The practice of selling raid slots came to my mind near the end of the AQ farming events and I mentioned my thoughts in that post, but the thread was quickly overwhelmed with reactions to the event itself - so I thought I'd give it a thread of its own.

What do you all make of the concept of raffling/auctioning off raid slots to wealthy non-raiders? An Immortality guild member recently mentioned on the R&D forums that they extensively employ these tactics for all their MC raids and outdoor raid bosses.

Benefits:
- Make lots and lots of extra money
- Prevent good epics from going to waste by rotting
- Allow casual or unguilded players the opportunity to experience the dungeons, along with the thrill of being a part of a well-oiled raiding machine
- Fill in some empty raid slots with eager warm bodies who actually want to be there, and who might actually do more good than harm overall

Drawbacks:
- Organizational efforts (setting up the raffles/auctions etc)
- Security (preventing ninja-looting)
- Noob factor (potentially training mobs, pulling aggro, generally being a waste of a raid slot)

Do these systems work, am I forgetting some factors?

OK, one more question - what do you all think of the idea of tracking a value for DKP gold exchange? ie, I can either contribute personal gold to the guild-bank for DKP or spend some of my hard-earned DKP on raw cash. Could you even combine this with the first idea, and have non-members spend gold to buy DKP that they can then spend (on select rotting items) on subsequent farming runs - in which attendance costs them, rather than earns them, DKP?

Wouldn't this break Blizzard's Terms of Use agreement? You're wanting to make money off of thier product, and that type of stuff doesn't fly.

Just let MC die already.

in-game money

ten storms pants rarararrrhhghghgg

It's certainly reasonable. It's kind of a hassle, but if you're willing to handle that aspect of it, gold for the guild bank is a good thing. I think AQ has made guild funds a more prominent issue than ever before, because, damn, we go through consumables like water in there.

As for DKP-for-gold, that's a bad idea on many fronts. I guess if you don't use a zero-sum system it matters less, but it's incompatible with zero-sum. Since 1.9 came in, though, we do allow people to buy items from their alts using 2 Nexus Crystals instead of DKP if they have Nexus Crystals.

Free to mains who are using them for raid-efficient purposes.

If you want to get a +NR enchant on a Grovekeeper's or Green Dragonskin Cloak, sure.
If you want to get +healing on your Trans gloves, sure.
If you want to get +shadow on your priest's PvP gloves, no.

Yeah, I'm trying to decide exactly where to draw that line (or to blur it with a small gold or RP cost). We've given some free NR enchants already, since we're working on Huhuran.

The thing is, every class has a comparably good glove enchant for raid purposes (+healing, +spell damage, +agility. or +threat). So you basically either give one to everybody or to nobody. I guess the viability of that depends on how many you have stored away.

Yeah, we came into 1.9 with >200 banked, but we haven't burned through nearly that many yet. Require people to have their t2 gloves (or optimal endgame gloves), etc., to apply the enchant... don't give people crystals for something they'll replace soon.

We considered using DKP to handle them, but really, they're so common and so readily available outside of 40-man raids that it would be a massive hassle for little real benefit in the long run.,

And you're not going through them alarmingly quickly? That's what I'm worried about. We have nearly 200, and far fewer members than you.

(Also, we have very little influx of crystals, since we don't really run MC anymore).

[quote=Praetorian,March 11th, 2006 @ 12:22PM] :(

Ok, I completely read that wrong. Not sure how good of an idear this would be since gold isn't usually an issue for guilds, and especially won't be once 1.10 comes out, but having strangers constantly in your raids to fumble things up and cost your raid gold would be. I guess if you have experience with the person before-hand and know they're not just some random moron, but then I'd be under the impression you'd maybe enjoy having that person's company anyways and not charge them for it. Stuff like this is why I fail at WoW business.

We've many many many times had people we know not in our guilds and a lot of times even complete strangers along on our Onyxia runs so they could get thier quest sword or be there to help thier warrior friend get his/her sword. We've never charged anything for this and have even on more than one occassion let one of those individuals loot thier epic helm when no one in our guilds needed it.

Of course, I think we do stuff like that just so we as a whole have someone/something to complain about.

With Gurg's seed, we never never have to worry about nexus crystals.

Don't let them disrespect your seed, man. It's not easy fathering good loot.

We sold the Leaf for the hunter quest before. After he looted, we booted him from the raid. Lag kicked in and his timer didn't start up. He followed us to Rag's lair and started the script as we were clearing the last of the trash. The other tank and I weren't even in melee range when Rag popped.

The guild bank may have been happy, but there were 39 pissed off raiders that day.

Uhhh, he was keyed to the raid ID so kicking him from the raid wasn't going to boot him from the instance.

We took some warlock to pick up all felheart for 2000g once. He came with 1/8, left with 7/8. Stayed from start - rag.

It was all master looted, so we didnt have to worry about ninja :)

Christ. With returns like that, 2000g seems like nothing.

2kG?

Report him for being a farmer.

We had obviously never tried that before. We figured it was like a regular instance and booting him from the group would boot him from the zone. We know better now.