Loot distribution Within a Guild?

[thrashette]

So how does your guild deal with item rot in DKP?

We keep a really low rot rate--around 4 items per month--but the means is alllowing surplus points in the system.

[didiaquarr]

DKP or any system will be set up to reward specific behavior (attendence, merit, nice armor colour, whatever). The system itself will contain the biases derived from the decisions you make about the exact specifics of how you set it up. So all you're doing is making decisions up front instead of on a case by case basis. The unfairness happens at that point.

We just said screw it. Officers decide on the fly. Keep it flexible and we don't have to do the work to maintain a full DKP system. Still do a bit of work to track wins of loot, but still simpler than any DKP system we could see.

If you're in a guild where you don't trust the officers to at least give things their honest best shot, you probably shouldn't be in that guild.

DDT

[Khumak]

Merit systems have the potential for distributing loot the most efficiently both on a per player basis and on a guild advancement basis but are VERY susceptible to favoritism and/or corruption and also very likely to be viewed by many members as unfair even if it were run perfectly because of the subjectiveness involved. Of the people I know who have left merit based guilds, almost all of them left over loot disputes. My guild uses DKP and we almost never lose people over loot disputes.

DKP, if run properly is probably the most fair and is unbiased but it has the disadvantage of having loot that would be upgrades for some people rot. It also has the potential of distributing loot inefficiently by allowing people to make "bad decisions" on what to upgrade. It may have been an upgrade and they may have earned the points to buy it, but there may have been a much better upgrade choice that they could have made.

[Gront]

Originally Posted by Gorlab

The problem with this system is players have less incentive to attend bad loot raids. Ex: backflag on a mob whose loot will all rot is worth 0dkp, while killing time RZ when the first dbotw drops is worth a heck of a lot of dkp.

I would tend to handle that by making "flags" a piece of loot worth a certain number of DKP from the person getting the flag. I know that I would gladly pay as much if not more for a Bertoxxulous flag as I would for any given piece of loot from him.

Backflagging raids will generally occur when a large enough minority of the guild needs that flag that the members who do not get the flags will be adequately recompensed for their time.

Heh. If you want a truly zero-sum DKP system, you could even have the "new member" system be based on DKP. An applicant is accepted to the guild if and only if enough existing members "vote" for them with their own DKP to bring them up to the average number of DKP for the guild. That is, if the average guild member has 100 dkp, and ten members are each willing to donate 10 of their DKP to the applicant, they're in. And not only are they in, they have 100 DKP to buy some initial gear upgrades with.

Just a random thought,

Gront/Graa, Ayonae Ro.

[Sassinak]

So you would charge members DKP to hail the planar projection?

Then you'd reward the raid for obtaining the same flags, resulting in a net of 0 DKP?

What of the people who come along, but don't need the flag? Do they get a reward and no charge? Or do they get no reward and no charge?

What if a person failed to get their flag (due to partial wipe or bugged PP or whatever)? Do you charge them DKP anyway? Do you reward the raid DKP anyway?

Zero sum is a nasty conundrum. It seems to me that it defeats the incentive behind DKP.

[Brutul]

Originally Posted by didiaquarr

We just said screw it. Officers decide on the fly. Keep it flexible and we don't have to do the work to maintain a full DKP system. Still do a bit of work to track wins of loot, but still simpler than any DKP system we could see.

If you're in a guild where you don't trust the officers to at least give things their honest best shot, you probably shouldn't be in that guild.

Hehe, you sound exactly like me when I was back on Tarew. There were people in the guild that wanted DKP very badly, and I argued against it vehemently, with all the reasons you list. It's too much work, there inherent flaws, we should trust our officers, etc, etc, etc. I probably made various paraphrases of your post at least a dozen times on the guild boards.

Now that I've been in a DKP guild I can say without hesitation that I was 100% wrong. DKP (if you use a bidding system and don't set prices for each piece of loot) takes one person 5-10 min of book keeping per night, and if you use the fancy parsing software not even that. It's no harder than keeping track of loot and taking attendance for a merit system, and it's 100% fair and has no room for bias. It is based on raid attendance, nothing else.

The only benefit of merit in my opinion is if you want to get more loot to your MTs, or favor old school members over newer ones. IMO this is absolutely not worth the drama it causes, and your most hardcore players automatically end up with the most points and thus the most loot.

