Ninja Looting and Sony's policies

This is the sort of attitude that causes people to represent themselves in court, and end up getting a long sentence because they pissed off the judge.

If there was a loot distribution system agreed to by the players in the encounter, that overrides the 'anyone can loot whatever they want' rule.

If you enter into a contract, it may abridge your rights. If you violate the contract, you may be punished.

Also, the expired corpse FFA applies to Unattended corpses, it is 'ninja looting' to loot corpses that the killer is still near because the are busy with a lesson burn, for example.

In any case, a new raid loot mechanic would be nice, instead of trying to refit the current corpse looting rules; make a new UI to award raid loot in two steps:

1) Raid leader or delegate assigns a piece of loot to an eligible raid member (or a special FFA/Usable group) much like the guild hall bank.
2) Member can then accept the loot, or let the raid leader(s) know "Hey, that's the wrong item/I'm the wrong person" and the Leader(s) can reassign it until a recipient accepts it, or some timeout elapses.

Two people would then have to make mistakes for raid loot to be 'mislooted' and no CS reassignment would be an acceptable policy.

Ok so Im a bit confused.... how does this relate to the current thread about ninja looting?

Not according to the repsponses I have been given lately. Without violating the forum threads for posting direct comments from interactions with SOE officials or GM's, I will state that the general response is as follows :: once the timer expires regardless of location of killing player - anyone has the right to loot.

As to the issue with Raid Loot mechanics, there is already a way in place to prevent effectively ninja looting - the only problem is that by keeping all raid loot locked until it is possible to determine who gets what .. you run the risk of corpse timers expiring and entire amounts of raid loot going to pure rot.

It is not an attitude that I personally have, it is the experiences I have seen which have forged an opinion about what to expect.

Due to seeing too many issues like the ones described, I do not raid that much anymore, unless I know the people I am going to be raiding with really well. That being said unfortunately has limited the raiding experiences I have as of late. I will leave a raid before it begins now, IF there is someone who I know is a known Ninja Looter or even if there is a person who is heavily rumored to be a Ninja Looter to join the raid. At least by leaving before it begins I don't have the expectation of receiving nothing and not ever being able to see a resolution, especially since it is so hard to get a SOE GM to respond quickly when these types of issues happen. Let's face it the lack of and delayed response time of CS also hampers the whole raiding process and expectations.

This would work perfectly and no guild could then have any issues regarding loot as they would have the tools to deal with it. Also, I imagine large parts of the source code for such a feature could be taken from the guildbank as it stands.

o I

So I repeat, with the above information, how do you propose the guilds should have spotted that this person was going to ninja loot an entire chest after 2 weeks of raiding with them?

So far you have implied that it is the fault of the guilds in question that they "let" this person onto the raid but have made no indication of how they would have been discovered. I maintain that this person is simply a scumbag who does not belong in a social game

As you mention, this is a progression server. At the times of these incidents, the loot stolen was absolutely current, in fact just 3 weeks earlier, I had personally paid a dkp amount that equated to 50 hours of raiding (probably the best part of a months dkp) for just one of the items stolen from one of the chests.

Kicking every app from the event after every loot mob in a zone like Solteris is just not practical. Especially when half the raid is moving forward to start the next section of trash clearing and the app in question is a pulling class. Add to that the time taken to traverse the entire zone to get to the next mob and we wouldn't get to see how they performed at all because they would be almost constantly sat outside the zone or running across it.

Such mechanic is useless, as has been mentioned over and over on this thread. The "master looter" mechanic of the raid tools locks corpses for a whole 3 minutes, and after that everyone (in raid or not) can pick up items from corpses/chests. Incidentally, this is the same lock out timer of corpses killing in any non-raid enocunter. Also, raid corpses rot (for the most part) in 30 minutes, so no raid loot would go to pure rot unless people purposedly intends it.

