DKP drama if completely ignored.

Edit- I hear skill books on the Horde side are pretty cheap? I've gotten 1000-1200g offers for a Fireball book. Proe tells me she's seen stuff like Multi-shot for 600g.

I purchased Multi-Shot for 450 early on a friday morning, and I was actually very, very fortunate to AH it for 11000. It took a series of 2-hour auctions for peak times and spamming it in trade.

I got several tells telling me I'd get no more than 550, so I'd say your perception seems pretty spot on.

For clarification, I'm Mal'Ganis Horde as well. I was actually talking to Relwin about buying it for 600, since I'd giving up turning it over for a big profit and the deposit was starting to eat at me.

It makes me happy that most Alliance guilds can't get past Rajaxx then. :)

In the loot description thread it says "points spent on resist gear" raises your cap for that resist. So, come the patch say, someone manages to get 255 NR unbuffed without a single raid drop (+40 NR from librams and the craftable items is easily possible with a couple Hearts of Noxxion, assuming you can't wear only cloth), all that farming and buying mats they don't get any credit for? I'm just wondering how this would work, because I'm trying to find a way to encourage people to really build up their resists outside of raids.

And should resist by class matter? 200 unbuffed FR is enough for anyone but a tank in most cases. I realize it would make the system slightly more complicated to do it by resist amount per class. Any ideas would be appreciated.

You posted before that you were making your own JP system. Does this mean you're using EqDKP? If so, how have you implemented per instance caps?