You will find very few people who have been in a well-run DKP system that would want to go to merit, and after watching what my RL friends, who were officers in Black Company, went through managing a merit system, I would never, ever, be an officer in a merit guild. The bookkeeping involved with DKP is nothing compared to that.

Also loot almost never rots for us. Our minimum bid for all items is 2dkp. That is half a night of raiding fire, so people will buy rot loot for their alts, pick it up as a toy or a temporary gap filler. Hell we have even sold junk from exp group named in fire and sol ro for DKP and people buy it. When we had minimum bids based on the officer's perceived value of the item we did have loot rotting, but now we never do.

[Gunnar]

I favor dkp.It's been great for our guild.Attendence on raids is the only factor in earning dkp and people work hard because they want to.Of course you need someone to administer the system.I balked at the offer myself...I would never have had time to tank! hehe.

That said the fastest progressing guilds on Stromm by far were merit.They did have more internal strife over loot and such,but, gearing a couple tanks and clerics with good ft early can yield a lot faster progression.We're about having fun with steady progression so dkp has been great for us.

[Gront]

Originally Posted by Sassinak

So you would charge members DKP to hail the planar projection?

Then you'd reward the raid for obtaining the same flags, resulting in a net of 0 DKP?

What of the people who come along, but don't need the flag? Do they get a reward and no charge? Or do they get no reward and no charge?

What if a person failed to get their flag (due to partial wipe or bugged PP or whatever)? Do you charge them DKP anyway? Do you reward the raid DKP anyway?

Zero sum is a nasty conundrum. It seems to me that it defeats the incentive behind DKP.

No, no, no. With zero-sum DKP systems, you don't reward "the raid"--you divide any points spent on an item among everyone who didn't get the item.

Suppose 50 guild members come on the raid, and 10 of them need the flag. Suppose also that some piece of loot drops that's actually an upgrade for one of the newer members of the guild. Let's say that the cost of a flag is set at 30 DKP, and that the piece of loot costs 20 DKP.

Each guild member who got a flag loses 30 DKP from their total. The other people on the raid get 30/49 = .62 DKP each. So for all 10 flags, the people who got flagged lose 24.49 DKP each (30 for the flag they bought, minus 5.51 they got back from the other people buying the flags), and the people who did not get flags get 6.2 DKP each (.62 DKP per flag, times 10 flags).

Now, the guild member who got the loot loses 20 DKP, and that 20 DKP is passed out to the other people on the raid at 20/49 or .41 DKP each.

Assuming that the person who got the loot was also one of the people who got the flag, we're looking at the following:

40 people got no loot or flags from the raid, but gained 6.61 DKP (so after three raids, they'd be able to buy a piece of low-end loot, and after five raids, they'd be able to buy a flag they needed).

9 people got just a flag from the raid, and paid 24.08 DKP for the privilege (less than the 30 they would have paid for the flag if they'd been the only one who needed it, as they got compensated in turn by the other 9 people who needed the flag, for helping on the raid that got those other 9 people their flags, and also less the .41 for their share of helping the 50th player get the 20-DKP loot).

1 person got a flag, and a piece of loot, and spent 44.49 DKP to get them.

If you figure that each person in the guild starts the raid with 100 DKP, you end up with 40 people with 106.61 DKP, 9 with 75.92 DKP, and one with 55.51 DKP. The total DKP in the system started at 5000, and ends at 5003.19 (due to rounding errors). Basically unchanged. But the people who helped out on the raid got a small but cumulative DKP advantage, and the people who got rewards from the raid lost DKP commensurate with those rewards.

As to your other question, if someone failed to get the flag due to a bug, I would treat that just like someone failing to loot an item they wanted due to the bug--they didn't get the reward, they don't spend any DKP, and so there's no DKP from them to be divided among everyone else.

The only flaw with this system is that it doesn't reward participation on failed raids. To fix that, I'd charge all guild members something like 5% of their DKP for not attending a scheduled guild raid, to be divided among all participating members. So if this were a 70-person guild, the 20 people who did not attend would each be dinged 5 DKP, and that 100 DKP would be divided among the 50 people who did attend, resulting in final DKP totals of:

20 members with 95 DKP, 40 people with 111.61 DKP, 9 with 80.92 DKP, and one with 60.51 DKP. Total DKP unchanged.

Notice that this rewards frequent raid attendance, and causes old DKP earnings to gradually "expire" over time, so that someone who raided continuously for six months back in Velious, but hasn't since, can't come in and buy all of the Time loot when the guild finally breaks into Time.

