Balancing around the .1% again I see.
Also people losing control over their items in master loot is such fucking bullshit. The amount of players that were helped by master loot rather then hindered by it, at least imo, has to be much greater. People getting fucked over by loot master rules had to be such a small percentage of the players. Since playing in Beta I've never experienced it. The only time I ever heard it was an issue is when a simp lord GM passed out loot to tits. Then again simps are on the rise so maybe they were protecting against this? Blizzard was 500 iq all along? Guess it takes one to know one.
It's due to the implementation of personal loot being pretty garbage. No one gets equal rolls to get gear, but everyone puts equal effort in. Not everyone gets equal effort out and they are at the mercy of RNG instead of some PUG leader/Guild leader. I'd argue that's worse. Rolling sockets, other stats, titanforging and such in wod/legion was bullshit and I am glad it is going away. Progression should be blocked based on the content you can complete. There is zero benefit to getting the same item thru personal loot twice in a raid now, and imagine that would be a major pain point going forward with SL.
There is no time commitment anymore in MMOs. However, that's a super good thing and allows people to play at their own pace. Designers need to stop being afraid of handing out loot people need as a means to stop progression. If you want to make it so a boss only drops a specific item, and the item isn't able to be traded between eligible receivers, then there must be a mechanic based on time commitment much like DKP was for EQ and EQ2 with master loot.
Much like how DKP worked, there needs to be a replacement for DKP if you're not allowing gear to be funneled into a single player that is crucial to success like a tank, high parsing healer/dps, etc... and I think something like valor points or honor would be that mechanic. Each raid boss kill would add currency to buy the same items over time. If your RNG sucks, you shouldn't be subject to playing a gachapon game where you have to keep running it until you eventually succeed, and may never get BIS items despite time commitment. In games like EQ, players solved the master loot system with DKP. WoW replaced the ability to do DKP and offers no replacement for that system.
WoW has implemented lootboxes that you don't pay for. That's a step in the right direction, of course. Lootboxes are predatory from the sense of them being RNG-based with no chance to outright get the item you want. They make you keep spending money until you do. WoW has simply just removed the pain point (money) and replaced it with another one (time) and still did not address the fundamental issue of why lootboxes are bad. Games like WoW are based on strength of group/guild in unity, and if they are held back because of a mechanic like RNG not giving them items and being locked out of said raid for an extended period of time (a week) with no way to progress, that's a pretty big issue.
It does, however, work differently in other games like EQ. If EQ implemented personal loot for non triggered epic targets that guaranteed progression, and camps for high value targets like FBSS/Eboots/etc for everyone involved in the kill, players would be more inclined to team up for those high value items as opposed to not doing so. This is due to EQ having such high drop rates on high ticket items, though, and the fact that the best items in EQ are not always earned through raiding, especially ringing true in Classic/Kunark.
