Dakous

Quoting a month old thread, but wandering way off topic:

Incidental reasons caused me to think along these lines, and dug the above post up (among others) when fishing around for other threads on the subject (and I swear I remember one along these lines, but couldn't find it). I have a lot of appreciation for the strength, versatility, and everything EQDKP does, but reading over other threads, reconsidering [re-]installing it seems to be a fairly common idea.

So. In a hypothetical, never going to be developed, hobbyist developed WoW-centric DKP software, what's the wish list?

Before answering that, let's start with an overview of the idea I had which I'm sure is stupid so I'd like it shot down:

Looking at NRT's default settings (at least, when I installed it), the copy-paste list of names is great. It's the going through and configuring loads of other stuff (new people, race, level, individual adjustments, price of items, value of raid, who bought what at which raid, eccet) that is slowly driving me nuts. And it is a simply modified form of NRT's default attendee box that I want to design around.

Events, which either have calculated (zero sum) DKP ("0" when input) or flat, attendees, purchases (which have purchasees, and costs), weight (which I imagine for most guilds would default to 0), and an "Attendance" flag.

The attendance flag makes something I dislike in EQDKP easy - if you want to give a group bonus/penalty which shouldn't count towards attendance ("These five people farmed all the primal life the guild needed for frost resistance, so they all got +1 DKP" - please don't debate the merit of that, just accept that someone, somewhere, may want to do so something along those lines).

Weight would be for zero sum systems that want to zero sum over the course of a week - if every loot night is weight 1, and wipe night is weight 5, someone who attends (presuming both raids are equally populous) the wipe night gets five times the week's point share as someone who attends loot night. (And there's no reason it couldn't ZS weight over longer or shorter periods, so let's pretend the length is a setting, with "week" being handy for conversation).

I suppose each purchase would need to be its own tuple in a specific table, to handle variably priced items (ie., bidding DKP systems).

Now, something absolutely insane that I believe most people don't do is that we have a blantantly inflationary DKP system that is controlled by zonal resets. That is, who cares if you have 10,000 DKP, it's tier 4 DKP, and not buying you anything in SSC/TK. I'm aware that's amazingly dumb, and how we should switch to DKP system [insert DKP system here]. The relevance is that we handled the "resets" (because Gruul/Mag are still being run as we run TK/SSC) with two EQDKP installs. The problem with this is that attendance reporting becomes a nightmare (although wonderfully delicious for the first while when T5 was all "wipe nights" - huh, someone maintaining 100% attendance on t4 dkp but doesn't even have a t5 entry, huh). Long story short - parallel DKP accumulators. I don't think that'd be useful to anyone else, but hey, it's a feature in the hypothetical, never going to be actualized, wish list.

For reports, what would be useful? As a vague idea, attendance reports, individual history pages, event history pages, item history pages... what else?

What am I forgetting?

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

Caligula

The ability to add standby DKP without making individual adjustments or adding the person to the actual raid would be nice.

 

Fizwidget

A few from my *long* mental wishlist:

Built-in Wait List with option to give wait-listed people a percentage from 0-100% of in-raid DKP.
Should be able to add alts to the wait list and credit the "Main" account.

Periodic time-based DKP distribution (perhaps 0.1DKP per 15 minute interval)

A list of all epic loot from Attumen to Illidan (like AtlasLoot, with the names populated even if you don't have the links for this patch) With the ability to assign fixed DKP values, and/or provide a list of winning bids in chronological order for non-fixed systems.

Gear Plan: A client (non-officer/raidleader etc) List of all epic loot from Attumen to Illidan that you can wear, with the ability to set "Major Upgrade" "Minor Upgrade" "Sidegrade" "Off-Spec" "Not Wanted" for each. Allowing raid leaders to select raid compositions on farm bosses to maximize efficiency of loot distribution, and ensure that we don't sit someone out of the raid who needs Major Upgrade loot that they have the highest DKP priority for. Also, it would give Guild Leadership a metric on when to stop farming lower-tier bosses.

Dauntless: "Incapable of being intimidated or discouraged; fearless"

 

• Abbi

I'd like to be able to import WWS parses (there's an XML file) for attendance lists; that would also get you classes. And, possibly, per-boss attendance.

 

Lazare

Integration with forum software would be nice so members don't have to sign up all over again for a new account, but it's hardly a deal killer.

