Except these complaints almost entirely revolve around LFR. Where you are not going to be allowed to change loot rules. You can already change your desired loot rules with consequences in other content.
Blizzards intent is based on what they allow us to do. Unless people are exploiting a bug, its reasonable to assume that what they allow us to do is their intent. In the face of a lack of them directly stating otherwise.
What we are allowed to do, by default, is fair.
Implying people would stop complaining because Blizzard stated some sorta intent would just not happen. Blizzard has stated that high end content is not intended to be pugged. That it should be done with premade groups. Yet people still complain about not having a queue or the issues with pugging.
That is just a normal aspect of human behavior. They will complain regardless of intent stated. Which is why I stated intent was irrelevant.
Oh please don’t misunderstand my point, I am not suggesting PL was without its flaws. I was happy to see it go for premade raids in lieu of group loot. I honestly didn’t run LFR enough for the deluge of whispers begging for loot to be that detrimental to my gameplay experience.
But this particular problem wouldn’t require sacking PL entirely to solve; removing the announcement of who got what item would solve the problem. In fact, that would probably still be a good idea for LFR under group loot today.
We may have to agree to disagree here. I’ve seen a lot more anger from player A directed towards player B for needing on an item player A felt more deserving of than when PL gave an item player A wanted to player B. Both of us only have anecdotal data here so it’s unlikely either one of us will know for sure.
Even if it is a statistical anomaly, it’s still a benefit for PL. I’m not suggesting Blizzard shouldn’t have moved to GL because of the narrow scope of this PL benefit, just that it was a clear benefit of PL.
That isn’t quite correct in the context of a PUG. The reason PL creates an issue with rings, necks, and cloaks is trading across a consistent raid group. Every member of the raid has the same rings, necks, and cloaks across all loot tables. In a consistent group of players who have an incentive to help gear teammates, this greatly increases your chance to acquire one of those pieces from raid because anyone else who gets one they don’t need can trade it to you in addition to your odds of getting it as a drop. On week 1 this likely won’t really come into play, but by week 6 you’ll definitely be seeing too many of these items.
But if we take trades away, now your only avenue for a ring, neck, or cloak is to have it drop for you. While these items might still be overly represented compared to any other slot, their chances of dropping for you compared to other slots will be less than your chance to get them from either drop or trade under PL.
Please do not misunderstand my point here. PL had its problems, possibly even moreso than group loot. I’m not asking for it back, certainly not in premades. It’s just inaccurate to claim there were no situations that PL handled better than GL, even if in totality GL would still be the better option overall.
No it really isn’t . Let me explain what Ninja looting really is. Ninja looter = loots item that they did not win and leaves the group . the people you complain about were there and participated. they have every right to roll on loot .even if they are going to vendor it. I am sorry you do not understand the actual loot process.
I noticed this as well. As someone who started before personal loot I often only need on things I actually need as an upgrade, but that definitely seems to not be the norm anymore.
If Blizz doesn’t want people who are “overgeared” to go into LFR or even Normal and roll need on a piece of gear that isn’t technically an upgrade, they shouldn’t make them different tints, knowing how people will absolutely do just that in order to get the set in the particular color they want. Blizzard absolutely understands this and is aware of how important transmog is to the endgame.
Blizzard cannot and would not enforce social system rules on top of the normal rules that make the dice appear or not appear. If the dice appear, you have just as much right to roll need on it as anyone else if you all participated in the kill, and that’s exactly what CS would say if someone reported it. They’re not going to magically give the person the item because they lost a roll to someone else who also hit need.
There is no way to enforce a social system in a group full of random people, that’s the nature of pugging, (and always has been) and knowing this should help you set expectations before going in.
I get what you are saying in the sense of PL having it’s issues, and I do get that you weren’t advocating for its return or anything else like that. I don’t view what you said as you being a proponent of it coming back. What I am saying is in regards to the two points you made about it having those particular strengths, of which I vehemently disagree with.
It may be anecdotal but even at its best, the only thing that PL actually did for the game was create a culture of harassment to the point where it was normalized to such a degree that this behaviour in the comic was commonplace. And it didn’t have to exaggerate at all which is why the main joke of it is “He is dead” rather than “Look at LFR/PL”.
One can argue that PL had its strengths … but my point is that precisely none of those strengths made the game better, and instead made the game MANY times worse. Which, after all… actually makes sense since Personal Loot came as a solution to get rid of DKP, sort of. There’s more nuance to it but the shorthand for it basically boils down to that PL came to the game to decentralize player’s ability to control their own and other’s loot (by making the game handle all of that for folks), which created these side effects that were actually benefits for what the system wanted to do. It just wasn’t beneficial for the game overall.
But this might be a rare case where I overall agree that a sentiment of “agree to disagree” is probably the correct conclusion. Not a particular fan of that phrase but, this might be a rare time I agree with it.
