gdkp
Latest
Gold Capped: GDKP raiding for fun and profit
Want to get Gold Capped? Every week, Basil "Euripides" Berntsen takes a short break from building a raiding guild on Drenden (US-A) to write up a guide that will help you make or spend gold. Check out the Call to Auction podcast, and feel free to email Basil any comments, questions or hate mail! A very interesting form of raiding has been gaining popularity. GDKP stands, literally, for "gold dragon kill points." It's a badly named system, but essentially, it means that instead of some effort-based DKP system, people participating in the raid use real currency: gold. So what is this GDKP thing, anyway? In a GDKP raid, all items of value, whether they're BoP gear, Primordial Saronite, BoE drops, Precious's Ribbon or quest items, are auctioned off in an open bidding system to all participants. The person willing to pay the most for it will get the item in exchange for gold, and at the end of the night, all the gold that was collected is divided out among the raiders.
Officers' Quarters: The ethics of loot selling
Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. A few weeks ago I wrote a column about husband/wife guild leaders who were using the old double-roll scam in a new way now that loot doesn't bind to a character for two hours. I also mentioned in that column the new trend in raids, particularly PUG raids, of offering gold for an item that someone else has fairly won. This week I received an e-mail from a player feeling guilt for selling an item. I'd like to address his situation first. Then I'll talk about what you as an officer should consider when this situation arises in your guild. Dear Scott, I wasn't entirely sure who to ask for this, and seeing as how the Officer's Quarters column you write seems to be the most "Dear Abby" esque that I can find, well, I figured you might be able to help me out. With the recent implementation of being able to give "mislooted" items to other qualified members of a raid upon a bosses completion, there has obviously been a lot of abuse to this new change. Abuse which, until very recently, I had been abhorrently against. However, I was put into such a situation recently, and well, suffice it to say, I am a bumbling hypocrite.
Listen to the WoW Insider Show today at 3:30pm Eastern
Our podcast (which is nominated for a Podcast Award, by the way -- this is the last time we'll ask you to vote for us over there, since voting ends on November 30th) is headed back to the virtual airwaves as usual, and this week we're bringing two new voices into the mix. We'll welcome not only C. Christian Moore, informally known as Colby, to the show (he's the new author of our PvP Blood Sport column), but also Kelly Aarons, informally known as Cadistra, both of WoW Eh and our brand new comic here on WoW.com. Should be a lot of fun -- they'll chat with Turpster and I about the biggest stories of the past week, including Pilgrim's Bounty and some superfast cooking leveling, the game's 5th anniversary and what things were like back when it all began, and this GDKP system everyone's using, as well as other player-created looting systems. Sounds like a full show (and that doesn't even include answering your emails and our other silliness). It all kicks off at 3:30pm Eastern/8:30pm GMT this afternoon over on our Ustream page (or on your iPhone or iPod touch, or just after the break if you want to do it that way) and if you are listening live, don't forget to show up a little early for the pre-show, and stay a little later for the aftershow. Hope to see you this afternoon!
The best of WoW.com: November 17-24, 2009
Happy Pilgrim's Bounty, everybody! That's the brand new Thanksgiving holiday going on right now in the World of Warcraft, where you can level up your cooking for cheap, chase turkeys around in-game, and even earn yourself the title of "Pilgrim." You'll find information about Pilgrim's Bounty and everything else in Warcraft over on Joystiq's sister site, WoW.com. Check out the links after the break for much, much more.
The sudden popularity of GDKP
We've been seeing this GDKP thing sneak up on the forums and elsewhere a lot lately, and while Scott has mentioned it (in a somewhat disparaging way, in fact), we haven't really taken a good look at it yet. So let's do so. GDKP stands for Gold DKP, which is kind of a mishmash of acronyms. DKP, or Dragon Kill Points, are a very popular way of determining loot division in a raid -- the concept dates back to earlier MMOs, and involves players earning points per boss kill that they can then spend on gear. We've talked about other DKP systems before. But rather than awarding loot based on arbitrary points, Gold DKP, as you may have guessed, instead gives loot to the player willing to pay the most gold... to the other players in the raid. The way it works is this: You go into an instance, say Naxx, and everyone knows ahead of time that it is a "GDKP run," or a "gold run," or a "cash run." You down the first boss, and Webbed Death drops. The master looter then takes bids of gold on the item (this can be done via public chat or via an addon), and whoever bids the most gold gets the item. The person who wins then pays that amount of gold (some raids have minimum bids of, say, 100g) to "the pot," and the raid moves on. Another boss drops, another item drops -- usually all items, including recipes and mats, are auctioned off -- and another high bid goes into "the pot." Then, at the end of the raid, the pot is evenly split among all members. Everybody who joined in on the raid gets an even share of the bidded gold, including people who got no items, or the Mr. Moneybags who won them all.
