I need a DKP tracker!

April 9, 2006 8:24 PM

I'm helping to administer a World of Warcraft guild and I need a recommendation for a DKP tracker that has some specific requirements.

(Quick explanation: DKP is a system of rewarding points to people who participate in large events in a MMORPG. Those people can then use those points to purchase the stuff that comes from those events.)

My guild recently went through a transition from large raiding guild to small raiding guild. We have a starting pool of DKP that the current members of the guild earned before the transition. We're setting up a partnership with several other guilds, and we need to track separate DKP.

There are going to be two pools. One will be DKP earned and used with just the guild. The other will be DKP earned and used during events with the partner guilds. I want one system to track both pools.

Help me in my nerdy endeavor!

posted by billybunny to sports, hobbies, & recreation (6 comments total)

One way to cope with this -- and the most successful, drama-free guilds I've come in contact with do so -- is to use officer looting. This means going around inspecting players and assigning loot based on a set of criteria (which can be explicit or not; one guild I know gives slight loot preference to players who bite the bullet and show up for Z'G despite everyone hating it and needing nothing from it).

Of course, the players have to have tremendous faith in the guild officers to be able to do this, but if your players are largely adults who want what's best for the raid rather than what's best for themselves it just works out.

On the other hand, I'm allergic to DKP since it encourages your guildmates to compete against each other for loot.
posted by majick at 8:35 PM on April 9, 2006

Well that just ain't gonna happen. :)

We've decided on this DKP system, it's worked very well for us in the past. (This isn't a discussion about the merits of DKP, but there is no competition among us other than friendly, and DKP is used as it was intended to be used--as a currency that is given for participation in raids. It is unbiased, and that is what we want.)

The only thing that's changing is that we need to keep track of two separate-but-related pools, and I'm trying to find a way to do this on one system.

I should have included this in the original question, but we have been using EQ DKP. It's been working well for us.
posted by billybunny at 9:13 PM on April 9, 2006

I was going to say EQDKP.

I'm not sure on the separate pools in eqdkp. It's been years since I admined one, but it was pretty flexible. If you haven't you might want to throw up a post on the forums to be sure there isn't a plug-in for it.

Talking from a design standpoint I have to suggest maybe you do not have a problem. It seems like you have two separate dkp pools so just throw up two installs assuming the loot credit is mutually exclusive. If you do not have two seperate pools you can always create seperate event categories, inject it as special adds if it isn't frequent, or mod the point value down for co-op events.
posted by rudyfink at 11:51 PM on April 9, 2006

I figured that was what I was going to have to do. Unfortunately, a lot of the officers are able to screw up the one-pool system we've got going now, so I was hoping that there would be a way to simplify it.
posted by billybunny at 6:57 AM on April 10, 2006

Are your officers using the CT_RaidTracker mod for EQDKP? We used this in my old guild's EQDKP setup (I'm a retired/inactive officer) and it was nearly idiot-proof. Your officers need to install the above mod and you'll need to install this Import Plugin into your EQDKP setup. During raids, the mod will generate a custom log. After the raid, upload the custom raid log into EQDKP via the Import Plugin and all raid info should be entered automatically.
posted by junesix at 12:22 PM on April 10, 2006

I am not raiding but our guild uses EQDKP also and it seems to work well.

There are a couple 'rules' that the guild officers have set in place though such as:

1) Some items are class specific and you cannot bid on them even if you can use them. This is known before raiding to avoid confusion/complaining.

2) They have 2 DKP systems. 1 for 20-man raiding and 1 for 40-man raids. In the 20-man raids the DKP sticks to your 'account' while in the 40-man raids it sticks to your character/toon.

My guild has been doing BWL for about 1.5 - 2 months and they noticed the problem that MC raids were awarding too much DKP. People were hording their MC DKP to bid on BWL items, thus skipping their Tier 1 epics and going straight to Tier 2.

I hope that helps.
posted by cbushko at 1:14 PM on April 11, 2006