Gold DKP

I have always been interested in economics (it largely stems from a family of economists) which means that one aspect of wow I in theory love is the auction house, though to be perfectly honest I have the attention span of a pea when it comes to controlling markets and i'm liable to give up and just offload my supplys at a marginal profit when I get bored, but thats me.

After avidly reading a wide variety blogs I kept coming across GDKP runs, though being an RP server such as Argent Dawn which has, to the best of my knowledge, only had one or two GDKP runs before I started organising them; which have gone to naxx while totc was progression so unsurpisingly I was tentative in organising them.

Before I continue further I will just give a brief description of GDKP:

Gold Dkp is a loot system (I think originally developed in Korea) whereby loot is put out to auction when it drops and the members of the raid bid using gold. The top gold bid trades his gold with the treasurer in exchange for the item. The gold that is spent goes into a pool that at the end of the raid is shared out evenly among the raiders.

Now of course there are variations in the above system with open or closed bidding, minimum bid sizes, entry fees and so on, but in the end they come down to the basic system outlined above.

About a month ago I started organising the raids on my server, initially taking them totc 25. I must confess it was tolerated to a much larger extent than I expected, but as per usual you get the odd nutjob who thinks that its fair to shout at you just because your proposing a loot system they don't even come to. So to start off with we went totc 25, while the guild was on a raiding holiday, taking a raid that was about 1/2 to 3/4 guild mains/alts and the remainder was filled with friends or pugs. We've had a series of relatively successful runs, but I have noticed one main thing, items still are going cheaply relative to prices on other servers. That is just fine (trinkets have gone for 2k to 13k gold), but in the end I would like GDKP run to have prices of items going for AH prices.

The reason why I am posting about this here is that this weekend we're taking the raid to ICC 25, and not only am I little nervous but I have had to think harder about raid composition and so on. The reason why goes as follows; in your normal GDKP run you split the raid aproximately down the middle with "workers" and "buyers". Workers are guild mains who come largely for some fun/that last trinket drop they need from the instance. "Buyers" are people who come in largely undergeared who are designed to supply the demand for the items that drop. In our initial runs we went with a high amount of workers relative to buyers, though we have now shifted more towards reducing the numbers of workers and increasing the numbers of buyers. That is largely because out of our maybe 10 - 20 workers who i could source from 7 have recieved the trinkets they wanted and are now happy to bring alts.

This weekend though we are going to ICC (which is only just being tentatively pugged - though you could argue that the leaders are just leading glorified rep runs as 2 in every 3 don't get past the first boss) and by definition we won't have workers and buyers as nearly all the raid are workers, due to the inability of our gild mains to come as they all go to icc. Unfortunately it does rule out one of the nice ethoses of GDKP which is that you can pull in an alt that has just dinged 80 into pretty much any GDKP run and gear him up without coping with "you are not geared enough to go into this heroic", but that is life.

The main dilema that I am faced with is a raid full of what should be buyers, but we will almost definitely have people coming who just want the gold, but aren't punching above the raid average in contribution. Now in an ideal world I would have a raid full of people who could just clear the instance in one smooth go, but would all really want to bid on gear, as this would result in a large pool of cash at the end being shared out which would comfort those that didn't recieve gear nicely even more. Howerever at some level I most want to raid with my guildys and there is nothing like a vent channel full of people cheering on the bidding in raid!

So for this week I will without a doubt take the broke people with us, as you can't help but pitty those people who have had to raise 50k gold to fund their own bid at shadowmourne. I will have to try not to hold my breath and go farm the ah for money so I can go lead the bidding and nab me some nice shinys (though it still hangs in the air whether I dig my warlock or my dk up).

Pidigidy