They will intervene in any case where there is a clear written agreement regarding the loot rules. So the raid leader needs to say at some point "GDKP run, money from bids will be split evenly at the end" in chat for a GM to take action. This also applies to normal main spec roll pugs.

So regardless of what loot rules you're using, get the leader to state them in raid chat and any ninja is actionable.

Unless it was someone with a solid reputation the buy in you're describing would just set off "I'm going to get scammed" alarms in my head. If you're evenly distributing the gold at the end that buy in really accomplishes nothing but encouraging people to stay till the end; which is not needed since the system is designed to be very appealing for late joiners making replacements easy.

It could also possibly cripple the purchasing power of people with a low amount of gold; who might be the very ones continually driving every items price to their max amount of gold.

TooltipWealth - Addons - Curse - might be a handy addon for running one of these - adds a players 'most gold ever held' stat to their tooltip. While not 100% reliable, if someone tells you they're bringing 20k to spend on loot and the most they've ever had is 3500, well, you've got an easy way to spot it.

This is Onehan from Blackrock

I've recently found out that gdkp system is spreading to other servers, and I being a gdkp starter and promoter (in US servers) I'm very happy to see this happening.


I had a few things that I had to deal with while introducing gdkp system to the server, and I hope my tips would help you starting a gdkp in your server.


The major concerns I consider most important are


1. Raid Management
2. Social Management, and
3. A STRONG WILL





1. Raid Management

As mentioned in the original post, successful run is the most important factor contributing to the "word spread".
Hence getting the "good" players are more important than getting the "rich" players in the beginning.

Now, getting the good players would be hard, since you'll hear so many people crying about paying gold for loot.
Most of these people generally fail in reading and understanding, and you need some helpful friends paying them out to make them look stupid and make clear explanations to raid why this system is fair.

Make sure that you are not the one giving the crap. Your reputation is important as a raid leader - and you giving crap contributes 0% to the word spread
And obviously your friends are reasonable and explain kindly if people are asking nicely)

To make a successful raid you need at least
well geared, well experienced, and smart tanks (all of the tanks)
1~2 geared and good healers who does more than their assigned heals
and 2~4 strong dps who breaks their bar through the damage meter.

Assuming rest of the raid are normal and you (unfortunately) have some failures
these people are needed to lead the whole raid.


Getting a full group IS an issue if you are newly introducing gdkp system to the server. Although you try your best and make everyone clear that the system is very fair and works fine, people are still unsure and are very tempted to leave and do leave the group when they see another raid forming on /2. So in order to speed up the invite process, you will unavoidably invite the bads (bads that are under-geared and not well experienced to raid but are still interested in gdkp system).

You will need all the wide raid view, recount analysis, ensidiafail analysis and such to accurately point out who screwed up the raid and caused a wipe. You have to make sure to give the impression to the whole raid that
it is HIM who fails. NOT YOU.
This is very important because by doing this, you don't lose trust from people and also this creates a hole where everyone can dump their rage from wiping (I'm not talking about mad rage here. People just need something to blame on - and make sure it's not on you) enabling the next try kept focused and not scattered.

If this does not fix the bads, there is a solution in gdkp by announcing
"NO GOLD SPLIT IF YOU SCREW UP ONCE MORE".
You'll be amazed how well people perform after the warning especially when the split becomes huge.

(Koreans made pug Hyjal possible by having 500g penalty when failing to fall - I haven't tried the penalty system yet but forfeiting gold split worked fine)


You will also encounter some minor issues such as
- People inflating the prices that are not related to their class (People do complain but you can't do much about it. Those people are also taking risks while trying to inflate the price to the "true-worth" value).
- People bidding after the countdown (DO NOT accept the late bidders. Not accepting will cause no harm to your reputation but accepting may. Make sure you slow down the count for highly competitive loots).
- People watching big bids get excited and start typing numbers in /ra (Tell them to talk in /s and not ruin the mod).
- Early leavers wanting split (no split to early leavers - keeps people stay until the end)
- Bidding process taking up precious time (Set appropriate minimum bid/raise to avoid people raising with small increments wasting time. Adjust the countdown pace to speed up the bidding process but allow enough time for people to bid. As soon as the auction is closed, open the next one and do the trade while the auction is still processing).




