Please Reconsider Group Loot Only in Vault

Community WoW Community Council
1

I’ve posted in the beta forums and general discussion threads about this, but I want to bring this up here as well.

Group Loot is a fine system, but it should not be forced on us. If we want to run a group with Personal Loot - let us.

We were told when Ion told us Master Loot was returning that it would be an option - why are we not being extended the same choice for Group Loot? (Also, I love that you told us we’d get Master Loot back as an option, but now it’s Group Loot only)

This is especially a problem in LFR. Anyone who did Dragon Soul LFR understands why this is a problem. If a necklace/ring drops, you’ll be rolling against 24 other people for it.

If more than 1 copy of a weapon drops, you’ll be rolling against everyone for it, and the same person can win the same weapon. (And I’d wager at least 90% of the time, that person immediately dropped group instead of giving that extra weapon to someone else who wanted it.)

And a good 90%, if not higher, of the time, people will roll need on everything they can. Because they want the gold. They don’t care about the other players.

And you can’t just make it so you can only need if it’s an upgrade - because you have no idea if it’s an upgrade. That haste/crit mail boot may have a ton of haste and a little crit, and be a MASSIVE upgrade for the survival hunter with boots that have a LOT of mastery that have a higher ilvl. You can’t tell if it’s an upgrade just by ilvl, you don’t tune well enough for that. Secondary stats matter and vary based on spec. (Not to mention Group Loot in LFR would mean you’d pretty much never complete the LFR recolor)

This system is not horrible in an organized group like Normal. But in LFR, it is a Nightmare. The original post does not specify if it will be included in LFR, but I’m assuming it will. This will be horrible in pugs as well, which is why I’m asking the option be introduced. Rather than forced. (Likewise, Personal Loot in LFR, and LFR only, unless you add a system where the group can vote on Personal or Group)

In short: Please reconsider the forced group loot. Give us the option.

PuGs of Normal+ will prefer Personal Loot probably 80/90% of the time. Guild groups will probably prefer Group/Master Loot.

But please, do not force Group Loot on us all. ESPECIALLY LFR. Give us the option.

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I agree with you as well on this topic when it comes to Group Loot. I also feel that we should have the option to use it or not use it.

As you mentioned regarding raid difficulties such as Looking for Raid (LFR), That many players are not going to enjoy this. I remember using Group Loot back during the last raid of the Cataclysm expansion, And it wasn’t too great.

We had pretty much everyone rolling on weapons, trinkets, gear, etc, That many people needed. And sometimes only (1) piece of gear would drop that most of the raid needed. On top of this, Some players would try and roll Need on stuff they already had to grief players by taking gear they clearly didn’t need.

I know back in Cataclysm, I remember going at least a couple weeks at one point without getting any gear at all. This was because of the sheer amount of players trying to roll on the same stuff week after week.

So I would like it if this change was reverted back to Personal Loot for all difficulties for raiding. If you read the comments from This Announcement from wowhead, You’ll see a lot of players don’t want this.

There was also a comment there saying we should keep Personal Loot, But remove the iLevel restrictions for trading to other player’s in your raid. This would have been the ideal option in my opinion.

Just my 2-cents on this topic!

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3

Please, just come back to the Legion formula. Personal Loot for pick up and Master Loot for guilds. With this Group Loot in practice the guilds will use it like the Master Loot while the pugs will suffer from constant ninjas.

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4

I think most people would just prefer the option, rather than forcing it on organized groups one way or another. Like my guild had a small chat about it back when Ion said Master Loot would return a bit different and most of us were fine sticking with Personal Loot.

LFR should be forced Personal Loot - the only time I think most people will agree a forced loot type is necessary.

However, I think groups should be able to choose between Personal or the new Group Loot, which Ion called the replacement for Master Loot. Not all forced into one or the other.

The devs constantly push that they’re trying to make the game about options for the player, then do things like this and it’s conflicting and makes the game unfun.

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5

Well the group loot causes accessibility issues so it would be good to see a solution added with it.

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If this system ends up in LFR it will be an abject disaster.

Clearly it’s been long enough now that no one, not even the devs, remember how we got to where we are.

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Only thing i get is Ashran flashbacks. “You will play it exactly the way WE want you to >:(” Which backfired several times because…duh.

Oh it absolutely will.