I chose the "5%" figure above so that a player who had to miss a bunch of raids in a row wouldn't come back to a completely empty DKP account. The flaw with this is that players with high DKP totals suffer more for missing a raid than players with low DKP totals. An alternative system would charge a flat 5 DKP for each missed raid, resulting in an average player running out of DKP after 20 consecutive missed raids, but a player who has been a faithful attendee and run up 500 DKP being able to miss 100 consecutive raids before running out, rather than losing 25 DKP for their first missed raid.

If I were designing a system like this, I would probably say "5% up to a max of 5 DKP", to make it fair to both sides of the equation.

Take care,

Gront/Graa, Ayonae Ro.

[xria]

For a small guild a merit system is often a decent option, as its usually fairly obvious who was best suited to an item, and most people know who has been on enough to merit the item in question.

However as guilds grow larger merit becomes more and more problematic, even while it can potentially result in faster progression particularly in the short term. In the long term it could be argued that concentrating on upgrading the raid critical members of the can lead to the loss of other members as they can end up getting a lot less loot as they arent considered raid critical.

DKP systems arent inherently better than merit systems of course, its only if the way they are awarded and spent is fair that it will work, and its easy to see that a DKP system can be set up to reward older members of a guild and be unfairly unbalanced against newer members either intentionally or not.

Personally I have preferred the open bidding, no minimum bid system of DKP, and the guild I was in went from HoT farming to Time using it, and I can only think of one serious loot argument that happened in all that time (18 months).

The open bidding system is probably the simplest to manage, it requires fairly limited amounts of effort to run - a friend ran a merit system in a guild of 50-60 people and spent easily 5 times as long keeping track of attendance, loots, and so on in various sheets so he knew where to award, and even then he had to turn up 100% of the time or another officer would have to award it and that would lead to problems as they didnt have the information to work with.

Open bidding means that players decide how much an item is worth to them, so the full complexities of whatever they value most can be factored into the decision of how high they will bid, where any merit decision cant easily cope with the fact that, say, one wizard might prefer FT, one might like more HP, and another a big mana pool.

Open bidding also means that points dont accumulate in the system particularly, which can be a problem for any fixed bidding system, or ones where a high amount of stored points gives you an advantage. Equally a fixed bidding system , or ones with minimum bids, can also cause items that people want to rot, because they arent willing to bid enough for the item.

Of course the primary problem that open bidding can cause is if players make agreements not to bid each other up on class only items (and in all likelihood only smaller class groups are likely to be able to come to such agreements). It can also cause problems where players overvalue an item for themselves, but this problem is somewhat self limiting - those players that misvalue and overbid items tend to run out of points fairly rapidly.

The other area is then how to award points fairly, and of course this can be the more time consuming part of a dkp system if you arent careful. In my opinion this is where most dkp systems are weak - if you only award points on the pull of the final mob when the kill is successful you disincentivise turning up for clearing and also being there for the learning attempts on encounters. However tracking attendance every 30 minutes or so adds a fair amount of work and things to remember for whoever gets the fun job of tracking it all.

The other issue to awarding points, is whether to award points at a flat rate per hour, or a fix value per kill, or whether certain zones/encounters attract a higher rate. This can be useful to do so that flagging mobs and so on have a higher value, rewarding those willing to go back and do them again for the nth time more than just for mobs that you kill for loot alone. The same can also be said for key loot mobs like Rallos Zek, where most of the items might be low valued in general, but it can help the guild out a lot to have more reliable taunt on its warriors and so on.

Other areas that can be key in a point system - do alts/boxes earn points, and can they spend them. This can be important in some guilds where boxed characters are used a lot to progress the guild (boxed clerics are common, or enchanters for Rathe and so on) and if they have no loot rights they can easily be substandard for the task they are being asked to perform.

Also point decay - if someone doesnt log in for 2 months should their points be cleared/reduced. Its easy to see both sides here, as people disappearing for long periods of time doesnt help the guild leaders to run a regular raiding schedule very easily as they will be short for a while, possibly get a replacement, then be overloaded in a class when the person comes back. However any arbitary limit in a system is always likely to see injustices - if the ciritical period is a month for example, why would a person being away for 25 days (no change in points) be so massively different for someone away for 30? (points cleared). Maybe the easiest way is not to make a limit, the other way is for a more gradual reduction over time so that any difference isnt so stack between the two states.

