Learnings from a stint in World of Warcraft’s GDKP community

After not playing this crack of a game for about 15 years, I decided to come back upon learning they were re-releasing the expansion I had skipped out on, Wrath of the Lich King (WOTLK for short). I had quit early during the Burning Crusade expansion to refocus on my real life post-18 years old, and in the intermission, I had always kept track of WoW’s lore out of childhood nostalgia. Now I was back, and it was around the time when I engineered my way into a guild that I noticed a ton of messages advertising GDKP groups.

GDKPs?

Let’s start from the ‘DKP’ part of the acronym. Short for Dragon Kill Points, this is a loot distribution system that uses points awarded to each player that attends group raids and achieves boss kills. Players bid on items that are dropped from boss kills using the points they’ve earned across raids, and the highest bids wins the items, and the points are redistributed amongst players. The ‘G’ in ‘GDKP’ simply utilizes gold as the exchange currency, and the gold then goes to a shared pot for the duration of the raid, and at the end of the raid the pot is split amongst players participating in the raid.

The Good

For any sufficiently hard group challenge it is essential to get into a good group. People will at some point in their playthrough generally not want to die over and over again with random strangers on a boss for no reward nor progress - it’s just no fun and feels like a waste of time. A lot of ad-hoc groups do not acknowledge this, and assume that the greatest reward is partaking within the social aspects of the group. That’s when the social drama eventually starts and the group falls apart. There are systems, created entirely by players, that rise to fix these problems, but they have their strengths and weaknesses.

The best parts of a point/currency system are the incentives and disincentives you can include in the distribution system. For example, it is common for a GDKP to include a percentage based admin fee from the pot. And the administrators can justify it - setting up groups takes a long time and effort, some of which consists of advertising in the game’s common chat lobbies, cultivating relations with good players. Leading the group, correcting mistakes made by players is yet another monumental task.

GDKPs also have bonuses and docks to individual players that the administrator can include in their incentive systems. If a player repeatedly fails on a boss’s mechanics, the administrator can introduce a cut to the split the offender receives at end of the raid, giving a clear signal for that player that he/she needs to improve. At the same time, the others that did not fail the mechanic gain from the failing player’s dock from the split - a signal that they did well. And on top of it, everyone gets gold - leaving the raid with something even if they didn’t get the item they want. It’s a win-win deal where you get gold for your time or a piece of loot.

Other advantages include the opening up of recruitment. These GDKP raids are very public friendly - so long as one has the gold earned from other GDKPs or the gear to cover their entry, unlike the usual guild groups that tend to be very closed groups - canceling or undermanning their raids is the usual reaction to attendance issues. In addition for newcomers to a guild, he/she usually has to wait a few weeks as a trial before being able to roll on item drops. Such measures were initially made as a mechanism to vet people and stop people from guild hopping after getting a valuable item, and to ensure fairness to the rest. However, this becomes a disincentive for good players who don’t want to go through another trial period.

The Experience

So I made a character specifically to partake in the GDKP system, intending to do GDKPs as much as possible. After gearing myself up through the dungeons, I started accumulating gold until I got accepted into one of the GDKPs. My early runs made me enough gold for the whole of the expansion’s consumables, so it was a huge relief knowing that I did not have to ever do daily gold grinding quests after a certain point.

Over time though, I started noticing something - people seemed to be really rich. Now granted, I was partaking in a system where GDKPs had been running for some time, and people who had been in the system and had benefited early from inflows of gold buyers. For a while I, as a newcomer to the scene, was being outcompeted against these people and unable to beat their bids for the best items in my character’s class.

The proliferation of knowledge and wisdom, leading to ‘Nothing but the best’

Whenever new content releases, players, ever eager to know what’s coming, will take a look at the new items and make plans for them. People motivated enough will make ladders of items, ranking them according to whatever metrics they require for the roles they do. For example, damage increases, health pool increases, healing increases. As with any ranking, this creates an effect where the bids for the best items are spiraled upwards, and the rest are cheap as hell.

Items are that not the absolute best, but could prove to be a major upgrade

Items that are deemed ‘Best in Slot’, some of which are hotly contested, which drives bid prices up.

What kind of effect did that have on me, as a new character arriving onto the scene? While I could buy gear that upgraded quickly, I found myself priced out of the best item for a number of weeks until I accumulated enough gold to buy them. And mind you - the waiting line is long especially for big ticket, hotly contested items.

If the average payout is about 20k a week, I’d have to save for 8 weeks worth of GDKP splits to purchase that best in slot(BiS) item Deathbringer’s Will, or pray for a less contested raid. Given that a new phase of content lasts for about 15-20 weeks (1 raid a week is the maximum you can do), and there are 10 equipment slots that have best in slot items, you can essentially forget about getting all your big ticket items quick as a new-ish regular, non gold-buying participant in such a system (excluding administrators due to the admin fee). Alternate methods to get around this is to raid more on an alternate character and siphon gold earned to the other, or buying gold through unauthorized sources and risking a ban.

The bomb

Around the time of this post was being draft, Blizzard, the developer of the game, decided to add the WoW Token, which is basically legal way of trading real money for gold. Now this introduces a whole new set of buyers and competition. Chances are without using any of the alternative methods listed above I’ll have to bow out of the scene as the competition for the best loot gets higher, and the wait times get longer. Inflation is indeed real, and the revolving door of GDKPs ensures a consistent supply of buyers.

Takeaways

That’s not to say I didn’t gain anything from it. I’ve found that the players involved in the GDKP system tend to be of higher quality - all thanks to the incentive system. If it wasn’t for the inflation effects of accumulated gold, it would have been a great system. This does lead me to think whether regular ‘resets’ are a good thing for economic dividend/wealth distribution systems. For example, I’ve heard of gold shrinks on private servers. Other subjects at play here are communism, capitalism, trickle down economics, and revenue splitting.

For an emergent system originally initiated by players to solve a problem with the game, it’s evolved to be quite a beast and I expect aspects of it to carry on to the future.