Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Te bright future of gold bid

We tried 80+ on Deathwing extending the first week lockout. Couldn't kill him. We farmed a month and he went down in 5 tries.

This proves a significant shift from the WotLK and 4.0-4.1 design. Output now matters and dance is secondary. In the previous contents literally blue geared players could kill end season bosses as long as they did not fail in the various bizarre dance moves. While the Dragon Soul bosses still have annoying amount of dance, they also have performance requirements. You can wipe despite no dance fails if you have insufficient DPS and HPS.

This design works as you can see from the statistics of MMO champion. On the first month 67K players completed Firelands, but 175K Dragon Soul and 1.31M LFR. The content is clearly used by players but still not facerolled and spitted on. We have every reason to believe that this way of design will continue (success continues, failure fixed)

However such approach increase the importance of gear. In WotLK and 4.0 but especially in 4.2 gear was purely cosmetic or "quality of life" feature, providing only bragging rights and faster runs. In DS and probably MoP gear will significantly effect your performance and chance of kills.

However this rises the question of gear distribution systems. At first I'd like to point out that in a fixed-roster guild gear distribution is irrelevant. The piece will increase the future performance of the raid, regardless of who wield it. Besides loot whores (socials who want to show off their gear), no one will gives a damn who gets the drop as long as he doesn't quit instantly. If you don't get drops, you still enjoy their benefits as your raid can kill more bosses.

In non-fixed raids on the other hand gear distribution will be crucial. There you must mind your own gear as there is absolutely no guarantee that the other guy will raid with you again. He can stop playing, he can quit the guild, he can go casual, he can simply raid on other days as you and you can leave too. In such guilds the only gear that increase the performance of your future raids is your own gear.

So let's analyze the loot systems from the non-fixed perspective:
  • /roll: totally random, so totally "fair". Far from it! You can only roll on upgrades (and actually there is no point rolling for non-upgrades), so the more geared you are, the less items you can roll on. On the other hand the guy in starter gear who did half of your performance can roll on everything, including that last piece you want. /roll favors undergeared players seriously and give no incentive to players with gear to participate
  • Loot council: this is a complete nonsense in a non-fixed system even if the council is completely unbiased and fair (good luck finding such). The reason is that the "perfect" loot council distributes the loot according to the needs of the raid. But the very point is that there is no such thing as "the raid" in a non-fixed environment. So even the "perfect" council will decide based on the blind guess on "who will stay longer and be more active".
  • DKP: fair if the guild remains successful and active in raiding. You earn DKP according to your effort and you can buy gear from it. But in a casually raiding guild "successful and active" cannot be guaranteed by definition. If everyone comes and goes as he pleases no one can tell if there will be raid tomorrow. Or ever. So you just gather your DKP and then the guild stops raiding and your DKP worth zero. Also, just because some guy were raiding under this guild name longer, he'll have more DKP despite he did not do anything more for your success. He got his DKP raiding with other people.
Please also note that if the DKP and loot council would magically work (council is perfect, guild keeps on raiding actively), both will reward the more frequent players, turning the guild into a fixed-attendance one as they will soon seriously overgear everyone else, so even if the guild rules remain casual, the casual players only get spot when the alternative is 9-manning, just in a HC guild. However you are in the guild exactly to be able to raid without fixed attendance.

This leaves nothing but gold bid. Here you are instantly compensated for your performance. You get something that is not bound to the guild, something that you can use instantly by buying BoEs, consumables, enchants, gems. I believe gold bid will become the standard in non-fixed roster raiding guilds. We use it for more than a year without a single loot drama or even debate.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

You use it without debate because its a founding principle of YOUR guild that YOU set up and we all signed up to your guild knowing we agreed to abid by your rules or to get out.