But what about people you don't know? Or people you have known for a few weeks and are behaving just fine until that one time where they just decide to screw over their guild? Back in the day people was known, so if you ninjaed a guild you would become a pariah in the server, but now we are on the days of "Witness protection pack at half price on the market store, just for Christmas!", where just for 10$ you can make your character unknown to most people, and in 2 weeks you can forge yourself a new "story" on the server, just so you can then sell your character for $400 in some well known sites i shall not name.

As for how to fix it, i think the method that requires the less effort from Sony's part would be making all raid-dropped items "ATTUNABLE". This way the master looter(s) can pick up everything on a chest and hand them down as decided by each one's individual guild/pug rules.

And here it is, when push comes to shove, Draego's solution: If you don't raid you can never be ninja looted. See, it's all in your control, no reason to bother Sony Customer Service! It's all your fault!

Seriously, dude, not sure why you are arguing so vociferously against Sony being involved in these sorts of things when Piestro made it clear they WILL get involved and handle matters, and when in fact that is what happened. Yes, it took some work as not all the GM staff was on the same page, but at the end of the day the head of CS got involved and the matter was resolved.

I have no idea, in this era of less and less customer service, why anyone would argue that GM's should do even less than they currently are doing.

I apologize that you had such an experience with a player in game. It is regrettable.
Perhaps it has taught you to look deeper into your applicants, use a VOIP program, get to know your guildmates personally.

In EQ. I am Dandin, A stats maxing Enchanter who is insanely passionate about his class.

In Real life, Im a Diamond Drilling Mechanic who could care less about numbers or why things work the way they do. My job is to make them work again.

Lots of people seperate who they really are from thier in game avatars.

You have it all wrong, I am not arguing against them being involved....... I am simply stating that things DO NOT always get fixed. You may have already forgotten, but I have already addressed this for you, Machen.

Upon which the individual who made off with the entire loot, was rewarded. The player even continues to play using the same character name and all, nothing was ever really done.

Again you seem to have misunderstood what I was saying.

Maybe you have never been answered by a GM who spouts that you should have filed the petition immediately nonsense - when in truth you filed the petition right after the event happened - only to be further told that there is nothing they can or will do - when in truth it is their fault for not answering the petition until 3 days later.

Believe me I have been on the screwed over end of this entire topic enough to have a very sour taste in my mouth about it. So yes, I may choose to not to raid unless I know the people I am raiding with, but at least in this manner I don't have to worry about the issue.


As to Ninja Looters in general, I have seen my fair share of bad endings.

Can't tell you how many times have had issues personally, especially in zones like Field of Scale. Have had people come up and start looting the corpses from my ranger's HS run while burning lesson, even after petitioning ...... SOE's answer was don't let the timer expire.

So you want to say I am arguing against them taking action... absolutely NOT. I would personally PAY to see them take action, for once.

I'm in no way in favour of Ninja looting but people like the above who run all over a zone killing whatever that moves through HS or any other zone disrupting mechanism have no inherit right to mobs they have run away from. (If you are killing in a camp and people are taking mobs at or near your feet that's a legit complaint)

I can see why GMs or SOE are not that interested in solving complaints of people who are Too Busy to loot mobs they have left piled across the length of a zone.

Nice assumption there, but no, I never leave the field like I have seen others do. So in regards to your auto lumping me into the category of one of those people who disrupt an entire zone, well you're just sadly wrong.

The effect would be the same if I were swarm killing the field as well on my Pally or SK, all my corpses in a nice neat pile, and IF that timer expires, regardless of all the corpses being at my feet, SOE would tell me the same exact thing (and has - so fair, NO).

This thread is about raid situations. There is a fundamental difference between someone petitioning over trash mobs that took a half a second each to kill, and someone petitioning over loot that took 54 people several hours working together to kill. Frankly I'm not really surprised the GM's told you to get lost if you petitioned about someone looting headshot or swarm trash. Completely different situation than what we've been discussing.