2. Social Management

Once you have a successful run, you'll get hundreds of whispers from people to join your raid. You need to be friendly with the good players, rich players, and supporters (supporters as in they say good things about gdkp while the most server population still cries about paying gold for loot).

You need to arrange the raid time when you can get most of the useful people

When useless people whispers you, you don't have to be friendly, but still reply kindly.
Don't give a word that he/she will get an invite, but give an impression that he/she can get invited when you spam on /2.
He/she might be useless now, but can be useful later on.
(A lot of these bads will gain a new perspective to the "worth" of gold. Gold is now dkp, and it is precious. They will start planning out the item list that he/she wants; Doing researches in EJ, mmo, etc. to figure out which items are optimal for him/her, so he/she doesn't waste gold on shit loots. Also by studying the stats and the mechanism of tanking/healing/dpsing, they will eventually become good players. ----- This seems like an ideal situation, but it does happen quite often in a long run. ----- This is one of the biggest differences what gdkp pugs have comparing to rolling pugs where many people just spam /roll for the loots they don't have mindlessly).

You will get in contact with a lot of people who know you but you don't. Manage your friends list and always leave a note so you know who to look for your next raid.
(eg. RICH - GOOD - holy priest, average - GOOD - resto druid, RICH - bad - rogue)

When your runs become popular, there will be more than enough people asking you for an invite for the next run. Invite these people first (only the good ones) before you spam on /2. If you are good enough, you will have more than 25 people doing this, and yes, they will stay and wait for replacement, even though you don't ask for it. - Say nice things to them when they don't get the opportunity.

You will be liked by many people and it is important to manage yourself to maintain the popularity. Even though you are super, one day, you are going to make mistakes, you will DC during the raid with 50k gold pot in your inventory. You will be positioned where people do not consider you good, and in case of DC, even though it turns alright at the end, the word can spread wrongly (Chinese whispers). Your fans will control the crowd and keep your reputation intact. These people might also offer you fish feasts or flask which come in very handy.


I personally don't use the calendar to organize groups, because I don't think I can free myself from wow once I start using it.

Plus, try to run at a set time so you have high chance of getting these good people regularly.
(This is most likely Friday night, Saturday night or Sunday afternoon).




3. A Strong Will

The thing is, no matter how well you do, it takes time to spread the system (spread can be done faster if you have more alts running gdkp, I only had 1). It took me around 1~2 months for someone to run the second gdkp pug and another few months to stop people asking "what's gdkp?". And more, you may get this anti-gdkp group forming, saying bad stuffs (nothing logical, they just to rage and troll) about gdkp in /2 and pst you "you greedy c***".

In my opinion, you need at least 3 solid gdkp raids going (excluding you) where u can stop putting in effort to promote gdkp system but the system promotes itself.



it is a game and why tank all these suffers?

Well, I was tired of 3-4 nights/week guild raid and it was hard to go on and off especially as a warrior. But the general pug quality sucked too much (back in TBC) for me to get in. I happened to read the Korean wow forums saying that they have successful BT/Hyjal pugs (before the patch) while US pugs were still struggling at ZA, and the major factor for the difference in pug quality might be the gdkp system.

I was shocked and amused, and thought if I bring this system to the server, I won't have to do 3-4 nights/week guild runs anymore, I will be able to raid whenever I want, and also I will be able to catch up with "dkp" by putting in extra effort - I hate rolling and losing forever and ever, especially to noobs.

Considering how much I like wow, and remembering the nights I sat for raid instead of socializing, feeling like eating elephant crap,
gdkp system seemed like the only way for me to get both wow and real life.

So there I went, promoting gdkp.
I did all the things I have said above up to the point where I thought I have promoted enough that gdkp system will promote itself. Then I quit wow for a while for real life issues, and came back, and guess what, there are gdkp pugs forming almost everyday! (and even spreading to other servers)
I can now raid anytime I want and all the gdkp pugs I've joined since I came back were all successful! (I have joined some rolling pugs but they were not successful. It is a tiny sample size to make an conclusion but I believe that gdkp pugs generally have higher quality than normal pugs).



All I'm trying to say here is that
you are going to have a hard time (probably not as hard as mine since you have this great post from Tyrion to link)
but whatever your goal is (e.g. gdkp system, freelancer raider, enhanced social management, etc.)
don't give up, then you WILL achieve it
and the outcome will be great!