Time to level a Hunter because “every item is a hunter item”.

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Some updates and clarifications were posted on this topic: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/changes-experiments-to-raid-rewards-in-dragonflight-season-1/1352473/363

Thanks for your feedback so far!

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I posted it there too, but just for not emphasis:

Or or or, hear me out, it might be crazy.

Listen to the players.

Don’t put it in LFR.

None of the changes you made affect any of the problems with group loot in LFR Dragon Soul.

If someone has the ability to roll need, they will. Period. We learned this in Cataclysm.

You are creating and fostering a toxic environment by forcing Group Loot in LFR. There’s no way around that.

It is blatantly obvious not a single dev on the raid team participated in Dragon Soul LFR, because anyone who did would not be okay with this. Dragon Soul LFR was hands down the worst experience in my entire WoW career.

At this point, I don’t care if you force Group Loot on Normal+ - you guys will see it kills pugs and change that later on, I know that for sure.

However, I will not stop, even after Dragonflight launches if it goes live, explaining how bad Group Loot is for LFR.

At the Very Very Very Least, Keep Personal Loot in LFR.

Otherwise you are encouraging toxic behavior. People will still need roll on anything they can - even if they don’t need it.

Why? Because they can sell it for ~100g. So unless your solution to that is to make LFR items have no sale price, which would be horrible and negatively impact LFR players, you still haven’t solved the underlying problem with Group Loot in LFR.

What is your solution for items like Necks and Rings that every single spec can use as main spec? 25 people fighting for a single ring/neck that drops. Do you know how rare it’s going to be to get a Neck or Ring in LFR, let alone all 3?

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personal anecdote from group loot in LFR:
Last boss in Dragon Soul, drops the bow. 3 hunters in the raid. The one who won it wanted us (me and another) to literally beg for it. He had the bow already and just rolled on it again to flex his ego.

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Now just wait until the bow from the final boss drops, that Blizzard said is unique and a higher ilvl than the rest of her loot and the hunter who doesn’t need it because they have a Normal+ or M+ bow that’s higher ilvl wins it and sells it.

I had many items drop in Dragon Soul and had to lose them to people who didn’t want them but just wanted to sell them.

And the majority of the time, they outright told us that’s what they were doing. “Sorry, I need gold.” or such.

This is going to foster an incredibly toxic environment.

Here’s a better idea using the Group Loot System you designed for LFR specifically:

  1. Keep Personal Loot.
  2. If loot dropped, give you a pop up that said, “Would you like to put this loot up for roll?”
  3. If you say no, nothing happens. If you say yes (have a confirmation box), then the other raid members that are eligible could roll Need/Greed on it, using the same system you guys have designed for Normal+. Then whoever wins it, the game automatically distributes it to them and makes it untradeable. (This is to prevent people from exploiting the system with friends)

Voila. Personal Loot is still there so you aren’t rolling against other players for items, but Group Loot can be used to distribute items people don’t want, to cut down on the toxic whispers.

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It’s good to see there’s some auto component to this but can a solution for selecting need or greed be implemented for players with accessibility needs. Going back to need or greed means we will require 4 macros, 2 for need and 2 for greed as these macros were long and had to be made for each frame and hit the macro limit at 3 frames hence requiring 2 for need and 2 for greed. Even with these macros it was lucky jackpot if you needed on the correct item or needed on something you didn’t need then had to get sighted help to trade it.
I get things change with expansions but when they do could they be thought of with a accessable format from the start as this new loot system is pretty regressive and now causes another hoop for players with disability’s to jump through just to do a simple thing like loot the boss.

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Honestly, first the Slime Cat situation and now this.

It feels like you guys are purposely being EXTREMELY Malicious to LFR players on purpose.

We are telling you point blank it will not work with group loot. We have experienced it before in Dragon Soul. It DOES NOT work.

You even admitted it likely won’t work in the update post. And yet you’re still going through with it. No we don’t need to “wait and see” - it doesn’t work.

On top of this, LFR gear is lower ilvl than outdoor gear and pretty much the same as m0 so the fact majority of people doing lfr do it for the mogs or to complete tier sets. Which group loot will make near impossible to finish.

You already removed the gear incentive from lfr. Doing this will remove almost all remaining incentive.

Listen to the players who actually do lfr. Don’t go through with this. Stop treating us like we don’t matter. Seriously.

