SWAPS loot system offers another WoW DKP option

I'm finding myself really fascinated with loot systems lately -- the old DKP is pretty good, but

even that has drama, and it seems like there's a lot of interesting ideas going around about how

to evenly and fairly distribute loot amongst a group of people. OutDPS has a writeup about a loot

system called SWAPS. Instead of sending "points" off into the void, you actually "give" your spent

points to everyone else in the raid. You start out with 1,000 free points (though those are

distributed over time, to prevent new players from having tons of points early on) and then when

an item comes up, everyone bids on it: the highest bid gets the item and the points they bid are

spread around to the rest of the raiders. In other words, if someone in a 10-man raid bids 500

points and wins an item, those 500 points are distributed evenly amongst the other nine raiders.

While the winner loses the 500 points they spent, everyone else gets a bonus 56 points. The person

winning the item "pays" for the privilege of taking it by beefing up everyone else's point totals.

It is probably not a perfect system (there's no way to reward points for anything other than loot

dropping, for one thing, and while some people have modified the rules to create a separate

bidding pool for class items, the basic system doesn't cover class or offspec items), but it does

solve a lot of the questions of fairness, and it keeps everything pretty above-board: if you are

low on points, the only reason would be that either you just started raiding, or that you've just

spent a lot of points on an item. There's an addon, of course, and it will give you all sorts of

reports and updates on where all of your raiders are at in the system. If you've been poking

around for a DKP system that is based on being open and fair, it might be worth trying out in your

guild.