Throne and Liberty DKP setup: how guilds run loot fairly

Throne and Liberty doesn't ship a guild loot system. Past 30 members, the "officer picks who gets it" approach starts to break, and the guild starts losing people quietly. DKP is the most common solution, and the version that works for T&L looks a little different than what BDO or WoW guilds run. Here's the setup.

What's different about T&L loot

Three things shape T&L's DKP versus other MMOs:

1. Loot drops in fewer, more contested chunks. Boco, Tevent, the bigger world bosses — the items that matter come in small numbers, and a lot of members want them.
2. Gear scoring is real. Combat power and gear scoring carry weight in T&L PvP, and members notice when others gear up faster.
3. Server merges and faction shifts keep changing the social context. A DKP system that requires hand-tuning every season is going to get abandoned.

A working T&L DKP system is simple enough that members trust it without thinking, but rigorous enough that the math works for 100 members.

What earns DKP in T&L

Default to: anything where members lost playtime to show up for the guild.

• Scheduled raids (Boco, Tevent, contested world bosses) — primary DKP source
• Guild raid events — your weekly large-group content
• Guild-organized PvP events — open-world objectives, contested zones
• Faction quests run with the guild — secondary, smaller award
• Guild base activities, donations — no DKP. Don't dilute.

The signal is "you spent guild time you could have spent on yourself." If a member is solo-grinding for their own gear, that's not DKP.

How much DKP per event

Flat per event for the first season:

• Standard raid: 100 DKP
• Major contested boss: 150 DKP
• Guild PvP event with 10+ members: 80 DKP
• Guild faction quest run: 30 DKP

After a season of running flat, you can layer in performance bonuses if you have the data. Most T&L guilds run flat indefinitely because the drama from performance-weighting outweighs the math benefits.

What to charge for items

Three tiers works fine for T&L:

The 80% rule on premium items forces real choice. Members can't farm one event and walk away with everything; they have to keep showing up to keep earning.

Blind auctions vs visible bidding

For T&L specifically, blind auctions work best for premium drops because:

• T&L raid loot is contested — three members might want the same item, and visible bidding turns into bidding wars that inflate prices unfairly.
• Members never seeing other bids means honest valuation. The system filters for who really wants the item, not who can outbid in real time.
• Discord-based bid submission keeps the math auditable.

For standard / cheap drops, need/greed is fine. Anyone who can use it rolls Need; everyone else rolls Greed. Saves DKP overhead on items that aren't worth fighting over.

Attendance and decay

Without attendance gates, members hoard DKP for months and show up only when premium drops are predicted. Two defenses:

• Minimum attendance to bid — members can't spend DKP unless they've attended at least 50% of guild raids in the last 4 weeks. Stops cherry-pickers.
• Decay — DKP drops 5% per week of complete inactivity. Active members stay current; inactive members lose hoard value.

Use both. You'll catch the gaming behaviors before they corrode trust.

Migrating from "officer picks"

If your guild currently lets officers distribute loot, the migration to DKP is more political than technical:

1. Announce the change at least 2 weeks before going live. Members will adjust expectations.
2. Start everyone at zero. No grandfathered balances. Your most active members will earn back to top quickly anyway.
3. First raid under DKP is awkward. Officers run the awards process publicly so members see the math.
4. Week 4 is when it feels normal. Don't change rules in week 2 even if someone complains. Stability over perfection.

Common DKP failures (T&L flavor)

• Officer awards DKP late — by the time they remember, members forgot they were there. Fix: award within 24h of the event, no exceptions.
• Bidding system that's not really blind — bids leak through Discord screenshots. Fix: server-side auction with locked submissions.
• Loot pool dries up between contests — members earn DKP but have nothing to spend it on. Fix: schedule premium events on a predictable cadence.
• Leaving members keep their balance somehow — DKP is leverage if it carries. Fix: balance resets to zero on leave/kick.

How CoGM ships DKP for T&L

CoGM has a full DKP system, but the deeper T&L tooling — DKP auctions tuned for T&L's loot pool, gear scoring, raid scheduling, server-merge handling — lives at our sister site throney.gg, which was built specifically for T&L guilds. Same Discord login works on both. Use cogm.app if you're running a multi-game community; use throney.gg if T&L is your only game and you want the deeper feature set.

Get the deeper T&L tools at throney.gg or start a free CoGM community for multi-game management.