Hope this was useful.
Good luck and have fun!

//KasumiRevy

Gdkp does not create any gold and hence it does not affect the AH. However, the gold/dollar ratio decreases because of the increased flow of gold (proven by entire Korean servers where they ran gdkp pugs for over 3 years).

Has anyone tried the idea of "You fail on <insert environmental fail magnet here>, you immediately have to contribute X to the pot." X could be decided at the beginning of the gdkp raid and if a player refuses to pay after dying to a void zone or whatever, then they get kicked. This would kind of take what rucvv said about not failing and force that player to really pay for his mistakes.

I'm not sure you're entirely correct in this, a more even distribution of wealth will increase demand of medium prices items, since a lot more people are able to buy those. That is in wow as well as in real life. If before 10% of the population had 20k gold, and 90% had 1k gold, whereas 100% of the population now have 2,7k gold, then you will obviously have a lot more buyers for the items priced at 1,000+ gold. I am not on a server where gdkp is used, so I wouldn't be able to say whether it has an effect in practice, but saying that it's not possible for gdkp runs to have an effect on server economy would definately be wrong.

I think that about sums up the best answer to most of the previous posters "what if?" comments. People don't generally like complex rulesets and will be wary of them. Even if people don't mind rules, it can feel cheap and take the 'fun' out of raids. Remember people also go to GDKP runs for fun, you don't want to suck the soul out of your run by turning it into a regime. Thats not fun.

Everyone can make a mistake now and then, you don't want to be eaten alive for it.

One simple rule: "If people consistently fail on silly stuff, they might not receive their share of the pot and/or replaced from the run" is enough. Thats fair and people will appreciate it. Remember good worth of mouth and reputation is crucial to GDKP runs, and part of that includes having fair rules.

We're very eager to see more people reply to this thread, especially if you fall into the following points:

- You have tried bringing GDKP to your server (And your take on the success/failures/problems you have had)
- You haven't tried, but you're eager to start trying it soon (And have questions/concerns/comments)
- Whether your server currently does GDKP runs and whether it's already part of the culture there (It is on Blackrock, where else?)
- If you just want to see these runs on your server, when they aren't currently, and why you'd like to see them start up (What part of the concept appeals to you?)

Big thanks to Rucvv for that excellent post. People reading this thread wondering, "I wouldn't mind trying GDKP on my server, but what challenges will I face?" can use that as a very solid resource.

Please chime in on the discussion if you have done these runs. Some people want to see/hear of others' successes first, before they consider trying it.

For items nobody bids on do you just DE them and auction off the shards at the end?

What levels do you guys set the min bids/raises? I'm very intrigued by this idea but as my server (Shu'halo) is a younger server and are medium pop. towards the bottom of the rankings in terms of progression I'm not sure if there is enough money floating around to make this profitable enough for the relatively few well geared people carrying the runs.

What kinds of totals are you seeing in Naxx runs vs ToC? Do you do these for 10 man runs as well as 25?

We had our inaugural run on Mal'Ganis last week, and after some diligence in filling the raid group, had a smooth clear of ToC25N.

We pulled from the Elitist Jerks Benefactors community, though we had a handful of folks from Trade Chat (which took some convincing that this was not, in fact, a scam .. being in Serious Casual and having people vouch for me in raid chat helped considerably).

Considering we had only announced and scheduled the run a day beforehand, I was impressed. The pot ended up at 32k, which split out to 1.28k per person.

I did a 10 man GDKP run as well -- the pot was pretty small as we had a lot of druid leather and shaman mail drop, but no druids or shamans in our raid. But it went smoothly and well.

Our next run in Sunday, and interest seems higher as people have caught onto the concept and interest is growing.

(We used:
epics: 300g starting, 100g increment
trophies: 1,000g starting, 100g increment
patterns/orbs: 50g starting, 50g increment
shards: randomed for at the end)

Any tips on slotting the raid?

Specifically: How to delicately ask how much of bank roll people have without asking them to publicly reveal it in a sign-up thread.

I've thought about coding up a simple custom sign-up web app, but would rather have something even simpler.

Do you have people sign up before hand, or just announce and then fill the raid based on who's online and who sends you tells?