One thing i've seen some RL's do is paste the Auction Ledger after their run on their realm forums - and they use that to advertise/announce their subsequent runs. It really is an excellent idea to do this. Heres one example pulled from google, someone announcing a future GDKP run and detailing the ledger of a previous run:

Doing this is a great idea because:

- People will realise that you dont need huge amounts of gold just to go to these runs, most items do not go for high prices.
- People will look carefully at the list and will think "I wouldve paid more than that!". In the above example: Reign of the Unliving went for only 4600g on a Frostwolf server run, thats a bargain (One dropped earlier this week on BR and went for nearly 20k). Some people see this and will take more money. Instead of just taking 2-3k to the run, people might now opt to take 5k because it could get them this trinket - which they previously thought might be out of reach.
- People will look at the list and think things like, "I paid 10 000 g to craft Merlins Robe, and Skyweaver Vestaments went for only 1000g!"

Avoid pasting things like "Jaraxxus: 1000 + 500 + 750 + 3600" as it doesnt really attract the second type of player above. Mention the items by name. You want to show them that items they want are going for competitive prices, not just throw meaningless figures at them.

You want to generate buzz and word-of-mouth, this is a great way to help. And if your ledger contains an item that goes for a high price, say 25k, simply comment how that item alone gave everyone an extra ~1k gold via the pot split.

I do use colour-coded chat, but didn't really realize we we're auctioning a plate item until I traded it. I guess that was due to me constantly alt-tabbing when starting a new auction to write down the results of the previous auction in excel.

As said, I expected that the loss of a serious amount of gold would prevent this kind of blatant pushing auction prices. However, the rogue did indeed pay and seemed to have no problem whatsoever over his stupid loss of gold. Of course we will not take him on any subsequent runs, but the result he has caused was still quite unsatisfactory. My problem was, that in the beginning when going over the rules I wrote that "only gold counts". So if I didn't give the item to the grief-bidder, I would technically have violated my rules...

I guess I will introduce a "only if you can wear it" rule in order to prevent this kind of blatant spoiler-bidding. However, this doesn't completely solve the problem. E.g. if an enhancement shaman bids on fast melee weapons, he probably is trying to push the final price up. What to do in such cases? I guess that even if he wins an unsuited item, he could probably get rid of it by selling it to the second highest, serious bidder for his last, unsuccessfull bid and live with a small loss of maybe a couple of hundred gold, which isn't really a big punishment considering that he can substantially "manipulate" the price of an item upwards. As I can not control the trading once the item is handed out this could be a problem (and indeed I know that yesterday, when two melees had a bidding war on an item, the winner afterwards sold it to the other one again for a lower price. However I do not know, and probably can't know, if he was trying to increase the pot size, or if he just realized that he had spent way more gold than he intended, as it was on Anub'arak and he had already bought 1-2 items). By grief bidding, one can manipulate the prices a lot. If one end's up with the item, one can just resell it again, which I can not prevent. Only if the grief-bidder can not resell the item to someone in need of it he is punished severely, but then, the people who could actually use the item won't really be happy to say the least.

My problem is, that it is very hard to draw a line about who is allowed to bid on what in order to inhibit people from pushing auction prices, especially because I'm not really all that knowledgable about what stats are optimal for some specc/class. Also, I saw it as a plus of this system in that it avoids the discussions on who gets to have a shot at items that you normally have in PuGs.

Also, in some way, this kind of behavior can of course also be beneficial to the raid in terms of pushing item prices to their real value which they are to the bidders, especially on armor types which have low competition in the raid (e.g. spellpower plate if only one paladin is present). But maybe this problem should be solved by a raid composition with a lot of innate competition so that this kind of behavior becomes obsolete.

rucvv: thank you for your input. I already tried GRM and announcing in /ra, but still feel that it writes a lot more than neccessary. Also, it is of course in English, and as I am playing on a German realm, some people will probably not react that positively to it. I will try to look at the settings and source-code a bit more and see if I can tweak it to meet my needs (and possibly localize it to German).

tyrian: Excellent idea. When I first saw your post here I thought to myself that I would have spent way more gold on Reign of the Dead, so I guess it provokes exactly the reaction that is intended.

Riz: I guess if your guild is selling drakes, you are at least known to be good players. If people from reputable guilds start this kind of venture it is already much easier. Also, I'd recommend to you to start advertising personally to the guild leaders/officers of other known skilled raid guilds. People who are in serious raiding guilds probably care about their equipment and are also often at least somewhat more receptive to this system than the average player.

Also, on my server's realm forum you mostly see trolling and flaming, but do not look at it as being representative of your realm's opinion. I had exactly the same argument of "promoting gold seller" being posted, but in my opinion, it is not really all that valid/severe:
-At least on my realm, I wouldn't wager to take severely undergeared players on such runs, so the playerbase is already quite "limited".
-One doesn't only spend gold. This system is not devouring gold, but merely redistributing it. I guess that on each server, there are rich people who have 5 or even 6 digit amounts of gold, which they cannot use to buy anything valuable, because there aren't all that many gold sinks besides of mounts at the moment. Hence instead of just accumulating gold in their bags, which is kind of "removed from the economy", as it can not be spent reasonably, it is now again reassigned some buying power and is hence distributed again among the playerbase. Hence a large amount of otherwise untouchable gold is flooded into the playerbase, making them more wealthy and not buying gold because they can get it easily this way.

