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