Despite some minor problems that can occur, in general I think most guilds will be better off in the long run with a DKP system in some form, and personally I think the simpler and cleaner the system is, the less problems will tend to occur with it.

[Bruenorg]

I understand the DKP argument but one major shortcoming that comes to mind is that it doesn't reward people who do things for the guild outside of raiding. What about those who spend time tradeskilling to make items for guildies, organize member led events to help folks with quests or whatever other activity benefits the guild as a whole outside of raiding. A DKP system, unless somehow tailored to reward those who do these sorts of things (I havn't seen one that does), does nothing for them and doesn't encourage this sort of behaviour. This is where a merit system based on overall contribution to the guild really shines. Sure, it can be subjective at times but if the officers are smart and mature about it all and there is a high degree of trust between members and the said officers, this system can (and does - certainly in our case) work very well. I realize some or all of these stipulations can be a rare circumstance.

Regarding DKP systems being less bookwork than a merit based system...I've never been in a DKP guild but the initial setup alone (assigning point values to items, member tracking, etc.) seems like that would be a fair amount of work. Though, I'm sure there are DKP systems that have this already done for you. But, I digress...

Good discussion, keep 'em coming!

[Gorlab]

Originally Posted by Brutul

The best DKP system I've ever seen
...
a bidding system with a nominal minimum bid is the way to go IMO.

How do you address the fact that bidding systems severely hurt the classes with the most gear dependancy? Making eb weapons exempt is a good start but IMO not nearly enough.

Originally Posted by thrashette

So how does your guild deal with item rot in DKP?
We keep a really low rot rate--around 4 items per month--but the means is alllowing surplus points in the system.

Who cares about item rot, if people don't want it enough to pay the points for it then it can rot and that's fine. It really doesn't matter in the long run if items rot and most items which are upgrades won't rot anyways.

Originally Posted by Gront

I would tend to handle that by making "flags" a piece of loot worth a certain number of DKP from the person getting the flag. I know that I would gladly pay as much if not more for a Bertoxxulous flag as I would for any given piece of loot from him.

The problem here is what happens if your time-farming guild needs some new clerics and you have asked two members to flag their bot clerics. Happens all the time and now you are asking people to spend their points to help the guild. Its better to just adjust the points to a zero-sum over time rather than do it this way. The other problem with your system is mobs are worth the points of their loot, this means that bad loot mobs that are needed for guild advancement will get worse turnout.

Originally Posted by Sassinak

Zero sum is a nasty conundrum. It seems to me that it defeats the incentive behind DKP.

I disagree, the incentive behind DKP is (in no particular order):
1) provide a method of players to see where they stand relative to each other
2) allow players to prioritize which loots they want
3) allow players to know what they can reasonably get
4) allow officers an impartial system to cut down on squabbles

Remember the other posters idea of charging for flags is not what zero-sum is about. Zero-sum just says make the points in equal the points out. What this does is prevent points inflation over time, which makes old school raiders have a HUGE advantage over new recruits.

My idea for balancing points to zero-sum will affect all active players equally, thus all players are relatively the same before and after the balance each month.

Originally Posted by xria

The open bidding system is probably the simplest to manage, it requires fairly limited amounts of effort to run - a friend ran a merit system in a guild of 50-60 people and spent easily 5 times as long keeping track of attendance, loots, and so on in various sheets so he knew where to award, and even then he had to turn up 100% of the time or another officer would have to award it and that would lead to problems as they didnt have the information to work with.

Its trivial to automate all that with log parsers. Don't blame a system because a friend of yours did it the hard way.

Originally Posted by xria

Open bidding means that players decide how much an item is worth to them, so the full complexities of whatever they value most can be factored into the decision of how high they will bid, where any merit decision cant easily cope with the fact that, say, one wizard might prefer FT, one might like more HP, and another a big mana pool.

It means more than this, open bidding also means that some classes are just flat out SCREWED and others are not. Look at a typical EQ guild when it reaches time. Under open bidding, the two SK's in the guild can get the SK only weapons for 1 dkp each. How much are the 10 warriors going to have to spend to get their weapons? Who is going to be better geared? Obviously the SK's have a huge advantage here ( just one example). I like everything about bidding except this, and this to me is such a huge problem I would leave a guild before participating in a bidding DKP system. Bidding dkp is LESS fair than /random IMO.