While that would actually be fair, it’d also be a dumb request from people who claim they need this gear so much to actually use to give up the advantage they currently have with rolling restrictions just so they can still be mad when they lose and lose even more often.
It’s PuG content in general. There are also posts in these regards. The LFR loot rule issue could be decided before queueing.
Strong disagree. What’s allowed is based on intent plus technical limitations. If Blizzard is unable to determine whether something is an upgrade , they are being fully permissive in their approach to err on the side of allowing people to decide. Personally – since, again, we don’t know the true intent – I feel that this was designed so that people could use the “honor system” of deciding whether it was an upgrade for them, not an excuse to roll need on anything they can. I can only derive that from the customer support post.
Anything given is unlikely to be truly fair. In a guild, these rolls would never fly, because people are working as a team. Just because you don’t know these people doesn’t suddenly make this “fair”. However, fair is subjective, and all we can do is present our cases one way or another, so I don’t expect everyone to agree.
People wouldn’t necessarily stop complaining, but we’d have clear intent to point to, instead of differing interpretations.
That’d be mythic. I don’t think we’re talking about mythic. Also, do you have somewhere they said this? I’ve not heard that before. Additionally, if Blizzard’s intent is irrelevant then their statement about pugging high end content would also be irrelevant.
But there is a transmog roll. Why create one if they could just roll need instead?
Oh yea, I don’t think this is a CS/ticket issue. I think it’s a failed honor system experiment. So that should be rectified. Or Blizzard should weigh in on their official stance and whether Need is only allowed because of technical limitations or if that was their true intent. Then people can decide for themselves whether or not to continue to run LFR or PuGs.
As for me, I run LFR for the tokens, that’s it. I won’t run normals because 1) I’m a bit nervous about it and 2) if all the geared players can just roll Need anyways, what’s the point?
Absolutely there is! By allowing or disallowing rolls, which is what we’re talking about here.
Yea, it obviously wouldn’t be in their favor, but at least it would be clear what the case is. Either way, someone is going to be affected by any change, whether it’s restrictions on higher ilevel players or lower.
Overall, I see all of your points, and I think they’re rational and well thought out. I disagree on some points, but I think we’ve probably come to a point where it’s simply a difference of opinion.
I do absolutely appreciate the congenial discussion!
You’d decide which of the options you’d be ok to adhering with, and it would match people based on the normal reqs and loot rules.
What I’m saying is that I don’t think it’s that “made up”. We have info from Blizzard saying what they limited on for Need, at the least. We also have the presence of the Transmog roll to indicate that intent. So I would say there’s more of a leg to stand on in terms of the basis of the loot rules than not.
The challenge though is that any attempt to derive a meaning will be influenced by your own preferences and biases. It is equally valid to derive that Blizzard has accepted they cannot do better through system changes and the ability for players to roll for whatever motivation they have beyond the limitations that do exist is acceptable. We just don’t know.
I won’t try to convince you that your interpretation is incorrect because it’s purely subjective. I just intend to point out that your interpretation does serve as an argument against anyone who puts forward a different interpretation.
The transmog roll gets plenty of use for farm content with premade groups. It would take additional developer time to code an alternative loot roll system for LFR compared to simply reusing the one that includes the transmog button for normal and above.
I acknowledge I cannot prove that Blizzard put the transmog button into the loot system for PUGs. But as someone who has worked in software development my entire career including the last half of it being on the management side, I can tell you with absolute certainty the presence or absence of any feature can boil down to resource cost rather than customer value. In the absence of official word from Blizzard regarding the transmog button in PUG settings, I do not think you can assume that its presence was an intentional decision that they expect players to use in that context.
Except that there are other explanations for the presence of that option. The only way we could say the presence of something confirms intent is if no alternate explanations exist.
So, this is for the other loot rolling options I mentioned. For instance, the split of transmog/Need or the inability to roll Need on items below the ilevel of what you currently have. For something like LFR, it would request what option(s) you would be comfortable with. Of course, the more options selected, possibly shorter queue time.
Additionally, it provides finer-grained control for standard PuGs and more enforcement for guilds, should they choose to use it.
Interestingly enough, I’ve worked in software dev as well, but only dabbled a little bit in management. Yes, I agree, a lot of it is resource cost, but many places i have been also utilize feature flags to enable and disable individual pieces of functionality. Of course, neither of us know precisely how it looks in the code, so it’s really only speculation. But I’ll acknowledge that it’s possible that it could be intended for something else, and not PuGs, though I find that (personally) less likely, especially in something that seems so straightforward.
Which makes it even more frustrating that Blizzard doesn’t speak up on any of these posts…
For sure, and I suspect at the scale of Blizzard doing such a thing would be small potatoes in terms of effort. But the effort is still not zero to build a feature flag, especially on the maintenance post-development. I can easily see Blizzard brass not seeing the potential confusion caused by the existence of a transmog button in the LFR roll to outweigh whatever effort would be required to hide it.