Twisting Nether(EU) had its first run yesterday, with only 2 days of "spread the love" err advertising.
A few points that were made obvious to me:
Having a name, reputation and maybe guild to back the very first run is immense. You´ll just get flooded with "How does this work? Do you have spots?" and so forth. Not a single troll/hater in 2 days - that was quite impressive to be honest.

Time consumption: Do not underestimate the bidding process - its going to add 15-25 minutes to your run in total.

Price outline: Well our first run had some lucky drops - Solace, Barb, 2 BoEs ended up in 50.000 exactly.
Tokens went for 2.6 2.8.3.6 4.2 5.0 - in that order.

As for initial posts, I found myself one that matched text wise with all I wanted to say, someone might want to copy it now after I refined it a little more(Change the contacts, give it a little adjustment for your server)
World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> GDKP Run #1 - Thursday 29.10 21.00 - ToTC 25

All in all, good to see this system back running.

People will manage themselves to not have kid issues, cat issues and work issues (once gdkp becomes popular, even if they have to leave, they will not complain). They will prepare to join your raid assuming you did good raid leading. One thing about 2-day raiding, you can hold onto some portion of the split and hand them out on the second run (eg. if first day's split was 800g, you keep 300g and hand them back out on the second day --- you need good reputation and organization for this kind of system) so most people will turn up for the second run (if not, the split is yours :P, or use it to invite new people).

The best way to do Ulduar-25 is to clear all bosses in 1 day (make sure you know how to lead the raid to minimize time wasting).

Since our first raid took 1:30 with lots of quick explanations to do as well as tactic briefings to make sure it works I went and macroed anything that came to mind - this will probably take care of 95% of your needs each week.(you might want to adjust individual tactics and the 1 bold line)

Northrend Beasts strategy outline:
P1: Run the Snobolds into melee, Casters switch to kill them, Melee just keep the passive DPS up.
Keep an eye on tank stacks, BoP if necessary before P2.

P2: Melee on the Moving snake, Casters on the rooted snake - try to balance DPS out.
Casters spread out over the full range - melee spread out in 2 camps behind the boss.
If you get poison -> run towards the people with fire debuff(usually the opposing tank)
Don´t turn the snakes towards the raid - also don't overaggro any snake.

P3: Spread out evenly, don´t clump on one side, especially during the stunned phase.
Paladins have a look at Omen and Salvation the highest targets(not tanks..) usually Locks, Mages and Hunters.


Jaraxxus guideline:
Healers spread out evenly around the room, ranged DPS spread out in the room - but not too far from the center for healing.

Casters always switch to Sisters AND Infernals.
Melee only switches to Sisters when they are in the middle.

Handling the Legion Flame:
Melee please INSTANTLY run out of the melee camp.
You do not need to run miles with Legion Flame, no matter if caster or melee - a few steps to the side will be enough to drop the flame without harming anyone.

Nether Power and interrupts:
Shamans/Mages please focus on purging/stealing Nehterpower asap. Melee prioritize keeping his casts interrupted.


Twin Val'kyr guideline:
Tank them ontop of each other in the middle.

The melee team stacks up to the south(Left hand side from the entrance point of view).
The caster team stacks up to the north(Right hand side) in one clump - just outside melee range.
Do NOT bother moving to catch orbs - just move if you see a LOT of opposing colored orbs running close.
There will be 1-2 assigned players behind each camp to catch different colored orbs and let good colored orbs pass by into the groups.

Special notices: Switch to Shield targets.
After one shield is down -> switch to the color fitting for the next shield.
Example: First shield on Darkbane(best color to have is WHITE). After first shield switch to BLACK and stay on Lightbane. Switch Colors for Vortex still, but switch right back.


Anub'Arak strategy outline:
P1: Anub will be tanked on top of frost, with the offtank(s) grabbing the adds and pulling them onto it. If you´re melee - use your aoe abilites. If you´re a caster - please only DPS the marked add.
Do not bother shooting down any frost - I will take care of that.

P2: Everyone stacks up in the middle.
If you get followed by Anub, you run ou of the group, so that his path does not cross the group, and bring him to any frost patch of choice.
If you get targetted by any Scarab - slowly move away from it and focus your damage on one that is not currently targetting you. There is no need to ever get hit by them.