Put Personal Loot in LFR. Group loot has been tried before in LFR and, something the devs apparently forgot, personal loot was developed ENTIRELY BECAUSE IT DIDN’T WORK.

The fact you waited until less than two months before launch to bring this up is another issue entirely.

I also love that LFR didn’t count as a raid for the devs when it came to Slime Cat, but suddenly it does count as a raid when it comes to inconveniencing players again.

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This blue reply is important to read and not miss since it explains the devs rationale behind believing that “this time it will be different”

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/changes-experiments-to-raid-rewards-in-dragonflight-season-1/1352473/363

The historical main issue with need greed is that in groups of people who are strangers or even unfriendly to each other for whatever reason making the loot rolls an active choice by the player and public to the other raid members often causes strong negative feelings and arguments especially in PUG content like LFR. Hitting need and watching someone else win means you know they also needed it and can check by inspecting them and make judgements, fair or unfair, about whether they really did or not and this causes at times major arguments, kicks from groups, trolling and harassment outside of the group afterwards and seems like generally a terrible situation to create.

I strongly suggest that any raid wide messages about the results of need/greed type roles publicly state ONLY that they won the item and NOT what they selected to win it.

No one should now be put in a situation of having to defend their loot acquisition choice.

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Can’t see why group loot needs to be forced honestly, just give group leader ability to choose no matter if it’s lfr/normal/heroic/mythic. If anything only force group loot in Mythic since that’s the only content you’ll see full groups doing content together. Warn players in group if they join with group loot and you don’t want to participate and make it so you can’t change during encounter combat (from personal loot to group loot).

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While I appreciate the changes to Group Loot in trying to make it a more fair system forcing players into one kind of loot or another is always going to cause issues. If someone forms a group it should be for them to decide what options they want to play with. Whether that be Personal loot, group loot, master loot, players should have choices on how they play the game and not be restricted to one system.

Now, LFR Is a different case because the game puts the raid group together, in that sense the most fair and easy to use system would be personal loot, with less restrictions and such it would be less of a hassle to use LFR.

What I do not appreciate is ‘Dead Loot’, I.E Loot dropping that simply no one can use in any capacity. I think we are well past that outdated system that seems to only exist to elongate the gearing process and provide zero benefits or positive experiences for the players. We don’t need an upgrade to drop every single time but it should always carry the possibility of gear being useful to someone. A bow shouldn’t drop if no one can literally use the item, simple as that.

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I do share the concerns over group loot being in LFR, I can see this being a problem when people roll for items they don’t need as they will just see the roll pop up and click it without thinking. I know they have said that group loot rolling is improved from when it was previously used (as it looks into main spec etc) but I can still seeing it being a issue for LFR

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Playing classic sometimes too (and also old memories) group loot outside of organized groups gives me really headache…

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Group loot seems like it’s best suited for organized/pre-made group content. Random groups are, in my experience, not compatible with this idea.

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This has been my concern since the start - and for anyone paying attention to GD, Reddit, or pretty much any fansite, it’s being echoed by thousands of people.

Group Loot is showing to be a failure in Sepulcher LFR already as we said it would. It’s going to be tenfold worse when it’s loot people actually need and we aren’t at the very end of a season.

Please, bring back Personal Loot for LFR, leave it for Normal+ until they have a chance to properly test it for a tier. But we have had enough testing in LFR to know it isn’t working.

And we are well aware that this is “the same” as Personal Loot - the difference is, Personal Loot was behind the scenes. We didn’t see it. So it didn’t feel like people were stealing loot from you. Especially when the same person wins 2-3 pieces of gear from the same boss.

If anything, bring back Personal Loot, but give us the option to put a piece of gear we win up for roll, so we can cut back on whispers/begging.

EDIT: To add on - It’s very different to lose a piece of gear to someone who is much higher geared and wants it for transmog or to give to a friend in Personal Loot when they didn’t actively roll for it, and for that person to have actively chosen to roll for that piece of gear, knowing it wasn’t an upgrade for them personally. This is why there’s so many complaint threads now.

Personal loot made it all behind the scenes, so if you lost a piece of gear, then it was just losing a roll everyone made. Now people who want things for transmog or friends are being attacked for wanting it for those, when they’re just as entitled to it. Please put it behind the scenes again, for everyone’s sanity.

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