Greetings,

Being the place to discuss stuff of value, i would like to share here, what we came across as a guild, in hopes that someone might find it usefull, suggest improvements or predict problems.

A bit about us as a guid, to understand from where the needs for such system have grown.
We raid 5 days a week, for 4 hours, with 35-50 online in the evenings.

HC DKP or as it was originally named Hardcore Attendance Bonus, is something that came up when we started continuous wiping on Ragnaros. It was the first boss who required not a few tries but weeks of wipes. It was obvious to us that getting 40 DKP from killing farm bosses in one night run up to Domo, and getting 0 from wiping to Ragnaros for endless hours was fundamentally wrong - someone who missed that one night run clear, but attended all the wipes and did his best for guild progress deserves the purple rewards more then someone who comes to only farm runs.

Thus in it's simplest form, 2 HC DKP was given for an hour of effort (compare it for example to 5 constant DKP from Lucifron kill, yes in the beginning we didn't have zero sum either).
This was a bit better, but still not enough. We looked upon the situation and wrote the following:
Boss on farm status = chance for an item, 2-3 gold, X DKP.
Boss on wipe status = minus 20-30 gold.
Obviously, there is the emotional part of beating the encounter, but DKP as we saw it was there to give perfect practical reflection of player's effort for guild progress.
Thus we balanced ourself accordingly, halfed the DKP gain from bosses, and re-wrote the HC DKP gain formula to :
HC DKP = time spent + progress made

Later on we decided to switch to zero-sum system for deciding DKP gain from boss kill, but the HC DKP remained.
A good example for this system would be our Huhuran attempts :
One night we started with 14% as best attempt over a few weeks of progress, to 1% after 4 hours of trying, and then instead of finishing, re-supplied ourself with potions, repaired, and kept trying for another 1.5 hours just to hit that same 1%.
For that increased time spent, and the incredible progress made, we awarded 20 DKP.
Next day, she died after additional 2-3 tries. The reward for her was just 8 DKP, some as zero-sum loot and some as a bit of HC DKP.

HC DKP comes from a point that says defeating hard encounter is not a one night stand of performance.
It's continous progress you make as a guild, and rewarding that is of extreme importance.

We as a guild know our limits. We know we have some better players, and some worse. Some who will attend every try, and those with lower attendance. And we want our awarded DKP to reflect each and every person's investment uniquely.

Ideally you don't need any extra incentive for people to come beat your content.
The problem with awarding time spent is that it encourages sloppy behaviour once things are farm-status.

There's nothing all that unique about your system. Tons and tons of guilds give DKP for wipes. We used to. The Conquest zero-sum DKP system upon which we originally modeled our system had IDKP (Incentive?) awarded for wipes and zeroed out of the system periodically.

People who are consistently and mysteriously absent for wipes and always there for farm runs shouldn't be rewarded, that's true. And awarding learning DKP is obviously one way of doing it. For us, I prefer to use invite pressure. If you don't show up for the wipes, you go to the end of the line when it comes to the first several weeks, at least, of farming the newly-mastered boss. And we reimburse repairs on pure wipefests in the learning stages so that there's no downside for showing up. The problem with wipe DKP is that it's inflationary. In a non zero-sum system or bidding system, it's a fine solution with few downsides. Under zero-sum DKP, however, it's very much a rich-get-richer sort of thing. The undergeared new recruit who's trying to catch up might really want to come to the hardest new fights to help learn them, but he isn't geared enough to be useful, so he doesn't get to go. And those who already have the best gear and most DKP get even more. Also, if new raiders join your system, they never had the chance to get those one-time rewards while something was being learned.

Invite Pressure works very well in a guild that is large enough to have significantly more people that show up for a raid then there are spots. However, in smaller guilds that don't have a problem with a large number of excess people that really isn't a valid incentive. If you are using a zero sum system than I think its appropriate to award DKP for wipping and then periodically balancing the system.

I know in an earlier thread Gurg said that one of his main dislikes with rebalancing is that it's possible for a new recruit to join right after a balence went into effect so he doesn't get the minus DKP while everyone else does. I think the best solution to that problem is instead of doing a huge balence once in a while using small balences that are often done.

Also, the undergeared recruit really isn't competing with the long time members for gear. It's more of a he goes to MC and takes all the loot he wants kindof deal.

That's exactly the problem my guild is having now. We don't use sum-zero. The old officers gave boatloads of DKP for learning attempts and caused horrible inflation. We're having steady deflation nowadays, but new members (particularly warriors) will only catch up to our oldschool people sometime in 2012 at the current rate.

We're highly considering adapting the EJ upgrade system, but it doesn't eliminate our biggest problem of having such a massive disparity in points banked. For example: I have roughly 260 dkp and I've been around since day one with about 89% lifetime attendance. A new rogue who joined six months ago and has 95% lifetime attendance has -100 dkp.

Or consider Himeko, one of our warriors who joined about 9 months ago and has maintained 98% attendance the whole time. We consider him the United States of dkp because at this point, the concept of not being in debt is just silly to him. When we adjust using the upgrade system, he goes from like -150 to about +46. That's more in line with where he should be. It's obscene that such a reliable, contributing member could never dig himself out of a hole like that.

Things we're considering:

# Adapting the upgrade system and applying it retroactively.
# Adjusting the cost of equipment sets for classes that need less gear. (E.g. increasing the cost of all rogue armor by 30%)

It's a shitty situation to be in that I have no idea how to adequately fix without flushing it all away and starting over.

Yeah, I'm a strong proponent of using quick hacks and inelegant band-aids to fix symptoms for the next few months and then just scrapping everything and starting over from scratch for the expansion, with all of one's accumulated knowledge about implementing a DKP system in WoW raiding.

Somebody in our guild came up with the idea that we call "priority points," basically just learning DKP per hour that doesn't factor into the real zero-sum system. It allows people who hang around for learning to buy items out of order by spending their priority points. Since it doesn't change any numbers in our zero sum system (which got way out of control before we reset it) it's kind of a band-aid fix for learning DKP.

I've been giving some thought to going into the code for eqdkp and adding in some logic to account for point capped instances, upgrades, and sidegrades. Are other guilds considering the same thing, or are you going to write something new from the ground up?

The other, more complicated, thing we're considering is doing a two pool system where class specific items earn and subtract points in a different pool. Everyone could get raid gear competitively withing their class, but not be at any disadvantage for cross class items if their class gets a few extra drops. We have problems with people holding out on spending points so they will be first in line for a claw of chromaggus or drake fang talisman, even at the expense of not improving their raiding gear. Unfortunately with our current rules this possible because most of the raid is violently opposed to forcing items on people.

We considered this but eventually scrapped it because
1) It's a major hassle to track.
2) Token systems complicate it even further than it already is. Because certain gear is "cross-class" but really can only be bought by 2-3 specific classes.
3) The "cross-class" pool is really just off-spec people buying PvP gear the majority of the time. Sure there's that Fury warrior buying rogue gear, but the majority of the time it's just warriors buying PvP gear. Of course you could always prioritize by class even in the cross-class pool. Like I said though, it's pretty annoying to track everything in this kind of system. How do you decide between priority on Deathdealer (a pure upgrade for rogues) and Oracle (PvP gear for priests)?

We're working on something from the ground up, but we'll see where that ends up. We have some talented php/database guys in the guild, so I'm optimistic about it. EQDKP makes me want to stab myself in the face every time I enter raids.

That would be like 3 visits to the hospital a year!