I was talking to Mist today about some of the changes made in the game that were directly because players complaining or gaming the system. Just a few I was thinking of.
Rolling on loot in LFR/LFD.
It use to work with Need/Greed which gave you an extra bonus if the item was for your current spec. Several problems happened with this, entirely due to players being jerks.
- Large groups of raiders, such as guild mates, all rolling on gear even if they didn’t need it to win it and funnel it to their friends.
- Players who won a token/item getting harassed, vote-kicked, killed, or other griefing measures if they didn’t give it to someone else.
- Players winning items they didn’t need, and black-mailing others to give them something else that person had won. Or, winning a highly desired item for others and sharding it, just to be an ass.
- Refusing to roll on an item and making everyone else wait the full duration before the item was won.
- Kicking someone because they won something, even if it was an item they would use, just because other people were mad.
Personal loot took care of ALL OF THIS. You get what you get and no one can do anything about it, and it’s soulbound so NO TRADING fusses.
Tag to raid group bosses or elites.
Once a raid engaged a raid boss, like Sha of Anger, only people in the raid could get loot. This led to a mad panic scramble to get in the raid, with people refusing to invite just for spite (if they had room), full raids denying people and just completely missing a long-respawn kill because you couldn’t get in the raid. Some of the world bosses were once a week, so missing a kill was very problematic. And just forget ever getting anything if you were a non-dominant faction on a very unbalanced server.
Now, it’s tag to faction, or tag to all. If you hit the boss, or heal someone hitting the boss, you get credit.
There’s still plenty of griefing to be had, of course.