As a guild we are in the process of moving away from a DKP system involving reward for kills & attendance and open bidding for loot distribution, to a ZeroSum DKP system using nurfed values and many of their rules (upgrades etc).

As background one of the major rationales for the change is that the original system has not met the aim of ‘fairly’ awarding loot as a result of attendance commitment etc. who has the most DKP has been a function of who has had to enter a bidding war for the first drop vs gaining a drop for minimum DKP.

This leads me to ask for opinion on two differing issues.

1) Translating current f00gs (DKP) from the old to the new system vs resetting everyone to zero.

I support resetting everyone values to zero to ensure ‘fairness’ on items going forwards, using the argument that the existing totals are skewed, so to carry them forwards just introduces the inherent problems of the old to the new.

As various people don’t like that, the alternative suggestion is subtract the average value from everyone to create the zero point for the system and divide everyone’s total by X. Of course the value of X is hotly debated, but we can’t for example bring in a person with 3000 dkp lead to the system if a typical T2 drop will costs 20 foogs – if we do they will never move down the table (especially compared to others on -800 or so after conversion).


2) How to handle T2.5 drops that don’t directly benefit the raid

We currently have no loot priority (bar the MT). We do however ask class officers to ‘advise’ their classes and in the main (but not always) such advice is offered and heeded.

However as we start to look at AQ40 I can see (as an example) that the paladin avenger set is geared around damage. As we have no retribution paladins I would from a raid perspective like to see the drops going to a class where the item will impact the raid, such as rouge. In the case of a class set I cant see many of our paladins electing to pass on these drops – how do other guild handle this issue ? I have a concern that if not handled well we will either end up with less progression due to item distribution, or a dissatisfied class – both of which I want to avoid!

Any applicable comments welcome, especially from anyone who has been through such a transition of loot DKP system

1a. Don't worry too much about being absolutely 'zero-sum', even in a technically zero sum DKP system.
1b. We were throwing around using NDKP values and converting, and we came up with an idea to take some average difference multiplier and divide by it. So if a priest T2 set in your DKP system is 1000, and using the new one is 100, divide everyone's DKP by 10.

2. We don't have any special rules with 2.5 other than say, if you complete your set with it you get it or something.

My guild will probably move to a new DKP system and reset everyone in TBC, which is only months away, so you may want to stave off changing until TBC /shrug. Depends on how much your current system is failing.

One thing I want to do is set elligibility to roll based on 30day attendence * DKP accrued. So if you have 1k dkp and 80% att, you can roll to 800, but someone with 900dkp and 100% att can roll to 900. I always thought that was a good idea to motivate people to raid even if they were comfortably sitting at a high att.

Combining DKP with rolling? What the hell?

We had to do the same thing, and wound up doing it around the time we were moving into BWL from MC.

So we just said "The hell with MC, it can remain screwed" and started BWL and onward on a clean slate with a rational system. Eventually we converted MC to a fixed-price zero sum system - it was never balanced, so it's still screwed, but it's a little better. Plus, it's MC, who cares.

So I guess my suggestion would be pick an instance and start from zero for everything from that instance on.

We recently reset our MC points (reason doesn't matter too much). However, we gave those with enough positive points a "token" that they could use in the zero-sum system. Basically, if I had 100 DKP in the old system and Hunter X had 90, then I could basically pick up a hunter item over him. At that point, I'd lose the token and pay whatever DKP value was assigned to that item.

Those who had negative points were just set at 0 with no token.

This requires two spreadsheets, one for token value and one for actual points. However, the advantage is that those who had significant DKP still get whatever item they want first. Meh, whatever, we're in BWL now so our core doesn't care too much about MC.

I wonder how you guys manage such systems, pen&paper (or the equivalent, excel spreadsheets)?
Honestly, for me that would be too much work.

Yeah, we did that for Naxxramas.

eqDKP with a couple small modifications to make zero-sum item entry easier seems to be the popular choice. There are some irritations with it as well (see the EJ Loot System thread for the laundry list).

The DKP system is horrible. All it does is anger new recuits, cause drama, and provides excess work for those who must calculate points. It is a shame that everyone uses it, because it really is flawed.

Currently in our system, someone has to have 75% or whatever of your DKP, and then they roll to however much DKP they have, and you roll to however much you have. It's nice in that it allows a larger audience to be elligible and have soemthing to look forward to, even if it isn't as 'fair' as DKP.

To borrow from Churchill:

DKP is the worst form of Loot Distribution system except all those other forms that have been tried.

You don't need a system to distribute loot. You need trust with your guildmates.

I will get right onto trusting my guild mates, when WoW comes built in with a lie detector.

Thus resulting in bad guilds.

So you are basically saying that you trust everyone in your guild to decide what items they need more than other people, how in the world do you decide who needs gear more when its an upgrade to multiple people?

I think the best thing about DKP/attendence is that it gives a tangible reward to everyone on the raid. With officer loot they notice you're there(especially if they track attendence), but you don't really 'Oooh' as much when say, a warrior weapon drops that your MT picks up to use in PVP, giving you a considerable amount of DKP.