MMORPG: Collaboration and the Art of Loot Division

In a World of Warcraft (WoW) Classic server in China, you and your 39 guildmates, all at level 60, have been farming Baron Geddon for the best shoulder equipment. You are the main tank of your team, taking all of Geddon’s attacks so that your squishy damage dealers don't have to die from them.

“Baron Geddon performs one last service for Ragnaros...”

Having heard this line for like a hundred times, you see Geddon fall once again before you. The boss fight, requiring the combined strength of 40 members, is finally over; but collaboration isn’t — in some sense, it has just begun.

As Byers and Crocco have written in the introduction of their book, role-playing games often “encourage players to collaborate in the game by forming adventuring parties or guilds capable of completing dangerous quests” (Byers and Crocco, 6). While dungeon raids is certainly the traditional way of cooperation, Massive Multiplayer Online RPG’s (MMORPG’s), like World of Warcraft, are adding another layer of cooperation right after those raids, in the process of dividing the loot.

Yes, another form of collaboration starts once everyone approaches and clicks on the dead boss to see what items it has dropped. The loot is visible to every participant of the raid, and it will later be distributed amongst themselves. However, none are allowed to actually pick up those precious items except for one person: to prevent members from looting out of selfishness and greed, WoW mechanics dictates that only a previously designated “master looter” can actually click on each of those items, and decide to whom they will go to. As a result of this, the master looter can easily appropriate all the items for himself if he chooses to. Hence, being a fair master looter implies exercising self-control in loot division and expecting all other raid members to comply with the division; on the other hand, being a normal raid participant implies trusting completely the integrity of the master looter agreeing to his decisions. In this situation, the master looter’s self-control and other members’ trust enables the two parties to cooperate, so that the fair division all raid spoils is made possible.

(Sidenote: the “master looter” mechanics is removed from normal WoWservers in patch 8.0.1, released July 17, 2018. But since I am using a raid example in a Classic server, in which a patch years before 8.0.1 would be in use, the mechanics is still in operation there.)

The word “fair” is used twice in the above scheme of cooperation, but what exactly does “fair” mean? How is fairness ascertained? It is certainly not through the personal whim of the master looter. At the same time, the complicated class specialization system of WoW makes allocating loot based on damage contribution (or healing, although less intuitive) undesirable, since some classes are designed to deal damage and some to heal and buff. A completely random way is also out of the question, again because the class specialization makes it suboptimal: rolling the dice might let a priest get a unequippable paladin armor while the paladin gets nothing.

The system actually in use in WoW to determine who gets that is called the Dragon Kill Points (DKP). There are, in fact, a few variations of how DKP is defined, obtained, and used in MMORPG’s, but I will not go into the details concerning each of them. Here I will provide a simple explanation of the one that the Chinese servers of WoWuses the most, and explain how that, too, cannot exist without collaboration.

The form of DKP in question is called the Gold DKP, or the GDKP. Unlike other variations of DKP, it is not awarded by guilds for participation in raids — that would cause the DKP to be nullified once a player change her guild, which actually happens fairly often. GDKP, as its name suggests, is related to the amount of in-game gold a player is carrying, and that gold is used in the exact same way of DKP. The use of GDKP did not exist in the early days of WoW, and was introduced a few years later by the major guilds at the time. It works as follows —

When a raid finishes, all the items the boss drops is then auctioned one by one, and each participant would bid openly for the items they want. The price they are calling out and paying with, however, is no longer guild-given DKP but their gold. The winner of each item would strike an in-game deal with the master looter, in which she gives the amount of gold she bid in exchange for the item. The gold she payed is then divided and distributed in such a way that each raid participant (including the payer) gets an equal share.

The element of cooperation in this process is easy to discern. Similar to the designation of the master looter, by entering a raid, all participants are, mindfully or not, agreeing upon a convention that is created by something that they themselves had never had a say in, although it is true to say that the GDKP is less of a social contract than the master looter procedure, for in the latter, all raid participants give up their right to pick up the loot and give it to one among them, in exchange for a loot distribution in a comparatively fair and sensible manner. But then there is no mandate dictating that the GDKP system must be used by all and abided by all (especially in the case of the master looter himself), and yet that is a fact, and not a player in the CN servers has ever openly argued against it.

With that being said, however, the auction system certainly has its problems. An obvious one might be that those who carry more gold have the option to bid selfishly, in order to obtain items that might not work best (or at all) for their own character specializations. An extreme example here would be a player who carries an extraordinary amount of gold — for example, a famous streamer and guild leader who asks his subscribers for a handsome payment in return for joining his guild (this person is purely hypothetical J) [there are, of course, many other ways to quickly earn gold in WoWand similar MMORPG’s that has nothing to do with actually playing and farming the gold, many of those invented in and exclusive to the Chinese servers, but that is another blog article]. Perhaps the only compensation for onlookers here is the share of gold they might receive from a big bid of the rich. But we must be reminded that without the GDKP system, anyone would have the option to obtain loot selfishly.

In a typical raid group of World of Warcraft, the interactions between the tanks, the damage dealers, and the healers has always been the most discernable form of cooperation. But the game is more than just dungeon-battle simulators — it is a society, its individuals having needs, and its mechanics pushing towards the fulfillment and regulations of those needs — and that requires at least one other form of cooperation.