There are still millions of players. You can always find someone complaining about every single aspect of the game. The majority however, did like the system and protested when it was removed and kept on vocing this opinion any time this came up again.
This was roughly how this already was handled. If you had the loot rules written out in the chat and the raidleader acted against those rules and ninja’ed some stuff, you could get the support involved and they would handle this.
The reason Blizzard removed PM was exactly this, it was work that had to be done and they wanted to save money on every corner possible, even at the cost of people being able to freely distribute their loot.
If you’re a solo/selfish gamer, that’s on you. I’d trade anything with crit on it, no matter what and I’d also trade a 0.2% upgrade to someone who gets 2% from that item. I prefer a world where progression isn’t halted because of bad rng or world first raiders aren’t sat for bad luck.
But sure restrict the entire player base over pug drama and post hoc rationalization.
I don’t doubt that you can “find posts” (as if that means something), but you seem to be very bad at understanding what the posts are about.
That being said, Master loot at the time it was removed was only available to guild groups (the threshold being either 70% or 80% had to be guild), the loot system could not be changed mid-combat or close to combat, and it really wasn’t a thing in the pug space at all.
To be entirely fair, “they would handle this” is pretty vague. Blizzard would not be responsible for removing loot from players, so at best you might get someone a slap on the wrist if you could prove they had been fraudulent, and plenty of loot discussion happened in media outside the game (e.g. voice chat) and Blizzard had zero control or purview to review or use that as evidence to determine someone had been fraudulent. Only if someone was stupid enough to be very specific in in-game chat would they be clearly actionable.
It would not surprise me if their support system was inundated with tickets they could do absolutely nothing about, and their staff were dealing with abuse from players insisting they should rip items from some person’s inventory and hand it to them because “Trust me”.
You know, I’m not sure that’s true… though to what extent I don’t actually know. For example, I think players are protected against people taking their mats for a craft, aren’t they? In the past it was pretty direct, not sure about today… but I can’t imagine people still don’t try those kinds of scams.
That’s entirely different. First, the idea of being “protected” against an in-game trade scam doesn’t actually require they take loot out of another player - if you lost 20 Hide in a trade scam, they can give you the 20 Hide back and make you whole.
They could then effectively offset the overall system by sanctioning the other player - after all, if they ban someone for a scam, the “extra Hide” gets removed from the system. Assuming that other player has laundered the results of their scam, reversing wouldn’t even be possible if they wanted to do it that way, e.g. if the scammer trades the Hide to an innocent player for a legit trade, and then uses the profit of that to do X then Y, blah blah. Even if they don’t, a one-off 20 Hide probably won’t change the economy or anything like that.
Loot disputes don’t work that way. For example, if a Master looter gives Bob a neck, but Jeff puts in a ticket claiming that he deserves it, taking it away from Bob to give it to Jeff is a supremely messy proposition - Bob didn’t do anything wrong except get awarded a loot item by a system he may have zero control/influence over, Bob may have sold his old neck since he now has a better one, if they just “give” Jeff an extra neck to compensate, that’s basically bypassing loot systems (4 items per boss, etc.) entirely, on what could be major high-ticket items, like the tier’s BiS trinket/neck/weapon. Hence, they (imo, wisely) won’t get involved in THAT nonsense.
The most common occurance was when the loot rules (e.g. main before second rolls) was established in the raid chat, the item dropped, the PM rolled and lost. If the PM then still took the item, a GM would review this upon ticket and take the item from the PM and give it to the person who won the roll.
Ofc this was all dependent on having your loot rules written out clearly in the chat and not over some 3rd party voice or chat, but this was also the reason why people would demand to have the loot rules clearly written in chat for pugs. At least this was the case in wotlk and cata, i havent done many pugs after that.
And sure, this would cause quite some futile tickets where it wasnt clear and a GM couldnt do anything.
I’ve been privy to a lot of these “scam” reports as well and it was often someone who neglected to read the loot distribution spreadsheet/loot rules/res list and got salty because they’ve waited “too long” for it to even drop.
Very rarely was it a true ninja, though it did happen. Much like the key that is going absolutely amazing before someone leaves. It happens, but not as often as people claim.