I still think your replacing who gets the best loot via loot council (Gm, RL and their mates) with the folks who can play the AH game best. In a guild where 3-4 raiders are maybe sat at 100k each and another 8 have about 2k and farm when not raiding so they can buy their 8th alt 280/310 flying, gold bid couldnt be introduced because of the drama. Imagine a) your the rich guy asked to accept some begger bid of 400g for the latest epic? really? I came and raided for a share of that? b) your one of two hunters whose killed deathwing for the last 8 weeks, every week. Finally FINALLY the bow dropped. Yey! oh wait, the other hunter just laid down 7k which is more gold then you ever had at one time. Gonna wait another 8+ weeks for it to fall again or G/quit for a "fair" guild?

Mark said...

The crazy thing about gold bid is, more or less d3's whole gearing process will be gold bid. Albeit smaller groups getting the drops. Any unwanted drops will go to a massive gold bid.

That isn't terribly novel thinking, but how much longer do we all think BoP/No Drop items will be around?

Perhaps legendary items will become guild achievement items to be checked out and returned much like books at the library.

Ahtchu said...

Gold bid... or any other system with a common denominator currency. DKP, loot council etc all work when the currencies are shared by all parties. In the case of a non-guild, the common denom becomes gold.

Lastly, your evaluation of a loot council is more or less correct, but you ignore the many implementations of the DKP system, namely: how it is awarded and how raid selection is governed. Both are involved in the purchasing power, the value of the currency.

Anonymous said...

There's a good number of fairly successful Gold DKP runs out there. The one I ran with in firelands did 5/7HC and most of the HC gear went for around 28k, but then we also had a minbid of 10k. Some items went for well over 100k even. In fact, I believe that in many ways, such a high minbid is highly beneficial to gdkp runs, probably even more so if you only run 10man and there's very little competition on a lot of items.

Azuriel said...

Gold bid has a certain appeal, but I doubt I could ever use it in a setting where I actually cared about the other people I was raiding with. It is fairly trivial for me to use the AH to bank 20k+ between every reset, and that is likely the entire purchasing power of 95% of the people I raid with - while they are "compensated" for my slapping them with my AH e-peen, I am so far ahead I could literally cripple progression for months.

The fact that I wouldn't is really my point: gold bid essentially becomes a 1-man loot council. I let other people have gear because I need them to have it to accomplish my own goals. In which case... we may as well had loot council all along.

Getting something is better than nothing, I suppose, but it is truly a "least-worse" situation IMO.

Anonymous said...

Its quite interesting, that you finally found out that gear matters and helps in progress.
Like many commenters told you.

As i remember, i said (when you first set up the project, pre patch) that you can clear the normal modes and at the hard modes you need the gear upgrades.
Now you already found out, that you need the gear even earlier!

To bad that i cant prove it, but if you would ve done the test in firelands, the results would be the same!

Every raid encounter has performance needs. If you just hit those performance needs, you need to play perfectly to kill the boss. If you however overgear it, you can fail to many things (even get hit by alysrazors whirlwind!).
This is true to every fight. If you dont have enough gear for the enrage timer or keeping up the tank, than its impossible to kill him. On the other side, if you overgear the fight, you can just burst down the boss, ignoring many mechaniks.

I know that you especially like to bring up the undergeared project and you did a good job to say, that player skill is more important than gear. But if you are missing player skill, gear helps. Always! Just come back with 5.0 and try dragonsoul, i m sure the fight will be easier.

For your topic about loot distrubtion. DKP and Gold Bid is quite the same, it is currency based. However DKP can only be earned in the raid, while Gold Bid can be earned outside the raid.
So i would say, for Gold Bid a hardcore player would have even more advantage, because he can "farm" more gold, than a casual that only logs in for raids.

Think about it ;)

Anonymous said...

Keep in mind this argument is written by a resto shaman. Without dance, there is not enough randomness for a DPS to not become utterly bored. Gevlon, when was the last time you DPSed in a raid? Ultraxion is very boring for a DPS (you either know how to maximize your rotation or you don't); Warmaster is not. On Warmaster it is the dance PLUS the utility requirement and the randomness of the swirls which make the fight difficult. Also keep in mind this argument is written by someone who doesn't have any HC experience (yet), and had zero HC experience in Firelands, very little in 4.0.

