For example suppose a mage has an imperial necral ring of burial (+90 foc dex 900 firemagic), another has a royal (+80/800) and another has a mighty (+60/600). All are relativly active, the mage with the imperial is the most active but the mage with the royal is fairly active, the mage with the mighty joined only a month and a half ago and is just as active as the royal mage. The mage with the imperial has 36k dkp, royal has 25k, and mighty guy has 12k. Because the boost for the imperial guy is only 10/100 it is not worth that much dkp to him. Even though he could easily outbid the others and win the ring he won't want to spend that much to claim it. For the royal mage the buff is pretty decent so he will most likely be willing to spend a good amount. The mighty mage is as you can guess prepared to go all in for the ring. Because of this the Royal mage ends up getting the ring for 10k DKP. He is just barely under the activity of the imperial mage so there is no protest, yet because the imperial mage already has the tier below he isn't willing to spend over 1/3 his dkp on the drop.
Thus it is fair overall because the drop isn't just going to an active member but to the member that it best helps. Bidding allows for needs/wants to play into the system for drop handouts.
I assume you're talking about a Godly Burial ring being up for bid.
In our upgrade system, the most active mage will get to upgrade their ring to the Godly. The imperial will be given to the next most active one, and the third most active will receive the royal. Then the mighty will be given out to anyone else who want it. Everyone wins. Blue is right. It's not someone's fault a royal or imperial dropped first.
Of course that is oversimplifying it.
We actually use a Total Points vs Gear Taken priority system (also known as
EP/GP). If, say, Imperial rings cost 1,000 points and Royal rings cost 500 points, and if the most active mage has 2 imperial rings, and the second most active only has one royal, then the priority for the first mage is 36k/2k = 18. The priority for the second mage is 25k/500 = 50. It means that the second mage has not been rewarded enough compared to the first mage, because his Points to Loot ratio is higher. In this scenario, a simple EP/GP system will reward the Godly to the second mage. Thus first one will have 2x Imperial and second one will have 1x Godly + 1Royal. (That is assuming there are no upgrade policies implemented.)
One thing I liked about EP/GP is that it is purely objective. There are no random factors or any collusion going on, and it pretty much removes the burden from our members to think about how much they are willing to bid to get an item they "really, really want", or "just want", or because "i don't like this guy, I'll outbid him no matter what, even if I don't need it"
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