A New Need-Before-Greed Loot Setting Proposal

[MongoJerry]

But wouldn't the people who are greedy anyway just lie and declare NEED anyway, regardless of if they need it or not?  What about the people who decide they need it for an alt and declare need despite the fact that a character in the group needs it for an immediate upgrade?  These are a couple of problems I can see with allowing the players to choose if they are needy or greedy.

Treesh, it's like I'm proposing a better apple picker, and you're countering with, "But that won't help pick oranges better!" Yes, you're right, but that's not the problem I'm trying to solve. I am not proposing an anti-ninja-looting system. I am instead trying to make the normal distribution of loot in a functioning party easier. I am trying to improve upon Group Loot, which does only a little about ninja-looting as well. (Group Loot and my proposed NBG system does have the advantage over Round Robin in that at least you have a chance to roll higher than the attempted ninja-looter).

If someone declares "Need" when their character does not in fact need the item, then one would still use the normal mechanisms available now -- that is, boot the person from the party, label them as a ninja-looter, never party with that person again, and tell others about that person. It may sound like an ineffective method, but by the time a person gets to level 60 instance groups, a ninja-looter will find his or her choices of groups very limited. Certainly, they'll find that they can't get in any of the better instance groups where the best loot can be found. I knew several people in the beta who ended up deleting their level 60 characters, because they realized how few people would group with them anymore. And they could forget about joining raid groups, because if the person ninja-looted a few times, then chances are *someone* in the 40-person raid party would have seen it. It would be nice to have an additional "blacklist" interface to make the sharing of such information easier but even so, word-of-mouth can be effective. As I said, the community on a WoW server is smaller than many people realize.