On my realm I've seen one fellow advertise for a GDKP run. He also posted on realm forums. He posted all the normal rules you'd expect. Well written. So I'd go on one of my characters and earn some gold, right? Golden opportunity? Wrong! There are also the clauses of "failing means you will be kicked and forfeit your share" which is far too vague to be held accountable with Blizzard in case of dispute. Were he from a reputable guild, or a reputable person, I'd still consider to go. Unfortunately, he isn't. He is from a PvP guild who are known to not state loot rules in BH25 and then hand out everything to their guildies or keep for DE. One of their members even ninjaed OS25 mount, during patch 4.2 no less (how sad isn't it?). I simply refuse to play with such people, they shall have no power over me. In fact, if I make a BH25 run I specifically ban members from that guild from receiving loot. Why? Because apparently their GM does not kick the ninjas I see no other way to make sure they stop their immature behavior by showing them a mirror.

I'd rather go with GDKP+ which would be the following: after loot drops everyone can roll need on everything. The winner can do with the item what he wants. He can do a GDKP auction, he can disenchant it, he can keep it, he can sell it. Up to him. This way you keep the random factor in the group, but you minimize it. You also allow people to earn gold, and you put this completely in their hands, their responsbility. The master looter has limited power this way. Actually, he has no power at all whatsoever since there is none. Oh wait, we already have this system. It is called doing raid finder with realmies.

I also am not sure I'd earn more gold via GDKP than I make right now by playing the AH and buying/selling guilds.

Cathfaern said...

"after loot drops everyone can roll need on everything. The winner can do with the item what he wants."
It's not a fair system, because it's involves too much luck. If you're lucky, you get 2 items on a raid, and you can sell it for high price. If you're unlucky, you get 1 item in 10 raid, and noone want it... while using gdkp you're always getting something for your contribute in the raid.

Anonymous said...

I think you're ignoring a critical failure of the gold bid system, which isn't really a surprise since it doesn't negatively impact you.

Simply put, gold bid strongly rewards players for activities in-game that have little or nothing to do with their performance in the actual raid, while offering little reward for actual performance or attendance. This makes it very easy to exploit if some players don't spend time outside the raid making gold. Which you have to admit, isn't an unreasonable thing for players to want to skip. Frankly, given the nature of WoW as it currently stands, gold isn't a particularly valuable commodity in the game itself, which means that for all intents and purposes it's just as arbitrary a raid currency as DKP, just with a different way to accrue it. So with that in mind I'd have to imagine gold bid has as much chance to create a gear imbalance as any other system.

Now, that's not to say it's a bad system, any more so than DKP, loot council, or anything else is. Any system can work with a good group and a competent leader, while any system can fail without them. What really matters is that the people who are affected by the system agree to it, and that potentially dangerous and divisive players are kept out.

If I had to guess, I'd say you gravitate so strongly to gold bid because you already have a propensity towards viewing gold as a valuable, desirable thing. But that's not a universal opinion, and one I'd bet is reasonably uncommon amongst serious raiders. For myself, I haven't bothered to use the AH for anything but buying crafting patterns since BC, not even to get rid of useless crafting mats. Even so I've obtained more than enough gold to buy anything I've actually needed with tens of thousands to spare. So for me gold bid wouldn't be notably superior to any other system, and would add another needless grind for another arbitrary badge-like currency with no outside use, no different than justice points or bijous.

Anonymous said...

I actually had that problem back in WotLK when organizing Naxxramas raids with randoms.
What I did was grant everyone 150 DKP (for THIS run) at the start. As it was 15 bosses you had 10 DKP per boss. You had to bid 10 DKP for any item you can use in your first spec and second spec items were free.

The only drawback was that you could blow your DKP at the first boss and then leave, but since we were the only random raid on that server that went regularly and always successfully, only few people did that.

