After all, how long were we told that vanilla servers were absolutely, positively, guaranteed to never be happening and that we were wrong for wanting vanilla servers?
I understand Blizzard’s point of view, loot trading allows them to ignore CS requests about loot, and that saves them money on customer service, but it also has the potential to be massively disruptive to the classic experience.
This isn’t about #nochanges. This is about a specific change that allows, even encourages, people to collude and act disingenuously toward their fellow players. That kind of toxicity can, and I believe will, help to destroy the sense of trust and community that differentiates the WoW of 2004 from the WoW of 2018.
People are going to ninja items. It happens. It sucks, but it happens and there’s nothing that can reasonably be done to stamp it out. But that kind of toxic behavior in vanilla wow was kept in check by making it almost impossible to escape a bad reputation (no name changes, server changes w/ severe restrictions every 6mo, etc). Loot trading prevents that bad reputation from ever coming to light because no one will ever know that you cheated a good faith system.
I don’t see how loot trading is an issue, or how you’re “cheating the system.” If you’re trading for the loot, that means you’re trading with the winner of the piece of loot in question. The winner who won it fair and square, whether it be by /roll, Loot Council, or some other system. If someone wins a /roll and they decide to trade that piece of loot to someone else, that’s their prerogative. Just because you feel that person didn’t deserve it doesn’t mean they’re “cheating the system.”
Loot trading isn’t a huge issue in theory. If it was set up so that the only realistic usage was the intended “fix a mistake without the GMs having to get involved” it would be perfectly acceptable. The way they have implemented it in retail is far too open to abuse though.
This is one of the worries I have, it may not seem big right now, but I can see ALOT of people abusing it down the line. People go crazy over loot, and will do anything to get it. Just hoping now it doesn’t get too out of hand.
Its not any different than any other kind of loot ninja.
Either the community will handle it themselves like so many say they will (server rep, blacklist etc) or they wont.
2/3 could be heavily abused. Someone could rage quit because the wrong person won the roll and immediately drop the group or pull a boss before the issue could be rectified.
I’m completely ok with loot trading, maybe drop it to an hour or 30 minutes but the issue with “ninja looting” is not a good argument against it.
Even in the old system, someone could do that and just ticket a GM. By the time a GM actually responded, the person could have equipped the item/used it to show the group they were going to use it and then just make up an excuse to the GM that they rolled for it accidently.
With the loot trade system, if I’m not mistaken, you can make them equip the item which will disallow trading. This makes it so they won’t be able to trade it or ticket it through the old system without some kind of evidence that the GM’s can pull up showing they ninja’d it. If they don’t equip it, then you can blacklist them for ninja looting.
All in all, the loot trade system actually prevents ninja looting better than the old system that way.
But what if it’s a weapon that is an upgrade and they can use but haven’t learned yet ?
Hunter and polearm is an example. Remember polearms cost 1g to learn. As a hunter I didn’t learn polearms until I got one.
And on a pserver a green polearm dropped in a DM run.
I told the group I hadn’t learned polearms yet but it was an upgrade and I was going to roll need and then farm that 1g.
If you are that worried about friend ninjas, just set it to master looter and have people do /roll in chat along with whether their roll is need or greed. That way you will see who rolls what.
Weapons are obviously a grey area and not something I would hold to below max level chars. you can always keep a list if you need to know which weapons a class can wear and which need to be trained. At max level I would expect all weapons to be trained. One can also check to see their current weapons to see if they’re already wearing, say, a polearm that needs to be trained.
Armor/trinkets is a completely different story.
a Simple solution to the problem
if you roll need. the item becomes soul bound. and untradeable.
this restricts loot trading to greed rolls and master looted items.