janrael

Have you considered auctioning off the buyer slots, and putting the proceeds in the pot? Or if that's too much trouble, you might sell the slots, but put the cash in the pot.

Another possibility is to take 5-6k in 'trust' - They give you the money in advance, but can still spend it on loot that run; it all goes in the pot whether they spend it or not. That ensures they spend some reasonable minimum amount of money, and has the side effect of causing them to bid things up that they might not want as much.

Selling slots for purely your own profit seems inappropriate to me - one of the selling points of gdkp is that it's symmetrical; everyone makes the same amount of 'dkp'.

 

◊ alinna

The problem with selling or auctioning raid spots is that it favors those who are "rich" which will probably generate a larger pot but poses issues for the raid composition if they are not geared or good players. In the case of an auction, unless you only auctioned off certain raid slots, you might end up with a group that is not ideal for the instance if the main selection criteria is how much they are willing to pay to enter the raid. Doing an auction for raid slots would be complex in any case. If you were to maintain a good amount of raid buffs and class balance you would need to auction off each role separately, which at the very minimum means 3 separate auctions for DPS/tank/healer roles. Managing an auction for 16 DPS slots would be interesting though. Do you have everyone send in their maximum bid secretly and take the top 16 bidders, but do they pay their bid or the lowest amount needed to get into the raid? Or would an open auction, like how the loot is auctioned off in a raid, be a better idea?

 

Reeshet

I really wasn't planning anything that complex. I was planning to just say "1,000g reserves you a spot in raid until 30 minutes after posted start time". And that's the extent of the guarantee. If you fail to meet the expectations in the raid rules, you get booted like anyone else.

If I get too many people wanting to pay 1,000 gold, that's a 24,000 gold problem I'm willing to deal with.


But seriously, if I had more than 3-5 people paying to reserve spots, then I would consider upping the price. I agree that this method would tend to favor the rich players, but I don't actually have any problem with that. The entire raid structure and looting system favors rich players.

Again, this would NOT gimp the raid. If someone is not geared adequately for the raid, I return their money. I agree that it would be totally inappropriate to do anything with the raid that's detrimental to the other raid members purely for personal gain. However, once gear & talent checks are enforced, I'm struggling to see why there's anything wrong with personal gain when it actually benefits the raid as a whole.

 

Douglas

Hm... if everyone were to put in that 1,000g, and it was all split up at the end, then it's a no-op in terms of cash flow.

Which is not to say this isn't a useful idea. It pretty much serves some of the same purposes as an ante in poker. That makes me think that maybe this is the right way to explain it to people and maybe even the right way to refer to it. "The first n people to ante up are guaranteed slots in the run."

In fact, think about having a pre-stated ante of varying sizes would impact the run. If people put 5,000g down just to sit in, that's a clear signal that it's a high-stakes run, and it might attract a completely different set of people and have a completely different dynamic than a 500g-ante run or a no-ante run. I mean, we can be pretty darned sure that with a 5,000g ante, people are going to be very motivated to perform well and stick it out until the end, can't we?

 

ZachPruckowski

I'm not saying that well-progressed realms can't be converted to GDKP, I'm just saying that on a realm where there are already plenty of successful raids, GDKP runs can't as easily take advantage of the fact that they over-perform /roll PUGs in terms of player willingness to stay and ability to attract good players. They obviously still have the "can buy loot with gold" thing going for them.

This is how GDKP came to my less-progressed server. The guy who runs the most successful PUGs on our server decided to run them as GDKP for a week.

 

Reeshet

mmm. Yeah... well I wasn't planning to actually put the money in the pot. That was kind of the whole point of my first post about it.

My thought is that if everyone were to put in 1,000 gold then I'd be 24k gold richer and I'd have a raid filled with dedicated, motivated, rich players who really really want to be there.

 

janrael

Dedicated, motivated, rich players who really really want to be there, and know that running a raid of their own would make them much richer. I think that tactic will cause splintering and (justified) complaints of unfairness. It's tantamount to you getting first pick of the loot every run - you earn 24000 dkp just for leading.

 

• Phara

No, your raid will be filled with 24 retards who think they will be handed loot because they paid you 1k gold, and then you'd be accused of scamming because you wouldn't kill shit. No sane person would ever join your raid, unless you're someone really e-famous guy.

 

elfatto

Inspired by this thread, my guild has recently started to run GDKP ToC25 runs for the past 3 weeks. For the most part they have been very successful, and I've noticed that interest has definitely been growing. However, we did run into some trouble last week, and it's related to what Dandz mentioned. A player who had gotten into the 2 previous GDKP runs wasn't able to get in due to the overwhelming number of people who wanted to go. He took this rather badly, and proceeded to talk mad trash about our guild and our GDKP runs in trade chat.

In the end no real damage was done, as I think we had already established that everything we were doing was legit and it was pretty clear that he was just disgruntled that he couldn't get in the raid, but it still bothered me quite a bit. Has anybody else had to deal with something similar, and how did you handle the situation?