Questions of Fairness

It's been 6 weeks since the guild officers approved the use of a point-based looting system (which I will refer to as a modified-DKP system) for end-game raiding, and in that time I have documented looting data from 17 Karazhan runs (13 from Blue team and 4 from Gold team). The modified DKP was created to facilitate fair, objective, and calm loot distribution. I wanted to see if my data could suggest whether the system has been fair or not.

In the chart below I sampled 22 players (some active guild members and 2 ex-guildies) and presented data on the numbers of individuals' loot items received from Kara over 6 weeks and the number of runs each person participated in. I finally computed the ratio of loot received per runs attended. For this study I assumed that a general measure of fairness would be numbers of loot received per runs attended (4th column).

Of course this chart has flaws. Numbers of loot per person by no means takes into account the value of each item they received (T4 items are worth a lot more than a random epic off a trash mob). Also, number of runs attended per person by no means takes into account the time each person spent in an instance. Some runs last 5 hours, and some last 1 hour. Finally, I sampled Blue team members more frequently simply because there was more data available on them; Gold team is roughly half alts, so alts looting numbers were linked with their main characters on Blue team. With all this said, I think we can use this data to get a basic understanding of how fair (or not) the modified DKP has been.




When you look at the 4th column you notice that the ratios for #'s of loot/runs are all over the place from zero to 1.875, and everywhere in-between. So those who expect looting to be completely equitable across the board are likely to be disappointed. However the better question might be ... is this ratio related to the number of runs one participates in (i.e. do people who run a lot and build up rollover points get more loot?)?

I have not done a linear regression on this yet, but I will if I need to!!! Just by glancing at the data it doesn't appear that those who run more often have an unfair advantage at looting under the modified DKP. There are those who appear very lucky and those who appear very unlucky, but these extreme ratios are largely because they haven't participated in very many runs (low denominators). Those who have run more than 10 times seem to fall between 0.2 and 0.8 in the loot/runs ratios. Four of the double-digit runners are above 0.5 and four are below 0.5. Any statistics people out there feel free to compute the standard deviation and all that; I'm not getting a grade for this so I'm not going to do it.

I am open to any questions people have about this data, and as always I appreciate feedback and constructive criticism.