If someone joined later, he would get only so much points according to how many bosses were still standing (e.g. if 7 bosses are still alive: 70 DKP).

This system worked like a charm. I assigned a loot master to someone I trusted (someone from my guild was always there). In return he didn't need to do the trash, only bosses and so he could take all the time he needed.

So anyone who is not into this gold idea might want to consider and test this approach. Might for you, might not.

Anonymous said...

I have to wonder if all the opponents of GDKP are poor.

Bronte said...

"In DS and probably MoP gear will significantly effect your performance and chance of kills."

I actually won't hold my breath. Given the new dungeon challenges, and how they flatten the ilvl for all participants so you can't over-gear your way through the instance, may actually make it to raid challenges as well.

5-man experiments always seem to be like a beta test for raid implementations.

Dangphat said...

As a slight aside to a straight DKP system, our guild is running EPGP quite succesfully with no loot drama at all.
http://www.epgpweb.com/help/system

Anonymous said...

There are 13 characters in The Pug with the highest rank (including the GM). Seven of them were in the Deathwing kill shot. While you may not officially have a fixed roster, it appears as though circumstances result in an arrangement that's fairly close to one. The raid composition certainly isn't a random selection from the 109 level 85s in the guild. So, yes, GDKP works for you, but that may simply be because with a (nearly) fixed raid team, distribution is irrelevant.

Anonymous said...

"It's not a fair system, because it's involves too much luck."

Ah, the good ol' luck argument. Of course it is not a fair system. No system is fair. The drops are random, evolving around luck. That is what (MMO)RPGs are all about. If you don't like luck in MMORPG loot drops then maybe you shouldn't play MMORPG since it is a core aspect of the game ever since we played IRL RPGs. Luck isn't evil. Even in GDKP you'll stumble upon it. If you've done GDKP then you know that sometimes something good drops and sometimes something bad. If there is no competition on the good drop and you want it, you can be lucky; vice versa if there is competition on a bad drop you may even get a little bit for it. There is a factor called composition and you can influence it yes (how many agility users, who rolls for vanquisher, and so on) but only by so much. The system or the raid leader have bigger influence on it; you can only vote by your time and/or money.

Besides, the system I propose boils down to GDKP since any smart person will GDKP the loot (unless its worth less than crystal). Statistically, you'd find that the end gold income is very similar if not the same as normal GDKP, akin to /raidroll. However while the system I propose negates the "I am overgeared and boosting scrubs" factor as does GDKP it also negates the "master looter ninja who runs away with 800k gold" factor which GDKP does not address. Your favorite system (GDKP) gives the master looter far too much power. I've seen it abused various times. I don't trust "Bob", and I don't care if you find "Bob" trustworthy for I do not. This is also the reason why there is no master looter in LFR, and why the RL power is very limited. Randoms don't trust "Bob" to distribute the loot fair and square.

Horpner said...

If you're too poor to win a bidding war, you profit from the winning bidder. Eventually, with dedication, you'll have enough gold to win some gear. You wouldn't gear up as fast as an AH baron, but you aren't locked out.

KhasDylar said...

One thing comes to my mind as a different approach of gear distribution: what if you reset DKP every run? This way noone can hoard thousands of points just by sitting in the backyard and watching tv during raid. For example, at the beginning of every run the players have 1000 DKP and they bid with that. If you are low geared, you'll bid on almost every possible item, lowering your current DKP amount and the points you spend will be distributed among the other players. Let's say Hand of Morchok drops and you are a Frost Death Knight. You really want this, so you bid 900 DKP on it and win. You'll be at 100 DKP while other will be now at 1100 DKP. If another gear piece drops, which you want, you can still bid, but you probably only win, if noone needs it. What if two or more players bid the same amount? Well, than they roll. If you have a well geared character and you are after just one item, you probably can have it, 'cause you sooner or later will have more DKP than the lower geared players, because they spend more. This way the lower geareds won't "steal" your loot, you'll compete with the same higher geared players - which you would do anyway in any gear distribution system.
Sorry if this is a complete bullshit, it just came to my mind, I don't know, if any similar system exists.
Gold bid could have a twist if you want it to be more "fair" for poorer players - with this I mean those, who can't play with the AH that much, either because they are lazy or because they don't have the skills to do it for whatever reason. The twist would be: you don't pay after you get the loot, but when you enter the instance: upon stepping into the raid, you deposit - just for example - 10k gold by giving it to the Raid Leader. After that, the same rules apply as on a normal GDKP run: you bid with your deposited gold, of course you cannot bid more what you have currently. If you win, your bid would be substracted from your deposit, making the other more rich. At the end of the run, you either will have some loot or get your money back. This would be a zero sum GDKP system.
As before, I don't know if any such system exists or it is a good idea or even balanced or not - it just came to my mind, feel free to correct me.