Being able to handle mains/alts intelligently would be nice. The trick here is to track loot, DKP, and attendance correctly. The only solutions I've found for EQDKP are to either substitute alt names with mains (which leaves you wondering why a mage bid on some plate armor when you check back later), or automatically adjusts main DKP totals when alt DKP changes (which leaves attendance split so it looks like the mage is slacking). Ideally attendance should be tracked per account, loot per character, and DKP either way.

Speaking of attendance, lots of guilds track Kara (and will track ZA when it comes out) in EQDKP, even if they don't use DKP for that instance. However, if you run multiple Karazhan runs, your attendance numbers will get completely screwed. Some guilds merge their Karazhan raids into a single "virtual" raid for attendance purposes, but this messes you up in several other ways. Not sure how best to solve this. Perhaps the easiest way is to simply set which events will (or will not) count towards attendance.

Some sort of good signup/raid planner would be nice.

Supporting a clear and well documented XML schema for describing raids would be excellent, since it would allow in-game raid trackers to be easily programmed. NRT supports a pretty good XML output, but so far no DKP software understands it.

"Real" zero-sum support would be awesome as well. EQDKP does not support it, meaning that import plugins have to calculate DKP when the raid is first imported. This works - right up until you make a change or correct an error, and everything falls apart. In fact, it's really easy for the EQDKP database to become inconsistent; I've hacked together some really really ugly SQL queries to fix this, but...

Support for DKP pooling would be nice; my guild doesn't do this but I know several who pool DKP earned for the entire week, and then everyone who raided that week gets an equal share, or various variations on that.

Also, the EQDKP event/raid paradigm is kind of messy. It'd be nice to see a more structured hierarchy. For example, you might set it up so a given day can have 1 or more raids. A raid has 1 or more raiders and 0 or more boss kills. A boss kill has 0 or more drops...hmm. Actually, I'm almost getting tempted to write it...

 

Caligula

Technically you can do per boss attendance if you do each boss as a separate raid.

 

• Abbi

WWS parses certainly provide enough information to determine which boss a certain person has killed, even if you're looking at a parse of a full run. But dredging it out might be tough. Still, it's a wishlist.

 

Stangg

gsDKP BETA v1.16.0 - World of Warcraft (Wow) FREE Raid & DKP Manager

Not sure if this is of interest from anyone, but someone who I used to play with designed it and is always updating features. The more guilds that sign up to it the more reason he has to implement your idea's.

 

xonk

Another thing worth mentionning I think, a WIP attempt at merging phpBB and eqdkp: phpBB3 + EQdkp integration - forums.eqdkp.com

 

Karmen

Heh, that was my original post and I still stand by it. Unfortunately I left up an old e-mail address when the password migration occured and that account is in purgatory or something.

I'm still using EQDKP for my guild and it frankly sucks. Maybe if I was passibly proficient with php/html it wouldn't be so bad. Unfortunately I am that crappy with code and the amount of free time I have to learn is rather minimal. Therefore any type of modification to EQDKP is somewhere along the lines of curing cancer for me. I could barely get Itemstats to work (not sure if it really is as the items only update upon clicking on them) and I can't get it to work on my PunBB forums.

I've looked at gsDKP, EPGP, the Immo suite, the ACE based mods like Bidder and a bunch of other stuff. They all suffer from the same faults as EQDKP, namely they are not customizable (at least easily) or have minimal support to where using them for the long term is a roll of the dice.

So, coming from a guild full of working adults (we raid 4 days a week for 4 hours at a time at max, start at 9pm PST after the kids are in bed) here's a list of things that this hypothetical, non-existant and probably won't be created DKP software should have:

-Flexibility in setting up the system whether it be zero-sum, hourly, bidding, what have you. These concepts are pretty simple and I can't imagine they are hard to code, no idea why none of the software easily allows you to choose what type of loot distribution you will be using.

-Attendance seperate from points. EQDKP really sucks for this, I can't stress this enough. Nights where we farm bosses count more towards attendance calculations than nights where we are working on progression content unless you want to enter in every single raid by hand in regards to points customized for that nights work. Just really, really lame. You should either be able to enter in each nights raid with just one attendance count or have it be totally seperate from points altoghether.

-Adjustments, editing, etc. Again, another area where the software is sorely lacking. We're using a zero-sum system, just modified a bit. If someone leaves why can't I go flag or delete them and have points earned and awarded adjusted over the entire guild?? If I give short term attendance points why can't I toggle them off at a certain date? If I want T4 content to be worth zero and all the points that went with them to be zeroed out why can't I quickly do this? Instead I have to spend my limited and precious free time with a calculator and pen/paper doing individual adjustments....

