DKP – Curse or Blessing?
If you raid your raid leader needs to distribute those shiny epics somehow among the hungry wolves. Most guilds choose good old DKPs for this purpose.
I remember the first dkp I spent on a drop from attumen. I have just hit 70 at this point and was very new to raiding. Up to this point, loot distribution has been Need or Greed for me in many many painful PuGs. My start to playing WoW was out of pure curiosity, no friend was there to give me any tips and up to around 63 I was guildless. So before raiding karazhan (and even then) playing WoW and interacting with other players was based on pure trial and error. And of course I understood quickly that in a guild a loot distribution system was necessary to reward raid attendance and take out some of the randomness that comes with the whole loot drop system.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with a form of dkp system. I’ll quickly sum up what my actual guild is running with:
Points can be obtained by attending a raid and killing bosses. In addition to that every attempt on a boss that hasn’t seen our first kill yet rewards dkp points. Being on the waiting bench but not in the actual raid gives you half the points of the raid evening.
Spending points works like this: Every item starts at 30 dkp, Tier loot at 50 and pieces for a second equip start at 10. Biddings are whispered to the officer who distributes to loot. Highest bid wins. Primary equip always wins over secondary equip.
All in all I think dkps are a very nice system to distribute loot but it doesn’t come without flaws:
- Hidden biddings that are whispered are a double-edged sword. I have seen both. In my old guild I have seen those funny biddings wars that took forever. This can slow your raid down, especially in raids like Naxx where you just kill boss after boss. Open biddings on the other hand bring some kind of social control on whom is biding on what and how much.
- DKPs per boss and not per raid evening are a tricky thing as well. Actually, an evening with full cleared Naxx gets nearly double the amount of points as an evening of working on Sartharion with 3 Drakes up. This is bad and doesn’t motivate people to wipe and work on new bosses and makes just grabbing those purples and the dkps on our first raid night very attractive. I kinda prefer a system where every raid night awards more or less the same amount of points with the possibility of adding points for “good play”
- DKPs award raid attendance and very rarely “the skill” and -dkp are often reserved for really bad behavior. This can’t be changed with a lot of trouble but often leads to some kind of imbalance in equipment. People who have the possibility to attend nearly every raid will outgear people who have to pass on some nights. Emblems only widen that gap. But that’s just one of the addictive hooks that WoW brings: the more time you invest the more “success” there is.
- The DKP system can easily be compromised. This is one of the rather annoying things but I guess that can’t be changed. People pass on items if they know a good friend will bid on the same. In our guild there are many little sub groups that communicate together before they bid. Then often 1-2 person will pass and wait for the next time this item drops and one person gets the item for the minimum bid. Like that many people can pile up dkps and annoy other classes or raiders when it comes to Tier loot.
- DKP are not a solution for everything. Our guild at this point excluded our 3 main tanks from the system. This made getting Tier loot for me very hard the past month on the other hand excellently geared tanks helped a lot when bringing down Malygos and now as we are working on Sartharion 3D
Are you happy with your loot system? Is there something that I missed that make dkps an excellent and fair system? Or did I forget to mention one of its flaws? Are you one of those guys who’s always topping the list of dkp points? Or do you just spend all your points on every item you want?
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I have never enjoyed the idea of DKP since I got into end game content back in vanilla wow. For my guild we just use the /roll concept and hope that people will pass if they think the other person can use it more. Main problem with DKP is that it feeds on the “I get what I deserve” concept. Instead of running the instance to help further your guild mates and thus allow you to reach further into end game it is about running an instance or raid just for the dkp and so you get what you mentioned above in that people will run the raids that give them more dkp so that they can get better loot later on instead of running the raids that people need the gear from to allow the whole raid to progress further.Is that a run on sentence?
Ah well good post and for some it might work, have heard of the loot council idea as well and I feel that both systems can foster enmity in the guild. If it is up to random then people can only get mad about others rolling but they know they have a chance at the loot at a later date.
My small guild doesn’t use DKP, and it’s great. Instead, the raid leader (tank) is loot master, and after every boss kill he links each item in turn for people to roll on. First roll goes to the class and spec that uses it primarily, then if no one has rolled, a new roll for off spec takes place. After that it’s sharded for the guild bank.
This has always seemed more fair to me. Anyone who raids frequently is bound to get all the drops they need eventually, while even the infrequent raiders have incentive to join us since they stand a good chance of being rewarded. A number of times the one or two pugs in the group have been aghast to find we actually let them roll on loot!
I have never liked DKP because usually people abuse it and it ends up not progressing the gear of the raid.
I am a huge fan of the main spec rolls first, then off spec. However, Loot Council is the best in my opinion.
As long as your council isn’t a bunch of rtards and is fair – it seems to work out the best….atleast in my experience it has.
We use a zero-sum DKP-system. Items cost a set amount of DKP. At the moment its 35 for Tier, 25 for “raiding-specc” loot and 10 for “off-specc” loot.
The item is simply awarded to the interested player that has the most DKP, who then pays the set DKP-cost.
DKP-points are awarded based on points spent. If, during a raid, loot is picked for a total of 250DKP, that amount is split on the participating players.
So the more loot gets used, the better it is for everyone.
Personally i would love a good loot council. But atm, beeing the only restoshaman in my guild I’m not sure I would trust them to know enough about my class.
We use EPGP. It’s about the fairest DKP system I’ve come across – so much so that I wrote a series of blog entries discussing all the different loot systems and their advantages and disadvantages. It’s certainly one that overcomes a lot of what you describe above – take a look at it if you get a moment.