P3: Proceed killing Anub, healers can let the raid drop to 50% of their HP without a problem - if you are comfortable to outheal PC quickly, then you can let thsssssem drop even lower.

We will have enough DPS even if he burrows 3 times(granted he is just above 30% on his 3rd burrow) - anything more than that is just a easy kill.


Distribution guideline:
Please stack up on the Master-Looter - I will trade you all going from G1->G5.
Do NOT try to trade me.
Once you recieved your share of the pot, please leave the group.

Thank you all for coming, you can find us in #GDKP ( /join GDKP) and get yourself informed for all coming runs.

Well did my first run tonight. Next one is Friday Nov 6 at 7PM.

We cleared the instance. People weren't really bidding as much as I was hoping for. I think a lot of people were just looking for badges and gold. To be fair, I didn't have a lot of choice on who I brought this week. The idea was very new, and I didn't tell anyone about it until the last minute.

I'm looking forward to next week, thinking it will be a lot better.

Here are the results of the run:

#[Trial of the Crusader] Raid Log #
======================
Icehowl (21:39:48): 400 + 400 + 1300 + 200 + 300 = 2600
Lord Jaraxxus (21:52:36): 2500 + 200 + 1900 + 200 + 200 + 600 = 5600
Faction Champs (22:21:11): 200 + 200 + 500 + 1700 + 4000 = 6600
Twins (22:39:14): 500 + 200 + 1400 = 2100
Anub'arak (23:02:22): 1100 + 3000 + 800 + 1000 + 200 = 6100

----------------------
Abyss Crystal: 1
======================
Gold Pot (25 members): 23000 gold
920g per person
======================

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. I really like the idea, looking forward to doing it again.

Finished my first gdkp run just now, and i believe it was the first on the server mannoroth (de) as well.

I did advertising in trade chat for ~5 days, the message was containing a url to my guilds forums, where i made a topic explaining everything. I met 0 flames or gdkp opponents in public channels, probably due to me being in a well known guild on the server.
Half the people who whispered me didn't realize that it was'nt just a normal pug, and so i had to double check with everyone. I worked with the in game calendar for invites, putting ppl on accepted who seemed alright gear wise and had experience in the instance, and putting ppl with less gear, experience or gold on standby.
Naturally several ppl vanished from the invite calendar without notice, so i had to adjust my advertisement and class needs every day. On the date of the run, 5 ppl on accepted didnt show up. I was able to use some of my backups on standby and the rest were last minute ppl through trade channel. Some of the backups had extra farmed / acquired a lot of money for the run.

The run itself went smoothly in 1.5 hours from the first pull to having handed out the goldpot. No big items, as in no weapons or trinkets, though a few ppl who did bid very high on trophies and normal items.

#[Trial of the Crusader] Raid Log #
======================
Anub'arak (20:17:04): 4500 + 50 + 2500 + 3300 + 2000 = 12350
Icehowl (19:05:58): 720 + 4000 + 300 + 1200 = 6220
Fjola Lightbane (19:56:41): 1500 + 400 = 1900
Lord Jaraxxus (19:21:11): 100 + 1100 + 3000 + 250 + 1300 + 1530 = 7280
Eydis Darkbane (19:58:30): 4500 + 4000 = 8500
Chest (19:40:37): 1010 + 250 + 1000 + 4000 + 900 = 7160
----------------------
Abyss Crystal: 2
======================
Gold Pot (25 members): 43410 gold
1730g per person
======================


Overall it was a reasonable successful run, no wipes, few deaths. Naturally the work i had to put into the organization seemed huge, and i hope it will get easier with following runs, as word of the concept and the successful run gets around

There are a couple of relatively stable ulduar 25 gdkp runs on blackrock, but they're not exactly smooth- I don't think that anyone has really perfected it yet. One night full clear is a pretty tall order for a pug, and the problem with the standard gdkp group composition (10 player backbone, 15 carries/alts) is that while you can faseroll the siege/antechamber, your going to run into challenges with keepers/descent; further, there isn't much loot from the easily farmed content that your backbone players are going to bid on.

