Will you reset DKP in Burning Crusade?

Now here is an interesting question for all World of Warcraft players that are part of a raiding guild: Will your guild reset their DKP system after the Burning Crusade comes out?

The basic function of a DKP system is that a guild hands out IOUs to members which put a lot of effort into raiding, but due to bad luck didn't get an appropriate amount of epics out of the exercise. That does make sense to a certain degree: if your guild is going to Molten Core every week, and you participate all the time, but no item for your class dropped, the least you would expect is that the day such an item drops you get priority over somebody who is on his first raid there.

There are a lot of different loot distribution systems, and not all of them hold up well over long periods of time. The good systems don't promise more epics to their members than they can deliver. A zero-sum DKP system automatically is always balanced. The even simpler Suicide Kings system just works with a list, with the person on top of the list having first right of refusal, and then dropping to the bottom of the list when he gets an item; so this system can go on forever as well. But lots of DKP systems end up giving out more points per raid than the epics in that raid cost. The inevitable consequence is that some members accumulate huge amounts of points. Even worse, if the DKP point cost per item is fixed, the guild ends up owing these people the equivalent of a dozen epics.

Many guilds already raid less than they used to. And when the Burning Crusade expansion comes out, there won't be many raids for quite some time, until the guilds have over 25 people that reached level 70. After this break some guild will find themselves on their first level 70 raid, finding their first level 70 epics, and some people are going to be rather unhappy about how these epics are being distributed. "What do you mean, you got 10,000 DKP and have first right of refusal on the next 20 epics that drop?"

Why should the fact that player A has been much more often to Molten Core with the guild than player B give him priority on more than one epic at level 70? Due to the raiding break between level 60 and 70, and everybody going into the level 70 raids with blue items from Burning Crusade dungeons, there is no more direct link between the contribution of player A in Molten Core and the success of the guild in the level 70 raids.

The problem here is that the people with the most accumulated DKP are likely to be the officers of the guild. I don't even know yet if I'll even dare to ask the question whether DKP are going to be reset for BC in my guild. Because the people who decide that are those that would lose most. Of course they would prefer to have first dibs on all the loot coming out of the level 70 raid dungeons, getting completely geared up before somebody else even gets their first epic. It would take some rather enlightened guild leadership to see that this wouldn't be in the best interest of the guild as a whole. But setting up a good transition system wouldn't be easy either. This is going to be difficult for many guilds.

So how is your guild going to handle DKP in the expansion? Do you have a system which accumulated a lot of DKP for some people over the last couple of months? Are you taking that system fully into the expansion, or is there some sort of reset?
- posted by Tobold @ 8:13 AM Permanent Link