-Lastly, I'm sure there is a ton of things that I could think of but the main thing I'll stress is ease of customization. Again, I can't imagine that any of these ideas are really that complex from a coding standpoint so I don't think this is asking for much. Every guild is different and what may work for one may not work for another. In a thread about a year ago on the subject of DKP the idea of Boss Credits was brought up whereby you could non-arbitarily reward for progression attempts. This concept seems pretty simple and the majorit of my guild liked this idea very much but nobody can code it. We are literally in a straight-jacket as far as our guild's wants/needs because of the tools we have to work with.

Anyway, hopefully one day something better will come along.

 

Dakous

Would a one-page group adjustment be tolerable? This is what's mentioned above, and TBH, I'm having trouble trying to imagine how to engineer an answer to your problem that maintains A) ease of input and B) attendance integrity otherwise.

See above, but instead of a fixed adjustment (-5 points, let's say), it's -5% points. You'd have to do the amazing mental gymnastics of flipping around 30% sitting DKP to -70%, and it gets messy if you have any weird situations, but... would that be .. and I hate using the word - tolerable?

[...]
The attendance addon - which in my paradigm would be NRT - handles this. Is there a need for integrity that Guy1Alt doesn't send a tell registering dkp for Guy2Main that the officer taking attendance is overwhelmed by? If so, wouldn't it make more sense to modify NRT to have that alias list?

[...]
Is there a compelling reason that attendance isn't taken every 15 minutes then?

[...]
I'm not sure I understand point one from the perspective of EQDKP. Is this essentially Armory's "Find an Upgrade [... and help me price it?]"

It would not get you sitters.

Besides people administrating DKP, what are people using EQDKP logins for?

[...]
Just so I'm not walking into a lion's den here, the main issue with zero sum is really when a member leaves the system, causing inflation, yes? Because to support ZS in EQDKP, the zero summed exchange in one event is hand calculated, and then not readjusted. My question is this, for the sharp folks in the audience - if every event is dynamically calcaulated (spent/participants) and the leaving member (purchases and participations) is removed, would that not de-flate the system correctly?

[...]
This is the weight feature as above if I understand you.

Regarding Stangg's pointer to gsDKP
That looks like a great solution on many levels, but the drawback in my mind is that if you want to walk away with your data, you're locked in. The "Upcoming Features" lists an export option, which addresses that, for sure.

IT's hard to address this since it goes to the rest of your post, but the problem is, the more flexibility in options allowed, the less "fire and forget' stupid it becomes by default. Eventually the options become so overwhelming that you might as well just write one yourself (and yes, with all the irony that entails).

Reading above, and even some of your comments, a system that will handle exactly our DKP system could probably be done up in a day or two (tea is an amazing invention). However, to fit all of the above without all kinds of nuttiness? Let alone some of the below. Not to critique the requests - the problem isn't fulfilling one, it's making a swiss army knife.

[...]
I'm not sure I understand the issue here. Points have to come from somewhere, and that is generally the idea of events ("raids", if you like). If the issue is attendance versus points, the ATTENDANCE flag would solve your problem - take attendance, and award no points, then enter another raid with points and flag no attendance. If the problem is that wipe nights don't reward DKP or proportional DKP, is that not what I describe "weight" (which is my understanding of Nerfed's idea a long time ago)?

[...]
I believe I mentioned zero sum (internal to an event, and extended over "a week" viz "weight") as out of box in the OP. As for temporary adjustments - this sounds like a good request for the administrative portion of the exercise - a page that lets you change all raids with match name to have (new) point value X. If all of a sudden you want every raid with *Lurker* to be worth 10 points, it's all of ten seconds of your time. This requires you to have the foresight that if you're giving temporary inflationary adjustments that you name them consistently, but I think that's reasonable.

In a zero sum system, just use weekly weighting. Unless you're speaking some form of inflationary perk - in which case, a separate specified group adjustment would handle it, no? If that's not it, please explain or link.

Everybody is your brother until the rent comes due.

 

◊ Kaubel

Holy cow. Is it not possible to say what you need to say without splitting it up into fifteen quote replies?

 

• Abbi

I know. You asked what our wishlists looked like; I'm telling you.

 

Kebinusan

Id like some sort of decent DKP bid mod that doesnt require require a client. Other than that NRT is near perfect but doesnt track costs I guess.

 

• sokar

Have a look at Raidbidder, works fine for me.