Not to beat a dead horse...

Edit: I was beating a dead horse. Don't post while drunk kids, do it while bored at work.

REBIRTH.

Anyway I'm struggling to come up with an ilevel-based system that scales nicely. If you do 5*(ilvl-60)*SlotMod with Efficiency and Quality set at 1, it seems really messed up. A Tier 1 hat costs 30 DKP, a Tier 2 one costs 80, and a Tier 3 one is 140. I don't think the cost is upgrading in tune with the increase in power there.

Anyone else thought about this some more since June and come up with a better formula for pricing?

We simply use ilvl*slot modifier. Made one-handers a 90% modifier and 2handers a 150% modifier, and dropped trinkets to 54%. We do custom price certain items though because sometimes an item is just not very good and not worth what its ilvl is.

If you use ilvl50 as your baseline instead, you'd get 80, 130, and 190 respectively. That seems more reasonable to me.

Really, I'd probably go about it the opposite way. Pick relative values for tiers of gear that you think make sense, in terms of their relative worth, and then fit a formula to those points. If you want one that will yield good results for your guild, that's probably the best way to go.

Why would you drop trinkets?

Looking at it from a rogue perspective, outside of weapons, if you take all of the gear from MC, BWL, and TAQ, and look at the relative upgrade most rogues will get out of it, the Jom Gabber, Badge of the Swamguard, and Drake Fang Talisman will stand out above the rest. And then for casters, ToEP is the weapon equivalent in MC.

It depends on what you are using for a base line. If you say that a Rogue coming in should have a Hand of Justice and a Blackhand's Breath you aren't going to see a terribly huge increase, even with Vanish swapping. If your baseline is a BB and Rune of the Guard Captain then your upgrade from RotGC -> DFT is going to be a lot bigger and comparatively would be more points. The items you listed also would probably have 1.5 budget modifiers if you were using Gurg's idea of making well-itemized loot cost more.

Well, I think it's more of the case of the typical trinket being poorly itemized, and the well-itemized ones stand out. Trinket is not an intrinsically weak spot (as seen by stuff like DFT, the healing gem, and Neltharion's, just from BWL alone), it is just plagued by weak itemization.

Our formula -

((ilvl * qScalar + qConstant) *slotmod ) - (81 * slotmod)


ilvl is the itemlevel of the item as found from the itemcache.wdb file, it's recorded on thottbot/alla for most items, but you can verify it yourself from your own wdbs if you want to.
qScalar and qConstant are both derived values found by Hyz for an item that are based on the item's quality (rare, epic, legendary).
slotmod is a derived value based on hyz's work (adjusted for weapons to add their dps values back in). It varies based on the item's Slot. (trinket, ring, 2h weapon).

The first portion of the formula (( ilvl * qScalar + qConstant ) * slotmod ) determines the estimated stat budget for any item. We then subtract the second portion of our formula (81 * slotmod) which is the estimated stat budget for a level 60 blue of the appropriate slot. (This is to keep the "buy in" prices lower for new members).

Our assumption is that anyone bidding full in our system has at least a level 60 blue they could be "upgrading" from, and there's no reason to charge for the level 60 blue's value. When the expac comes out we'll reevaluate.

As an example of some of our pricing

Tier 1.0 Hat: 38
Tier 2.0 Hat: 55
Tier 2.5 Hat: 63
Tier 3.0 Hat: 75

Reasonable enough.

Do you have any subjective component to your formula?

Or is Band of Forced Concentration worth the same as Ring of Blackrock, and Gloves of the Hidden Temple far more expensive than Doomhides?

I've set up a basic formula with iLevel * Slot Mod * Instance Modifier. The instance modifier is 1 for BWL, 1.2 for AQ and 1.5 for Naxx. We haven't done anything in Naxx and we're on Huhu in AQ, so it's working so far. I readily admit that the pricing needs work, but I'm planning to use a similar formula (quite likely a modified version of whatever I find on these forums that seems most agreeable to the other officers in my guild) to give us a guideline. From there I plan to generate the values once and then change them as needed. Right now Band of Forced Concentration is the price as Ring of Blackrock.

I'm very interested to see what people design for the expansion. EQDKP (with Freddy's plugin) works well enough, but I can only stomach it since I've made some changes to raid imports and because I know we'll be starting fresh soon.

i just make up prices fairly loosely based on an ilvl/slotmod/demand formula, people argue with me, i argue back, then they pay up! :-P

Like many guilds, we simply ripped off EJ's price list when we started raiding. However, I wasn't satisfied in the long term with the highly subjective pricing because we would wind up pricing new items by the standards of old items which themselves may or may not have been accurately priced in the first place.

