Not to interupt the scuffle between bear and canadian (wtf, i thought canadians and bears lived together in harmony up north? Whats with all the hate?) but another aspect of DKP is going to be the constant need for rule addendum. Shawn did an awesome job each xpac to put forth a bunch of rules to cover most situations, and I believe tried very hard to not shift those around too much between then. If it wasn’t for the fairly major mid-expansion changes I’m sure they would have carried over fairly well.
It also really helps to have guild officers and members on board with it, and making an effort to not abuse the system. I know during Cata it would have been VERY easy for me to walk away with just about every piece of multi-class healing gear and still be at the very top of the dkp list. Being one of the only holy pally’s I could get every healy plate upgrade for 5 dkp since I had no competition. I didn’t really pay much attention to my dkp at the start and accumulated quite a bundle of it. I ended up bidding fairly large amounts on plate upgrades even though I didn’t need to just to force my DKP down and spread it out among everyone.
Had I abused the system I could have walked away with a substantial amount of gear with very little anyone could do about it. How do you make a rule to account for only 1 person using an entire set of drops and therefore not needing to spend dkp on it? There are some instances where hard rules just won’t work, so you need to rely on the basics of ‘Don’t be a dick, dick.’
Also, IMO LC would never work in a guild the size of DoD simply because no matter how set in stone the rules were reguarding upgrades, with so many people and so much turnover among the benched players there would be no way of remaining fair. Someone every raid would be getting annoyed that they didn’t receive a piece of gear. And this could very well take place simply because the people in charge of the loot council may not notice the players usefullness. Take a player like Neps, he typically didn’t top every healing meter, and had he not been vocal and sexy as shit you may completely overlook him as a healer. This is because whoever he was assigned to didn’t die, and he didn’t do stupid shit to need to be called out. He simply did his job very well, kept everyone around him alive and kicking, and therefore his name wouldn’t have gotten floated around as much. I’m sure there were a great many raiders who would fit into that category, but again their names elude me simply because they did their jobs, remained quiet and just pushed us forward without making any waves.
Its far easier to overlook peoples contributions to the raid and guild as a whole when you are pressed into a few minutes to make a decision. You can be right 99% of the time, but that 1% will cause far more damage then the broken rules in a DKP system would cause simply because everyone can see where the rules are broken, but its far harder to explain human error to angry people and make it sound like it wasn’t favoritism.
Also, holy shit was DoD a god damn family. My wife even knew to schedule our outings around the 25 man raids, she called it my “game date night” since WoW was my other girlfriend pretty much During Cata when the guild was on the brink of stopping the raids it was probably my worst experience in gaming. Its like hanging around your parents while they are arguing, the tension and apprehension for what you know is inevitable is just so much. I’ve never been able to get so into a game since, and to be honest I don’t think I’d want to anymore. DoD and WoW may live on, but the death of the 25 mans killed the game for me. Shit, is this a spoiler or is it fairly common knowledge that Cata blew ass?
Anyways, welcome to the DoD forums, post more often! And ignore dalans and cheese’s arguments, they should realize this slap fight of theirs is pointless soon enough, apparently this is what happens when 2 assholes disagree (Yea, I just called you both assholes, and I’m positive I’ve called you both that many times already, so deal with it and get back to being sexy!)