Greedy Goblin

Monday, August 16, 2010

GDKP addon design

Note: after I wrote this post, Treeston/Stolenlegacy shown us his addon that has many of the mentioned functionality, so it's maybe waste of time to start coding until he is complete and something is missing.

There are GDKP addons out there, but not one that would be a serious help to me, and not only because I introduced the 1/3-to second bidder modification. (It serves the purpose to compensate people for joining a raid where they have competitors, therefore decreasing "raid optimization" efforts, where people want to exclude anyone who can bid to "their" loot).

The time-consuming part is the bidding process itself, on the player side, not on the RL side. So let me design a GDKP addon functionality. I'm not a programmer, so I can't create the addon, but if you do (or modify your existing) I can offer the popularity of this blog to advertise your addon. So here it goes:
  1. the boss died, the raid leader approach the boss. His addon reads up the loot from the boss (if it's impossible then the RL links the items to the addon's field)
  2. The addon announces all loot for auction concurrently (the RL may have the option to announce manually if there is reserved loot). The announcement happens on /raid by the addon writing "[itemlink] is auctioned, nnnG minbid, mmmG minimal increment". I'd like to emphasize concurrency, so if there are 4 loot, than 4 lines of announcement appear at the same.
  3. The raid members can bid manually by typing "[itemlink] xxxG". The addon of the raid leader accepts this bid if it's at least minimal_increment higher than last bid
  4. Here comes the big move: the addon can run on the player side too. They don't have to watch the raid chat as their addon reads it for them. As soon as the RL announced the loots, little loot windows pop up showing the picture of the item, the current bid, and the name of the highest bidder (or "no bids yet"). There are three buttons next to every item. The first is "pass", if the player presses it, the loot disappears from his interface. The second is "bid minimal", the third is "bid minimal x5" (the value of the minimal increment is read from the raid chat). If the player presses either bid button, the addon writes "[itemlink] xxxG" to the raid chat. The bid buttons grey out if the player have not enough gold to bid. Since the raid chat is read and written by the addon and the players see a graphical bid interface, bidding is very fast.
  5. When there were no bids for 5 seconds to an item, the RL's addon writes "[itemlink] will be sold to XXX for nnnG, you have 5 more seconds to bid". It is necessary to let those without addon to bid as the /raid is flooded by bids. If anyone bids, the addon repeats the countdown after 5 secs of the last bid. If there is no bid, it writes "[itemlink] will be sold to XXX for nnnG, you have 3 more seconds to bid" and once more at 1 second. The countdown number is flashing next to the item on the player's interface if they have the addon.
  6. If no one bids during the whole countdown, the RL's addon writes "[itemlink] is sold to XXX for nnnG, XXX please trade me the gold (or 2/3 of the gold and 1/3 to YYY it should be selectable)" The item disappears from the interface of all players.
  7. The RL interface have two panes, one is identical to the player interface, so the RL can bid. The only difference is that if he passes on an item, it does not disappear, just the bid buttons, to let him see how the bid is going. The other pane is the cumulative pane, it shows all items sold in the raid, their price and a "paid" icon that should be checked by the raid leader when the winner trades him the money. On the bottom, there is the sum value and it's /10 and /25 value.

20 comments:

nonameform said...

Missed your post on Saturday, so going to comment on this one. GDKP runs can be very profitable, even if there are not too many people with gold in the raid. I've been in those "boost" raids twice and both times it was ToC 25.

First time we got around 700g each. Considering that even if we wiped, it was just once and on Anub'arak, it covered all my repair bills and also it was much better G/hour than dailies or farming (not better than AH though). I believe the biggest bid we had was ~4k for Reign of the Dead (BiS caster trinket in that tier of content).

Second time we got 1100g each. The reason why this time around we made more gold was Juggernaut's Vitality. One person in the raid bought it for 14k gold (he was willing to go to 30k) and that single item actually made the pot for the raid, since we had about 20 boosters and 5 biders. Reign of the Dead that dropped again was sold for around 500g.

All in all, GDKP runs depend on luck in a sense that you might either not get good drops or you might have people without enough gold who want to buy items for their minimal bid price or even cheaper (we had quite a few of those, trying to buy ToC tokens for 50g even though starting price was 250g).

Treeston said...

Addon link, for reference.

Also, when are you going to get my name right :/

Sean said...

I made a post in Blizzard's Dungeons & Raid forums to propose an additional loot option (GDKP):
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26435287350&sid=1

For those that don't want to click on links:

1) Raids
Hi, I'm requesting that Blizzard implements a GDKP-like loot system. I propose that the implementation to be a simple one.

The raid leader can set the initial parameters: initial bid and increment. When a item drops, a window popups which shows the item, current bid and time remaining (e.g. 10 sec). When a player enters a bid, the counter is reset. The gold from the winner is evenly distributed amongst the raid members.

If no one bids, the item is /rolled to a random member or goes to the raid leader.

2) Dungeons
I propose a similar system to this for 5-man dungeons as well.

Sean said...

If anyone followed the link to my forum post, I had a rather amusing reply:

As far as griefing I'll give you an example.

Player A has 100k gold and likes to grief.
Player B has 3k gold and is looking to gear up.

An item drops that Player B really needs, whereas Player A doesn't. Player A does one of two things.

1.) He outbids Player B on everything just to be mean/funny.
2.) He barely raises Player B so B has to pay a LOT more for the item.


I highlighted the particular comment in bold. I guess some people feel that rich people will just stupidly shelve out money to be mean/funny. I reckon the replies that I got are blog post worthy material.

Bobbins said...