Of course, both ideas could be supported by easy-to-write addons.

Anonymous said...

@Horpner
True, but "with dedication" the non-AH baron will eventually get the loot under any system. So that's not an argument supporting GDKP.

Goodmongo said...

Here's a trick. You start bidding for an item you really want. Start low and see if anyone else wants to bid. They keep raising the price. Force taht other person to overpay for the item. You win out because you get a share of what they overpaid.

In fact bid for things you may not want. Force the price up. It you end up with the winning bid just say Oops sorry I overbid that last round and it has to go to the other person. I'm 100 G short.

And this is why gold runs won't really work out.

Anonymous said...

@Goodmongo, that's pretty easy to get around. If you can't pay, then bidding starts back at 0, and you don't get to bid. Also, doesn't The PuG have a thing where the #2 bidder has to pay as well?

Anonymous said...

@ Anonymous 25 January, 2012 20:14 : I think it's 1st bidder pays X to second bidder and rest to pot.

Goodmongo said...

@Anonymous 1/25 20:14. So the bidding restarts. Thing is you really don't want the item. Now you have stated you only have X amount (you said you bid more than you had the last round). So Player B still wants it and you go to your max amount. Player B bids 1 gold over your max and wins it. You still accomplish your goal of forcing someone to overbid on an item you don't want.

This works very well at least once per run. In most of the runs I was in all money went to the pot. But if a percentage goes to you (the over bidder) it works out even better.

Anonymous said...

There is a fourth type of loot system: roll priority based on past raid attendance. My guild has used this with good results for three years now after trying every other kind of system.

How it works: at raid start-time, guild officer marks attendance of all who have shown up ready to raid. Raid leader then chooses the 25 who will go. The others must sit that night, but get attendance credit.

Attendance officer maintains a spreadsheet in our guild forums showing everyone's attendance percentage for past 10 raids. 90%+ is "Tier 1," 70%+ is "Tier 2" etc. If you are on vacation you can declare its dates on the forum and your absence won't count those days (you can do this once each year).

When loot drops everyone who wants to roll on it for primary spec declares their interest in chat. Attendance officer then determines who is eligible to roll according to this priority:

Raider > Recruit
Tier 1 > Tier 2 > Tier 3 ....

So if you are Tier 1 attendance raider you are always guaranteed a roll on an upgrade, and that your only competition is another Tier 1 raider who needs the piece.

If you are Tier 2 attendance level you just gotta wait until the Tier 1s have filled that slot, or keep attending regularly to become a Tier 1.

If you are a recruit you just gotta wait until the member raiders have filled their slots, or keep attending regularly with good performance to get promoted to raider. (We have 1-month tryout period.)

The only exception is our Tier 1 main tanks always get priority if it's an upgrade for them, until we are on farm status.

It works really really well for us. You avoid the politics/drama of the loot council and the administrative complexity of DKP and the sometimes long time delays for distributing loot under a DKP system.

In our system there's a bit of RNG between you and the 2-3 others competing for the same gear, but it always evens out after a few clears. While in progression status, gear always goes to someone who will very very likely be helping the raid for weeks to come.