Originally Posted by xria

Open bidding also means that points dont accumulate in the system particularly, which can be a problem for any fixed bidding system, or ones where a high amount of stored points gives you an advantage. Equally a fixed bidding system , or ones with minimum bids, can also cause items that people want to rot, because they arent willing to bid enough for the item.

Just add a points adjustment and points won't accumulate either, so that's irrelevant to the type of system. Who cares if items rot, if someone doesn't want it enough to pay then it SHOULD rot. Item rot is not a big deal.

Originally Posted by Bruenorg

I understand the DKP argument but one major shortcoming that comes to mind is that it doesn't reward people who do things for the guild outside of raiding. What about those who spend time tradeskilling to make items for guildies, organize member led events to help folks with quests or whatever other activity benefits the guild as a whole outside of raiding.

One way of looking at this is, if a person is not willing to do things to help out the guild outside of raiding then they shouldn't be in the guild. Officers figure out pretty quickly who the "bad apples" are in a guild. Every guild, regardless of rewarding it, will have some people who work on tradeskills. This does not need to be rewarded at all. If you feel like you *have* to reward people for something outside the raid, you can do something similar to what Afterlife did, have a subjective raid leader points column.

Basically let raid leaders award points here and there subjectively for something, "oh you came up with the strat that helped us beat this mob, +1 leader point" etc. Put some limits, like have them in 1pt increments or whatever. Let these be added to your total for determining who gets an item but you can't spend them. Let them clear out after a month as well. Net zero-sum leader points, gives you a small benefit, etc, etc. But really...this is just not needed IMO.

[Bigchest]

im an officer in a guild who does merit loot and there is some loot bitching, but it overwhelmingly comes from members who are prone to bitch about something. if they werent complaining about loot then they would be complaining about something else, and usually do. ive been an officer for about a year now and as far as i can remember only 1 person ever left over loot. and that person had 3 drops in the month and lost out on an item to another person who hadnt had a drop for 2 months, so they left.

dkp and merit both have their shortcomings. merit can be biased or unfair and sometimes make the wrong decisions but dkp could be corrupt as well. if you dont trust your officers to make a fair decision on loot meriting most of the time you probably shouldnt be in the guild. also dkp allows for stuff like knights winning BoWs ect. a couple months ago on bertoxx a bard in a dkp guild purchased great shadow platemail over the guilds MA who was wearing a vindi bp. if the MA had gotten the bp he wouldve been upgraded 35 AC which is huge. i think that if youre in the kind of guild where people are complaining so much about merit you would have the kind of people who would be a bard bidding on GSP over a warrior, or a paladin on a BoW. if youre in a guild where members dont spent their dkp stupidly like that and people have respect for other classes needs over their own then your officers are probably smart enough to distribute loot fairly.

[thrashette]

I understand the DKP argument but one major shortcoming that comes to mind is that it doesn't reward people who do things for the guild outside of raiding. What about those who spend time tradeskilling to make items for guildies, organize member led events to help folks with quests or whatever other activity benefits the guild as a whole outside of raiding

You can easily reward people for flags gained, tradeskills completed, items made for the guild bank, epic assistance, or guild donations. Whether you give them more permanent DKP points, a free bid, a temporary adjustmnent, or a higher place in line depends on your system. You just have to remember to install a mechanism to let the reward equal some spend and a cap so you don't get inundated with more of a particular thing than you ever wanted.

Who cares about item rot, if people don't want it enough to pay the points for it then it can rot and that's fine

People with secondary characters, people with weak items, new people, and that lower third of your raiders all seem to care. Maybe it is an EQ maturity thing--once you get to a certain level it doesn't matter. I only know my part, which is that I get a cartload of complaints about it.

[Mokor Leadheaad]

reason i decide i like dkp is attendance. why go kill mob x that only drops a crappy melee item but awsome caster stuff or vice versa. ohh dkp better show up and get the points so i can get the loot when we do kill mob y that drops stuff i want.

any system run by people though bad stuff can happen.

[Sassinak]

My guild uses a merit system, but keeps track of loot using a DKP tool (which has no point values assigned). Everyone can see who got what, and when. Everyone can see who attends the most, and who attends the least, and who started slacking off in May. Everyone has a good idea of how frequently they should expect loot, in terms of raids-per-item. The officers strive for balance and for the most part it works. There was a lot of bitching about loot historically, but the noise went down a lot after the attendance tool became viewable by the whole guild.