GDKP - Gold

Blizzard seriously needs to look at the roll gold plays within the game structure.
With the expansion drawing to a close there are serious imbalances which need addressing.
Does GDKP have a roll in this?

chewy said...

The functionality you describe is possible from an addon.

While I'm not volunteering to write the addon since I don't have time, I have enough experience writing addons to know that what you're asking for is technically possible.

Sean said...

The functionality you describe is possible from an addon.

While I'm not volunteering to write the addon since I don't have time, I have enough experience writing addons to know that what you're asking for is technically possible.


Yes, I'm aware of this. My proposal is for Blizzard to implement a secure method to distribute gold in a GDKP to prevent pot ninjas.

Treeston said...

@Azzur: If there is a written statement in in-game chat made before the raid by the raid leader, then he is bound to that statement and any breach will be punished as a scamming offense by GMs.

Do not go on any GDKP runs that do not offer such statement when asked.

chewy said...

@Azzur

My comment was aimed at Gevlon's post not your reply.

Dokb (Ner'zhul EU) said...

We could think of little tweaks to fonctionnality such as :

- RL has a button to write the GDKP rules in the raid chat (with or without 1/3rd to second bidder).
- Filter the raid chat for those who have the addon (like dbm does). There is no need for someone who has the addon to see the written bids.
- Add the highest bidder name in the player interface.
- RL can split the pot between a number of players other than 10 or 25 (in case of a leaver or any other event preventing a player not to have his share)

And I also think addons can communicate between each other without reading the chat, might make it easier to code it that way. While keeping chat annoucements for those who do not have the addon of course.

I currently do not have the time to write addons, but if no one has done it by september, I'll try and have a go at it.

Treeston said...

@Dokb: I am currently working on the simultanous auctions Gevlon wants and expect them to be done by tomorrow at least. I'll look into your requests then.

Sean said...

@Treeston
@Azzur: If there is a written statement in in-game chat made before the raid by the raid leader, then he is bound to that statement and any breach will be punished as a scamming offense by GMs.

Do not go on any GDKP runs that do not offer such statement when asked.


Indeed, I do take the precaution of asking the raid leader to state the rules clearly prior to the run. However according to official Blizzard policy (http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=17761&pageNumber=1), the gold will be removed from the ninja but not redistributed to the raid.

I can also confirm that the GMs will indeed carry out the stated policy as I have recently been a victim of a GDKP ninja.

http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?locale=en_US&articleId=17761&pageNumber=1

Anonymous said...

One could also you EPGP [1] as a base to make the addon.

http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/epgp-dkp-reloaded.aspx

Anonymous said...

@Treeston
Be careful with sending addon information. I looked at the code for vulnerability to cheating and I liked how you did everything in raid chat and parsing the args.

If you do go the route of SendAddonMessage, than you have to worry about people tampering with clients and purposely sabotaging bids. (Encryption isn't tough, but an extra step)

I suppose you could just prevent the raid messages from being seen with those who have the addon.

I would also consider localization now, before you are completely done. This being created for an EU guild and all. (http://www.wowwiki.com/Localizing_an_addon)

Anonymous said...

I have been running a weekly ICC25 GDKP run for 6 weeks now. The last 3 weeks we have made 3.6k+ gold. Also clearing 11/12 with 3 hardmodes. My suggestion to anyone out there trying to start one up is put a sign up on your realm forums. The first week I also made a post on the top 5 raiding guilds websites and invited them to come. The first week you try to introduce your run you will meet a lot of resistance. Tell people politely that rules will be stated in game and you can't ninja the gold pot without risking being reported.

If you want to know more about GDKP visit http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t77416-gdkp_run_discussion_spread_your_server/

Anonymous said...

I lead a GDKP ICC25 every week (inspired by this blog - thanks!). We usually go 9/12 in three hours; last week we went 10/12 and everyone got paid a bit over 3900g (highest two weeks were 4500 and 4600).

I like the idea of a better addon; my raiders didn't like the popular one that is out there, so I went back to doing the auctions manually.

I don't like the idea of simultaneous auctions, just because player attention span is limited. As soon as people see the loot, we start clearing trash for the next boss. The few people who are interested in bidding on something are excused from trash during the bidding process.

The simultaneous auction method would speed up the auctions, but would they speed up the raid? I'm not sure, because more people would be doing the auction rather than trash, and it seems like there would be a great deal more bidding errors that would cause headaches.

Zanthor said...

I've been running GDKP's on Blackhand for a while now and use GRM, it's a decent app for the job and gets things done easily enough.

I have a "ninja" button that loots all items after I announce, and we move on with the raid and I trade items to winners between trash pulls. We always finish loot before we start the next boss.

I'd love a smoother way to do this, I don't think multiple auctions at once is a good idea for my runs, but it may work for some...

Anonymous said...

I have read that on Korean and Taiwanese servers GDKP is widespread, perhaps they have sophisticated addons for that.

Now who here has a Korean friend to ask? :-)

Treeston said...

@Anonymous: I know, that is why I opted for the raid chat method in the first place. Chat filter is exactly what GDKPd does as of the latest revision, the only thing that is done via addon messages is showing all items that are dropped before they are actually auctioned (so you can place auto bids already).

As for Localization, it's one of the last things I'll do before I push the addon to release.

Anonymous said...

I have been on numerous GDKP runs and it not only gives me experience in the raids so I can turn around and help my guild, but having some extra gold is always great, I can usually bid once but i'm always outbid in the end which is okay, But walking away with Gold is always a good bandaid for the lust I feel when something i'd like to have drops :D