Plus every time a new instance came out, we'd spend interminable amounts of time as a group haggling over pricing. We have better ways to spend our time and energy.

After the reverse-engineering information came out, it was obvious that Blizzard used some sort of budget to assign stats to the item based on ilvl. I figured we could do the same with our item pricing.

So we converted to an ilvl-based pricing system that uses the following formula to determine cost:

cost = ilvl^2 * Slot Mod * Quality Mod * 0.025

Explanation of terms:

- ilvl is the Item Level. It is squared to make higher-level items cost disproportionately more.
- Slot mods are as follows:
o Head – 100%
o Neck – 54%
o Shoulder – 74%
o Back – 54%
o Chest – 100%
o Wrist – 54%
o Hands – 74%
o Waist – 74%
o Legs – 100%
o Feet – 74%
o Ring – 54%
o Trinket – 68%
o Shield/off-hand – 50%
o Wands - 45%
o 1h Weapon – 70%
o 2h Weapon – 110%
o 1 Hand Melee Weapons for Hunters - 40%
o 2 Hand Melee Weapons for Hunters - 60%
o Bows/Guns/Xbows for Melee Classes- 40%
- The 1.2 is the modifier for any purple (blues would be 1.1 and greens are 1.0), again from the reverse engineering thread above.
- The 0.025 is a constant that scales the values back down to something approaching our old values.

This formula makes higher-level items cost disporportionately more as we get into harder and harder instances that drop epics with higher base item levels.

The change has been pretty well-received by our guild and it's been great to have a stable baseline for pricing with very low administrative overhead.

Edit: You can find more information, including sample pricing lists, at our guild wiki here:

http://wiki.theamazonbasin.com/index.php/Tich_BRP

Also, for reference, the original R&D thread about ilvl, ival, slotmods etc. was preserved on wowwiki:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Formulas:Item_Values

We have a subjective component, but our subjective component is a class system. Items either qualify for a class of rebate or not. Classes are broadly defined, ahead of time. It's not a case by case adjustment. So band of Forced Concentration and Ring of Blackrock would have identical value if their ilvl is identical and they don't qualify for any of our classes. (As I recall this is the case).

Quoting from our thread on the subject:

No object is subject to more than one mod - you get at most a 25% discount on an item.

If someone can make a good argument in favor of another class based mod (items with +weapon skill should cost slightly more because they are underbudgetted in the ilvl formula) we would adopt it. We don't favor modifications specific to the item. "This is a bad allocation of stat budget" means it should be sharded, not priced so that someone is tempted to buy it. The priest trinket from BWL should honestly rot every time. That's the best use for your raid.

The only thing I'd change about our system is the price of our "assumed" item. I'm beginning to think we should have assumed an ilvl 60 -epic- instead of an ilvl 60 -rare-, although that only adjusts the initial buy in cost, it would keep the initial buy in in line with the upgrades from t1-t2-t2.5-t3. Luckily that portion is being reevaluated when the xpac drops, and it's not a huge concern for us before then. We're going to see what the average ilvl looks like in a level 70 raid before redoing that component.

I really should host a wikki for our system. Forum posts aren't ideal for this sort of information =P

:blink:

Death's Sting: 150 points
Bloodfang Pants: 175 points

That you are putting valuations on items based on slots implies that you are attempting to equalize item value. That you consider a one-handed weapon inferior to a belt indicates you're not valuating them well -- at least, for melee classes. As someone who has overanalyzed the relative value of items for a mage and a rogue, the above works pretty well for a mage but ends up with nonsensical results for a rogue. And if you're not interested in putting a reasonable value on items, why valuate them in the first place?

Well the SlotMods given to weapons don't seem to properly account for the fact the DPS isn't budgeted; they're raised slightly from the default ones, but not by enough. I've been working with 1.3 for a melee 1h and 1.5 for a melee 2h, with different ones for casters and hunters. Seems to be looking ok so far.

EDIT: The reasoning for keeping 1h and 2h mods so close is mainly due to warriors. They have a tank weapon and a second DPS weapon (1h or 2h), and I didn't want warriors getting fucked over for going 2h instead of DW. This way the cost difference is pretty minimal no matter if they choose a second 1-hander or a big 2-hander for their DPS weapon. There will be 'Class Mods' applied to armour so that a full set of stuff costs roughly the same all round, no matter what your class's weapon expenditure.