Re the bidding up issue I've personally said "If you bid up someone else, and they let you win, be prepared to either a) be stuck paying for the item, or b) having to sell it to them for half the price you paid for it to reclaim some of your stupidly lost gold."

Only one person was silly enough to get caught out with it. And as a result lost ~2k gold, and spent the rest of the run getting mocked for it. No one is stupid enough to do it after that.

I'd say just stick with 'gold is priority' rules. The system sorts itself out

People will only pay what they think it is worth. Hence it isn't really a loss to be bidded up. In fact it can be decidedly helpful to have people that do that.

Imagine having only one caster Druid. And something he really would love drops. Is it then fair to the rest of the raid let him have it for the base price? There are arguments for both sides of it. Naturally the optimal situation would be to have another caster Druid, but we all know we can't always get the perfect setup.

In the case of the Rogue buying Plate for 1k. Well if the Pally had actually wanted that piece he would have payed more. 1k is a bargain, so either he had little gold or his own gear wasn't that much behind the piece. In either case, you were better served with the Rogue I think. Even the Pally could have played the Rogue since he must have noticed him pushing the price up. So he began bidding knowing the Rogue would chime in, and then he caught him redhanded. Which was a considerably better situation than the item being dissed. 1k implies that very few wanted the item and those that might didn't really want it very much.

Remember, that is a possible solution to this, force the griefers to buy more gear than they actually want.

Very interesting story that...

I guess it just showed that on GDKP runs you can't act like an idiot like so many normal randoms as it can clearly bite you in the rear if you go too far. Since it is all about gold you can get stomped in a horrible way like that pally (I must say I liked it since it drives the point home a lot better than simple words). I'm writing this down to provide examples for any potential runs I will part of. Better get rid of bad behaviour ahead of time, rather than suffer it.

Does anyone have any really good mods for saving replies to commonly asked questions?

I find I'm explaining the same thing everytime, and I'd rather not use up all my macros for this (I use them for actual macros). So a mod that could save replies, and I could label with the corresponding question would be a life saver.

With the "goldraidmanager" linked in the first post you can also do this kind of stuff. Check out http://media.curse.com/CommunityServ...grm_manual.JPG , scroll down to where the "briefing" tap is shown.

You could possibly ask people interested or those with questions to join a specific chat channel such as "GDKPInfo" where you can spam the information for anyone/everyone present. This seems to be one of the few solutions that I know of that prevents replying to each tell separately.

Right under the Auto-Advertise-Frame there is a rather large "Memo" area for notes and such.
In there I wrote down answers to common things and when someone asks a typical question I just copy and paste the stuff from there.

Along with Zanthor, I've helped to bring GDKP to Blackhand-US. I did a 25ToC last week that was lackluster, mostly my fault - poor raid composition and rather poor dps. This week however was a great success; I learned a lot from my first mistakes. All bosses down and no wipes. Unfortunately Twins and Anub didn't drop any stellar loot so the end split was 1600/person. Trophies are going at about 2400-3000 which is a tad low. We'll see whether the prices pick up or not.

Last week the Dual-Blade Butcher went for 5k; this week's highest was Sabatons of Tremoring Earth for 3600. Hopefully next week the loot tables will treat us better!

Just thought i'd give an update on how Frostmourne is going. My runs are extreamly popular. Doing 3x 25 totcs + 3x 25 onys starting at exactly 1pm and finishing exactly 6pm for all 6 raids with pots ranging from 30k-55k for 25 totc, and without even advertising in trade they fill up in a minute or less through word-of-mouth + guildies. In fact it's now reminesecnt of sitting people out of guild-raids, which is a downside because I always hated doing that.

However I have only seen 1 or 2 other advertisers for gold dkp runs, 25 totc only, and as far as I know no run has started gold-dkp without me around, which is kinda a bummer.

A few notes for other people starting it on their servers, if you do plan to start it, deciede why, if you want the system to become widely accepted on your server so you can often find gold-dkp runs then don't "brand" your runs as heavily as I did. If however you want high demand for your runs in particular, then brand away, just be prepared for the constant whispers!

EDIT: Few additions

Trophies steadly going up in price from when I started a couple weeks back, they were 1,500 now 2,000-3,000.
Minimum bid of 500g or DE is a good level for items.
Trying to get 2-3 undergeared but cashed up players is plenty to have healthy pots.
Players are here for gold, but they are here because it's an effeciant time for gold investment, my runs are quick, fun, no fooling around and people can net some good gold + maybe items they are after, try to keep your focus on making runs successful, rather then huge pots.