I've been thinking lately about how DKP systems are structured and ordered. As someone said in another post, the biggest problem is differentiating between issues with the actual system itself, and just issues with people using or abusing the system.

I was thinking of a way to create a system that attempts to prevent itself from being manipulated. I would like to discuss those ideas here and get your constructive feedback, even if it means dismantling my idea down to one fundamental flaw.

This idea won't cover the scope of rules such as upgrades, or values, just the basics of how DKP are earned and spent.

Essentially, there is a upper and lower limit to your DKP score, depending on the base of your scoring system. So let us say that items are scored on a scale of 25 DKP. The upper limit would be 500dkp, the lower -500dkp.

A person who takes an item can never go below -500dkp. Any item that they pick up that would reduce equal to or below that amount, has it's value reduced to leave the looting player at -500dkp. So for two quick examples, Player A has -300dkp, and Player B has -500dkp. They both have weapons passed down to them worth 225dkp. Player A pays 200dkp for his weapon, and instantly becomes -500dkp. Player B pays 0dkp for his item as he is already at -500dkp.

For players not being able to be in excess of 500dkp, I think the easiest implementation would be a Killbank.

Every Tuesday, when the instances reset, a Killbank earns points equal the combined excess of players with more than 500dkp. So if three players are at 525dkp, and everyone else is 500dkp or below, those players are reset to 500dkp and the Killbank is now sitting on 75dkp. This Killbank can be used for motivation, inspiration, or rewards. However the Guild/Raid leader discerns it is best to use.

Now throughout the course of the week, a raider's DKP can raise above 500 until the end of the raiding week's reset. Of course if they don't spend these points, they're lost.

On a week where the Killbank is cashed in it's entirety, it wouldn't start to take "deposits" from players until the next Tuesday, instead of the first following. This allows people at 500dkp if they get a large reward from the Killbank and a week of raiding to have the chance to spend it, befor the Killbank takes it all again.

Now I'm sure there are an exceptional number of cons to this system, most of which can be voiced by players who find it unfair that they don't get to keep their points past 500dkp.

The whole purpose of the system of course, is to encourage players to NOT be sitting at 500dkp, hording points, waiting for that next big piece of loot instead of taking viable gear that they can use now to benefit the raid. Because the points just don't magically disappear, everything within the system should still be zero sum in the end, and having the caps on both ends of the spectrum prevents there ever being such a huge gap between older and newer players.

This is still a very rough idea, but I like it. And I appreciate all input from you guys, negative and positive regarding the structure of the system and the rules.

A problem arises when certain classes have shitty drop rates. On my hunter's guild since we started bwl, we've had around 20 netherwind drops, compared to 5 dragonstalker drops. Our hunters would be eating points every week

Edit - *dammit, beaten to the punch.*

Hopefully you dont have mass inflation, if you do fix it.

One way to do so would be to remove points from horder but not to those mass negative. It sounds like you dont have inflation though since you want to take the excess and award it as incentive.

As kalman said points caps penalise the classes who are not receiving loot.

If you have a massive problem with people refusing to spend points i would suggest the easiest solution to be banding your system. Everyone over 500 points would be considered to have equal points and need to roll or some other measure to seperate them. Upgrade systems also provide incentive to spend.

Another option would be to charge those above X points extra. Think similar to tax brackets in income tax systems. You may x% of your points in bracket a and y% of your points in bracket b. To an extreme degree points spending could be encouraged by reducing cost of items to people in the negative as well. Id love to start having discussions about bracket creep in dkp systems as new instances with increased ilvls were released.

The same thing could be achieved basing points spent on percentile/outliers, and would reduce the need to really think about how many points people will have.

Class loot differences is something I definately didn't think about. And there are only so many cross-class items or weapons that a person can pickup before they start to get annoyed about their lack of a simple three piece bonus.

I have seen DKP systems where people in negative were discounted and earned more DKP compared to people with higher DKP scores who paid a higher price for items, and earned less DKP to normalize the distribution. I was thinking that in theory, a simple double-ended cap would suffice to prevent a large discrepency in points between players. I'm not a mathamatician, so I was looking for a simple solution.

Thanks for the input thus far.

In terms of banding the system, capping out how many points you have to have to be considered in the lead, I figured already for a 500dkp capped system, you would award people extra DKP for "lead" position only based upon their attendance in that particular instance over the past two months. So, say for example two people tied at 500dkp, and one at 400dkp, a rare piece of loot drops. The first 500dkp player has only been to the instance once last week, the second 500dkp player has been to the instance for the past three weeks, and the 400dkp player has been to the instance for six weeks running. At a base of 25, the First player would have 525dkp in terms of rights to loot, the second player would have 575dkp in terms of rights to loot, and the last player would have 550dkp in terms of priority for loot.

Still spend DKP based upon their original standings, but this prevents people from hording points in other instances and coming in to "snipe" one piece of loot. In theory, at least.