Regarding ninja'd pots, I asked again inguild to double check. I can confirm 100% that GM's have intervened before when a GDKP pot is ninjad and done the following:

- They send you your share of the pot in the mail
- The person who ninjad it will get banned and/or have action taken against them.

Whether all GM's will do it, I dont know. It might be one of their unannounced policies, in that they'll handle this issue for raids that fall victim to it.

Advertise your run as, "KyraMorgan's Weekly GDKP run". Associate your characters name to them. You can add in your guild name, "Hosted by Crimson Alliance". All that really means is you probably are using your own guilds vent and might have a couple players going. People are more likely to trust a run that is run by (respectable player) and hosted by (respectable guild ive heard of).

Obviously your character/guild has to be something people trust (not something with those ninja reps etc)

They intervene when you scam someone off trade mats. I don't see why they shouldn't intervene also when you scam a full raid of people off their gold.

I trust Wowwiki, you have a lot of explaining to do Carebare!

Server:Emerald Dream US/Personalities - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

Wow, the name Cozy is still legend on ED. Relax (formerly On Cooldown) is the top raiding guild. Most of Relax is fine, but the guild policy is that they don't "babysit" their members, meaning as long as you don't F-over the guild, nobody cares. Recently the most recent Vindi-offshoot folded and a bunch of the members were absorbed into Relax.

This is very true. If you're a raid leader putting this together, you have to be mindful of this. Sometimes lots of people you know, might expect/want to come 'because they are your friends or guildies'. Before you know it the raid is mostly full, and you might have a problem on your hands if you weren't careful....

If you fill the run with 25 friends who have no gold/dont need upgrades, you might not have a very successful run. (If your intention is to generate gold)

As an example, we did another GDKP TOC 25 today. Lots of guildies went. Everyone only got about 2500 g each in the end. Now the drops were pretty shit this week, no Death's Verdict type stuff, but if you invite too many friends/guildies - you just dilute the value of your run. We invited a boomkin to the raid who has 100 000+ gold, but whats the catch? No other leather spellpower users were in the raid to drive his bids up high above minimum.

Even though these are runs hosted by our guild, its still a somewhat firm "Its a GDKP run, dont come to leech off it and be prepared to spend". Knowing the raid leader and being in the same guild doesnt change his intent, that the runs are focused on generating gold and they might not be suited to you. Nobody will force you to spend on a run if you come, but you might not get regular spots in future if all you do is 2000 dps and expect to get items for 200g each. If everyone in the raid did that, it'd be a disaster.

Again as mentioned in the first post summary, Raid Leaders need to decide what they want the run to accomplish. If you want to make a big pot, you need to manage your friends and people who 'expect invites' and firmly explain the rules of the run. Its about generating gold, so be prepared to spend if you come, or you better be doing a lot of dps to validate your spot and non-spending status.

If you're doing a more 'social type run' and dont care so much about the pot size or gold generation, you can easily bring friends/guildies knowing all this - and it wouldn't be an issue.

It all comes back to the raid leader.

How do you deal with people that have no interest in getting the item but know what someone else is willing to spend and bid them up (not necessarily having enough gold to cover their own bid) purely to inflate the pot?

If the "inflater" gets stuck with the top bid, they pay or you kick them. Otherwise, tough shit? Surely you're going to have collusion keeping prices low on some items too. Both are inevitable.

Additionally you could ask the attendees you don't know to show you how much gold they are bringing via trade so you can ensure they don't bid too high.

It seems like putting more than a tiny amount of thought into that is missing the point. It'll be pretty apparent if some douche does it more than once, at which point you write their name on the naughty kid list and stop inviting them. Runs like these sound great for everyone involved, so that alone will motivate everyone to play nice and not ruin the nice thing.

If it happens at Twins, you just can kick them from the run and tell your buddy who happened to log on, "Hey I had to kick a jerk at Twins, wana come in TOC for 20 minutes and kill Anub'arak - and get about 5000g for doing so"? He won't say no. Or just do the fight with 24 if your raid is geared enough, and everyones individual pot is higher anyway - which will make everyone happier.

Either way you don't lose. I guess theres the chance of them trying to grief/hold a spot in your instance open, but I think as someone said this is making a mountain out of a molehill: its not likely to happen because people want these runs to go smoothly and they want to keep their spot - because its in their financial interest.

As mentioned earlier, showing how much gold you have is often a requirement for joining, if the Raid Leader doesn't know you. I imagine this is usually done to prevent people exaggerating their personal wealth to get an invite - but it can be used to combat this if necessary.

Yeah I don't think that this concept is being presented here as a wonderous innovation which eliminates every conceivable problem with pugs. You'll still be carrying undergeared scrubs who can't play their class, you'll still be facing RNG drops and competing for items with others, and you'll still wipe if too many people stand in the fire.

The way to counter the above problems is quite simply to form regular / consistant pugs, drawing on a trusted group of players. The problem here is that once players have the drops they want, they'll generally stop turning up. By providing incentives for these players, these runs can offer a much higher degree of stability, not simply through the retention of good players, but also through the absence of the requirement to replace these players with green-geared scrubs. Of course these players are still critical to the run's success, but no matter how big their banks, you still don't want 25 of them at once.

I'd still be hesitant to dive head-first into using this system in pure pugs, but think it could be an excellent option for alt runs, etc.