One possible strategy is to very explicitly split the raid into 2 nights- first night is *just* farm content (in this order: FL, XT, kologarn, auiraya, council, razor, ignis), then the second night you bring in an overgeared backbone and alts for hardmode-only watchers, general, and yogg. Your not going to make much of a pot the first night, but at least you'll have all the trash taken care of- allowing you to roll out a red carpet for your VIPs/Big Spenders who are after mount-related achievements.

Really smooth run on Runetotem today. Pot ended up at 24,975 for a 1,099 split. Already have folks hitting me up about next week.

Make a statement at the beginning that whoever is present at the kill of the last boss gets a full share of the pot.
If they try to complain about it first you explain that it is there to keep people from going AWOL, and second it is there for the case that people actually do and you need replacements. The point is simply to keep the runs in high esteem. Imagine the positive output of one guy that come in at Anub? 10 mins for 1-3k gold, that's going to sell like warm bread.

There is also the organisational hassle. Imagine subbing in 2 guys for a thirdshare each... And what if you replaced a guy at Twins and another at Faction Champions? It can soon get overwhelming, and the goldpot can thus take an impossibly long time to share out.

Ever since reading about GDKP being used on Korean servers back when Black Temple/Mount Hyjal were still the places to go, I was interested in trying it out, but feared that the opposition would be too strong and the average random raid not skilled enough to beat the current content. Thanks to this thread and Trial of the Crusader being ridiculously easy to clear in a short amount of time, I recently toyed with the idea of introducing this system to my server, which is EU-Vek'lor.

Due to me missing every toc guild raid due to other duties, I went on and tried to organize it by advertising it in my guild. However, the response was quite low and what was worst, I did not find a raidleader, due to our main raidleader having already too much to organize (I myself felt that I am not experienced enough to lead such a raid, especially because people will judge the system according to how the first raid goes. Therefore I wanted to get an established raidleader to do the leading and I'd do the organizing with him). However, I then found a likeminded raidleader who even did some "normal" ToC25 random raids and hence knew already a bunch of people.

Last Wednesday we first toyed with the idea. On Friday, we discussed the rules and wrote everything down. Then we advertised in the realm forum. Further, we mobilized our friends and acquaintances. After one evening of /2 spamming and whispers we had around 20 people signed up in the ingame calendar. Of them, about 15 showed up on Saturday at 19:45 invite time. After some more advertising & spamming in /2 as well as explaining the system a felt 100 times, we were full and pulled at 20:45. The beasts dies on the first try, and the bidding was one of my top moments in wow I guess. It was just so exciting to see how people would bid and react. The first few items were really cheap, but when the trophy came the bid war started. It was a really funny experience to see how everybody got more selfconscious in the bidding process. We then one-shotted every other boss and were finished at 22:15. Unfortunately, no "big" dropp like trinkets took place, but we ended up with respectable 40k gold and hence 1.6k for everybody.

I was extremely pleased, as PuGs normally dont even kill Anubarak on my server, which is EU-Vek'lor. I feared that due to it being a low population realm with only a few casual raiding guild we would have much more problems getting 25 people to try the system out and also kill bosses, especially because we only started advertising not even 24 hours before our first raid. Hence I was very baffled that a "bad realm" raiding-wise (only one guild has killed any ToC25 hardmodes, rank 230/260 on wowprogress) pulled this whole feat off. I guess that due to not having that many great guilds, there are still many people in need of ToC25 items, for which they are willing to spend serious amounts of gold. I guess that my hypothesis that the system would work much better on larger realms was kind of wrong and guess that it can also be done very well on somewhat smaller realms (Vek'lor is recommended, hence really low pop...).

Summed up: We had a blast this night and I wanted to thank you guys for your positive examples and help.

However, I still got a few problems to sort out:
-How do you deal with people who try to push people to bid more and more, who are themselves not interested in the item at all? We had one rogue bid on plate stuff in order to increase the winning bid, as well as on the 2.6s-axe from Anub'arak. He even had the highest bid on the plate pant (1000g) and I as our finance guy was inattentive and traded him the item for the gold. How do you handle this kind of behavior?
I actually thought that people would not risk having to buy items they can not use at all for high amounts of gold, but apparently there are those kind of people who dont really mind losing 1000g. I mean in the end, the paladin didnt have his plate pant, but instead of him the rogue probably went on and vendored it, which is quite stupid I think and didn't really leave a good impression... Thank god the paladin was not a dick about it.
-What do you think should be the minimum price/increment? We set it to 500g/100g, but the bidding was at times taking very long, and also for items with low competition due to raid setup the prices were very low...

