The View From Down Here

DKP? Say, Why?

Matticus recently mentioned on twitter:

Guild sites should show: Where they’re at in progression, raid times, loot system, and an app link somewhere visible.

Sounds mostly sensible enough

• How far you’re progressed? Definitely makes sense for a prospective applicant to know if they’re horrendously undergeared for your content.
  
• Raid Times? Yep, makes no sense to apply to a guild if you’re never going to match their raiding schedule
• Application link? Make it easy to apply, of course. If you don’t you’ll lose out on applicants who can’t find your application form.

But the other one? Loot system? I completely fail to see why that should ever be something that needs advertising. In my experience, there are two types of applicant. There are those who are interested in raiding for its own sake, seeing the gear obtained as a means to an end (seeing more content, beating more difficult encounters). And then there are the people who want to get the gear so they can stand around in Dalaran and /flex at lesser-geared passers-by.

I’ve written extensively on the subject of loot systems before. There are some good, some bad, they’re all capable of being gamed in different ways (and if you meet someone who says their system is perfect, they’re a liar). But when someone asks the question “What DKP system do you use?”, in my experience what they really mean is one of two questions:

“How soon can I get to looking hardcore in Dalaran?”

or:

“How long will I have to put up with this crummy guild before I’m geared enough to find a better one?”

Players in well-progressed raiding guilds are almost inevitably there to experience the journey, not the destination. By asking the DKP question up-front, a prospective member is showing that they are thinking of their reward in terms of the pixels they can decorate their character with, rather than the satisfaction of having beaten a tough encounter.

If you’re interested in progression for progression’s sake then so long as it’s fair (and let’s be honest here any progression-oriented guild has to have a fair loot system or they’ll implode into a black hole of drama) it shouldn’t matter exactly what that system is. Almost all the players who would want to join your guild should be there for the teamwork, not the high-ilevel purples.

Progress should be its own reward. So long as the loot is distributed afterward in such a way as to make further progress as easy as possible (however you choose to define that), it shouldn’t matter too much how it is distributed.