That’s a scenario. Idk that we the players really had access to anything that would indicate what was “the most common occurrence” for the tickets Blizzard received, especially considering people could and probably did just file tickets without making a fuss in raid where everyone else could see.
That said, even that hypothetical is a fair bit of work for a GM. They have to make a call that the ticketer is correctly claiming X as their main spec, which is a subjective enough term unless that was also typed out in chat. comb hours of chat logs worth of text to make sure things were as clear-cut as the ticket holder claims, no rules were amended and then agreed to, etc. etc.
IIRC, they were very specific that they would only remove items with the consent of the loot holder at at least one point. I can’t remember EXACTLY when, but it’d be around late 2000s.
Incidentally, I remembered people used to share GM chats where their tickets were refused and what not, so I tried to do a quick Google to see if my memory was right and found this:
There may be earlier ones if someone cares to search deeper, but that’s from 2012 so yeah.
If that’s in reference to me, this is a US account for providing beta feedback mostly. My mains on EU and I’ve been raiding on it since we’ll before ML was removed.
Honestly though, when you post responses like this it’s hard not to think you’re just trying to bait people.
Actually, I think you’re right. All the “ninja” issues in the past were never really resolved by Blizzard. Just server-wide sanctions on the player themselves, which don’t really work anymore since it effectively region-based now and the pool of players is significantly larger.
Anyway to the point of the topic (not to you, Darielle), I’m fine with personal loot being enforced for pugs, but anything that qualifies as a “guild run” (I think it’s like 80% guild members or something… whatever lights up the mini map icon) should allow for the option of master loot.
Loot is a part of the game that’s interesting to me. Even if I’m not getting something, it’s fun to see what dropped and have things be rolled on. I much enjoy Classic WoW for this aspect. Retail just scrolls them by in loot chat super quickly and it’s kind of just glossed over now…
I won’t comment on master loot being good or bad for the game but its extremely frustrating when I get a piece of loot I don’t need and I can’t trade it because its my highest ilvl so it goes into my bank for the entire patch. This happens even more now that the last 2 raid bosses drop the highest ilvl loot so theirs no way I can have those slots covered to trade by doing m+ or getting a 252 raid drop
Master Looter was removed in response to the overwhelming number of customer service ticket interactions generated by perceived loot abuse.
Justified or otherwise, the amount of administrative effort required to attend to the tickets was probably untenable. I’d bet dollars to donuts that Blizzard, in their infinite quest to reduce costs, probably saw this is as such a major costs savings that player interests were irrelevant.
If you think people didn’t abuse ML, then you must have been living under a rock. Probably more consequential however, was the number of conflicts that could not be traced back to any sort of agreement. When someone is next in line for a drop and the GM gives it to his girlfriend, that’s not Blizzard’s fault, but it became their problem. A lot, I’m sure.
At this point no one is asking for Master Loot to come back for pugs. It’d be helpful if people stopped trying to use the pug argument as a reason to say “get bent” to organized guild groups.
The issue is that many “guild groups” are just glorified pugs. The vast majority of guilds in the game are just cesspool guilds with no real organisation or shared goals. And these guilds having access to master looter was why it was totally removed to begin with.
Supporting evidence for this broad and likely incorrect generalization?
No, the reason was already correctly identified by Deevax. It was a cost saving measure to virtually eliminate customer support tickets about loot abuse.
I don’t have evidence, but based on my experiences on the forums, most of those tickets were likely frivolous, but guilds paid the price for selfish individualists abusing the ticket system by incorrectly claiming to be victims.
No, because Guild groups aren’t necessarily exclusively all guild members. I can’t remember, but I think it’s 80%. So if a 20 man group pugs 4 people, then it is a guild group with potentially 4 butthurt pugs that feel like anytime a boss drops something they want a theft occurred if they didn’t get it.
Guild groups is usually 80%, with some exceptions, e.g. in 5-mans it’s 60%, but I don’t even know if you could activate Master loot in a 5-man because I’ve never met anyone who would have thought about trying it (I certainly didn’t).
When you consider that their policy became “Reject, send boilerplate response about policy not to interfere”, I doubt the number of loot tickets themselves were causing some big issue. They could even easily have been automated to be rejected. It would have (imo) likely been the following up where people start cussing out the Support staff or hurling abuse at them that made them think to cut that out.