Tipps for other people eager to introduce the system to their realm:
-Make macros. Explaining the gdkp system all the time is not something you'll want to do by hand. Explain the rules with macros. I also made macros for the bidding due to not liking goldraidmanager's constant spam.
-Team up. I was quite stressed being the one to do the auctioning, trading and noting all the stuff down in excel. I guess that when doing this for the first time, it's nice if you can delegate different tasks to different people.

Prices:
Trophies (in that order): 3000; 3250 (the one I bought :/); 3100; 2600; 3000
Other notable items: Hellscream Slicer 4500 / Legguards of Feverish Dedication 3200

Colour-coded chat will help. I would also consider making it a rule that people who blatantly spoiler-bid or grief-bid will at the very least be banned from coming again, and probably will forfeit their share of the pot. For everyone else, a brief "caveat emptor, no refunds" statement will keep them from bidding on something they can't use.

For bidding increments, I'd use 100g from 500g to 2.5k, 250g to 5k, 500g to 10k, then 1k thereafter.

Our runs on Onyxia-EU have been really successful. Although we just did 2 of them until now, I get absolutely flooded with whispers and PMs from people who would like to join. We decided to offer 2 runs per ID, Friday and Saturday, to meet the demand.

I would like to share two things that could be beneficial for people organising GDKP-Runs:

1. We've come up with a solution for people not showing up despite being invited via Calendar beforehand, as this occured on the first run but has not been an issue any more:
When people want a preinvite via Calendar for the raid (and thus a guaranteed spot), they have to send me a PM containing the name of the character they would like to attend the raid with, the amount of gold they are willing to spend and, most importantly, 2000 Gold as pledge.
As soon as they get invited into the raid, they get their money back. If they don't show up, I send them the money back and invite another.
This serves as a security measure for me that the person is serious and sure to be able to attend that raid. Even if there is zero risk (as they get their money back regardless of they attend or not), it seems to be psychologically like they "invested" something and are thus more dedicated for showing up. Also, more importantly, if there is anything to prevent them from attending, they are far more likely to give me a note about it and I can plan accordingly. ("Hey there, can't attend this friday, please send me my money back.") If they hadn't sent anything before, I doubt I would get to know if somebody would come until the actual invite.
Also, the 2000g are a sign that the people really have at least 2000g to spend, which makes showing money in the trade window before an invite obsolete.

I explained my reasoning for this in my advertising thread for the GDKP-Runs on the official Onyxia-Forums very clearly - that these are PuG-Runs, that I don't know everybody who will be attending and therefore cannot be sure if they can be trusted to show up if they say so.
Nearly everybody so far has been very understanding for this reasoning.


2. Of course there are also people who would love to come but are not willing to give the 2000g beforehand - I'm fine with this, as I already have 20 applications for spots on the next Friday raid. All of them have sent the gold in advance.

The people who don't want to send anything beforehand also have a chance to get onto the raid, as I only accept 20 chars in advance and leave the other 5 open until the invite for the raid starts. In this way I can plan out a raid beforehand and just need a few DPS and maybe a healer to complete it, which is easily done.
I just have to post something like "GDKP Run about to start - still 5 spots open, people with much gold preferred" and I get spammed with people willing to spend five-digit amounts of gold instantly. Then I can just handpick the classes the are most beneficial.

The friday-run for the coming week is almost filled right now (Saturday night, almost a week before), so my system seems to work just fine. The saturday-run still has a lot of open spots, but this may be due to it being the first time being scheduled for a saturday. We'll see how this turns out.

Concluding this post I'd like to point out that our pledge-system may not be appropiate for everyone or every server. It just happens to be that it seems to be functioning very well and I'm planning on continuing it like that.
The second tip (only filling up to 20 people and leaving the last 5 spots open until the raid starts) seems to be very beneficial for the amount of gold that is ready to be spent in the raid, as there are many people that don't bother to apply for a PuG-raid but nevertheless want items badly and others who didn't get a spot. These types of people are dying to get on a GDKP-Raid and will be doing just about everything to get a chance.

Is anybody doing something similar? I would love to hear about experiences regarding a pledge-system and "not-filled-out-raids".