Again I'm sure SOE has bigger fish to fry than people who don't have time to right click and grab what they want with /corpsehide looted active. I myself would never go near another's camp but I would also not cry too much if I had a massive pile of dead beside me and someone started digging through them. Basically you are asking a very limited resource to investigate and apply some disciplinary action to a situation where a 10 second pause every 3 minutes would make the complaint a non issue. If I was in CS the complaints received from mass killers using HS Decap SK swarming, or beam kiting would be very very low on my priority list.

Whether or not a certian someone, who seems to have nothing better to do than troll the comments trying to invalidate anything which has been said, actually cares about the issue or not. Valid points have been made.

On the raid aspect, like I have stated before, it does not help when you file the petiton immediately and DO NOT get a response until 3 days later. Then when you finally do manage to get a response, you are the one who is chastised for not contacting SOE about the matter sooner. YES IT REALLY IS OUR FAULT that there are not enough CS to resolve these problems in a timely manner. Thank you, for completely ignoring the fact that this has been addressed previously.

As to standard game play content, the problem still stands as well, lack of CS and lack of CS actually enforcing SOE policies only emboldens these people who Ninja Loot to the point where they start doing it IN RAIDS because they feel they will be able to get away with it there as well. To compund the matter, as I stated concerning "PICK UP RAIDS" I have seen the accused Ninja Looter be able to walk away with everything they looted (useable by them or not) simply because they were able to prove that they had an expectation of being cut out of any of the loot winnings.

Now if the issues, regular game play or raiding, were not being ignored by SOE CS, then we would hopefully see less of this crap happening in Raids.

Sorry - was posting in a hurry and it went in the wrong thread. I suspect my post for this thread ended up there...woops...

lol, no worries

It did provide for a quick break on the topic though.

I sometimes go to areas where afk people are killing or swarm kiting.. and I loot. as the rules stands.. once the timer has run its course and the body is lootable by all then by no means am I breaking any rules. And if they complain I apologize and move on. However ninja looting is a horrible thing that makes people frustrated.. and the lack of CS and lack of visible conciquences always makes people upset and frustrated. There may be people who get in trouble and get punished but again when there appears to be no penalties for some it gives many a bad taste. One of the reasons I like SWTOR way of setting loot rights. If you are in raid the leader can set master looter which locks the loot from being taken by anyone in the raid save for the leader himself. This keeps players from ninja looting and running, and ensures better enviorment. Now they also have a need/greed system if not using master looter.. but I have ran into major issues with people needing on all loot.. just to get the items that they dont need. and then trying to sell it to others in group or raid... which is horrible... but it is better then the free for all that we have on EQ> I would love to see it implemented with a fetaure to allow master looter rights to be turned on so that only the raid leader can loot and can give looting rights to people.. this would help some.. however there will still be bugs.. its just it would be nice...

While a better raid loot system would be nice, I'm not sure it is really warranted at this stage of the game. The dev time it would take is probably better spent on other things--and can you imagine how much fun it would be when the new system inevitably has bugs? Probably would result in more petitions than ninja looting has caused over the entire history of EQ. As Piestro said, these incidents are extremely rare. As long as Sony CS is willing to take punitive action, they will continue to be extremely rare.

Not really... its been almost 15 years and there are bugs that still exist from day 1... so arguing that they have better things to do like fix bugs is no longer a valid excuse. They have ignored alot of bugs.. yes those bugs were not game breaking.. but the annoying bugs that have been around for ever that we were told would be fixed.. and quest lines etc.. well it got old..... So No.. I dont think they have better things to do with their time. They need to do what the players want..... if that is implementing a new looting system for raids.. then put some guys on it and get it done.... even if its only for new content. It would show they listen. I have yelled for a better merchant system for years.. one that looks at items you are vendering and calculates the price based on the location and the creature that dropped it... so we dont have items like fine steel being worth more than an item that drops from a level 90 raid boss..... I say its better to keep up the fight and beg for changes.... we may eventually get them..... long before a bug gets fixed...