You want the loot of another player in World of Warcraft? Just report them as a ninja looter – at least it worked quite shamelessly for one player in WoW Classic.
Loot is a hot topic in MMORPGs, especially in World of Warcraft and its offshoot Burning Crusade Classic. People often argue passionately about loot and sometimes curse their own rolling luck, when something doesn’t go well.
Or you can be particularly devious and report the actual winner of an item simply as a “ninja looter” and watch the chaos that Blizzard causes from the situation.
Best healing item in Karazhan drops – But who gets the hammer?
This is what happened: The druid Onetwo recounted in the subreddit of WoW Classic the course of his visit to Karazhan. He joined a group because he still needed some items from Karazhan and was on the hunt for “Justice of the Light” – a very good mace for healers.
When the corresponding mace actually drops, Onetwo is happy, but is immediately messaged by the second healer in the raid. The mace is “locked,” it was discussed with the raid leader. Onetwo as a druid therefore has no claim to the item because it rightfully belongs to the priest.
However, Onetwo had not heard about this agreement beforehand, and the raid leader did not seem to have made any firm commitments regarding it, rather just mentioned it to the priest without making promises.
In the end, a mage in the raid demands: Just roll for it.
Onetwo and the priest roll. The druid Onetwo wins clearly and can scoop up the mace, which he immediately has enchanted, even going into debt for 500 gold.
Suddenly the mace is gone
Blizzard “steals” an item: Onetwo plays for a while with the new mace, heals in dungeons, and completes arena matches. After some time, he is messaged by the priest, who claims he has been “massively insulted”.
A day later, Onetwo then realizes that he suddenly heals significantly less than before. The mace has been removed from his character.
He then writes a ticket to find out what is behind this matter. Relatively quickly, he receives a response from support, informing him:
I have sifted through all the data for you and have seen that the mace was removed because you were reported for “ninja looting” and the investigation found that the report was justified. We consider this matter closed.
Following this, Onetwo tried to contact support again to explain that he could not engage in ninja looting at all. After all, he had not been the loot master and had simply rolled normally on the item before it was assigned to him by the raid leader.
However, Blizzard did not respond further to these inquiries and immediately closed the tickets again. To them, the case seemed closed.
Protest on reddit calls Blizzard to act again
Thread explodes on Reddit, draws attention: Onetwo then decided to do what had often led to error correction at Blizzard: He sought the public and presented his case on Reddit and in the official forum, backing everything up with screenshots.
Although there were a few skeptics who wondered why he had even documented the rolling with screenshots, as if he had already anticipated that he would need the images, the case received a lot of attention.
With over 14,000 upvotes, the post on Reddit is one of the big exceptions of the past weeks.
This is how it turned out: In the end, the whole story had a good resolution. After a few days – and the big post in the WoW Classic subreddit – Onetwo received another message from Blizzard support. The mace was returned to him via in-game mail, along with an apology from a game master.
There had been an error, and as compensation, they added 30 days of game time along with the mace.
Thus, this story also became one of those cases in which the special attention from the community led Blizzard to address the case again and conclude that the player was indeed in the right.
Even big streamers like to argue heatedly over loot. WoW streamer Asmongold showed how to approach it particularly tactically.
