Ninjalooting?

[Sheep]

"Memory

Level 60 Gnome Mage

Guild: Razorblades and Bandaids
Realm: Tichondrius
50. Re: How to have fun in Duskwood... | 1/9/2006 10:55:40 PM PST


The horde is just crying because the last time they got half that number of people to work together was when the offenders got thier first Azuregos kill (and second major ninjaloot).
[ post edited by Memory ]"

Quoted from the Blizzard forums.

Can someone please explain to me what ninja :shuriken: looting is, how it is done and it's consequences?

[Boutros]

Ninja looting when you take an item in a manner contrary to the looting rules of the group. Generally it is done by just taking an item of the monster's corpse before the group decides who should loot it. Consequences vary from none to being blacklisted by everyone on a server and being unable to group with anyone.

[Sheep]

Why would it be referred to as a major ninjaloot?

[Concillian]

Why would it be referred to as a major ninjaloot?
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Because if someone, somehow ninja'd loot from Azuregos, that's a pretty major offense.

If you ninja a 20% drop from a 5 man encounter, it's bad, but not horrible, you can run it again a few times in the next couple days and pick it up again.

But when you have 5 or 10 people of the same raid all wanting an item from a 40-person raid boss that is on a server-wide multi-day spawn timer, the term 'major' definitely applies. You don't just get one chance at Azuregos per x amount of days. You get one chance per x amount of days... if your timing is right so no other guilds get to the boss you're after before you get there.

[Raelynn]

Because if someone, somehow ninja'd loot from Azuregos, that's a pretty major offense.

If you ninja a 20% drop from a 5 man encounter, it's bad, but not horrible, you can run it again a few times in the next couple days and pick it up again. 

But when you have 5 or 10 people of the same raid all wanting an item from a 40-person raid boss that is on a server-wide multi-day spawn timer, the term 'major' definitely applies.  You don't just get one chance at Azuregos per x amount of days.  You get one chance per x amount of days... if your timing is right so no other guilds get to the boss you're after before you get there.
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It could've also been a rare drop. Some of those bosses have some nice purples that don't drop all that often. It also sounded like it was the first kill for that group, which means that was a bit more of a "this is great" feeling behind it only to lose the loot after the effort.

[MongoJerry]

In this case, Memory (note: a vocal member of the major Alliance guild, Insomnia) is spouting a common but untrue slander against the old Offenders. I was there at that alledged "ninja loot." At the time, there were 100+ Horde players involved in killing Azuregos (40 to kill Azuregos, 60+ to screen out the Alliance), who was a new boss at the time, and the loot setting was on Master Looter with Sabik, the raid leader and defacto leader of the Offenders set as the Master Looter. At the time, it was believed that you could pass loot to a person outside your raid by having that person join the raid and then having the Master Looter assign the item to them. I gather that was true at one time, but that was no longer the case. So, what happened was that 100+ people rolled on items, and Sabik tried as hard as possible to get the items to the right people (and you can imagine how hard it is to get all the rolls straight with people spamming general chat, raid chat, and yelling random stuff).

When the initial attempt to award loot failed, he and the prospective winners tried all kinds of stuff including changing loot settings, logging off and on, retrying, etc. After many minutes of attempts, it was clear that nothing was working and that the only people who could loot the body were those in the original tapping raid -- a raid made up of mostly The Offenders, of course, who had gotten there first (Note: I wasn't officially in TO at the time, although I had raided with them in Molten Core several times by that point). A new set of rolls were made and the epics were awarded -- and some people who didn't understand what was going on shouted "ninja loot!" Despite repeated attempts to explain what happened, some people wouldn't be molified and they accused TO and particularly Sabik of playing dirty tricks in order to get epic loot. It wasn't true in the slightest. I was on teamspeak with TO, and everyone was just happy that Horde got the dragon kill and that the Alliance had been routed. At that point, TO was already regularly going deep into Molten Core and we all knew that our epics would come. We were all just as pissed off that such a satisfying and enjoyable moment had been spoiled by poor game mechanics and a few malcontents.

Of course, what happened was that because The Offenders was the most active Horde guild on the server when it came to both raiding and PvP (which was all outdoor PvP at the time), members of major Alliance guilds on the boards had a field day, making the situation even bigger than it was. 3/4ths of the people posting on the topic and accusing TO of ninja looting were members of major Alliance raiding guilds. Of the Horde who posted, most of them either weren't there or were just posting, "Well, if TO ninja looted, that's bad" kind of messages. However, due to repetition of the story, people's neurons got programmed to believe that TO had somehow ninjalooted something off Azuregos -- in the same way that many people have been programmed to believe there were WMD's in Iraq or that al-Qaeda and Iraq were working together in some way. None of these are true, but the allegations were repeated so frequently over such a long period time that people came to believe them to be true without any facts to back up the claims.

Incidentally, there was indeed one case of ninja-looting by The Offenders, which was described in my Baron Geddon writeup. The short version is that TO had agreed to give Sabik, our main tank, any Wrath items that dropped and that he wouldn't roll on any tier 1 warrior items. The idea was that the better equipped our main tank is, the farther the whole raid will be able to go. Five warriors knew this going into Molten Core, but one non-guilded warrior didn't. So, when a pair of Wrath gauntlets dropped, Sabik picked them up without rolling on them, and that one warrior blew a gasket. However, I don't want to pass this off as an innocent mistake by Sabik. He knew before picking them up that that other warrior would blow a gasket, and there were some personal conflicts involved (the only reason that warrior was there was that a couple of his friends from other guilds insisted on TO inviting him). That other warrior should have gotten his 1-in-6 chance to get the gloves. It really was a ninja loot that should not have happened. (Incidentally, I, not a member of TO at the time and on only my second run with them, won a server first Belt of Transcendence on a straight /rand 100 roll).

However, due to this one ninja loot, TO was forever labeled as a guild who serial ninja looted, even though that wasn't the case at all. Some of the members of TO might have been loud mouthed and obnoxious, but the guild was as honest as any guild on the server. However, as I mentioned, TO was also the top Horde guild when it came to raiding and showing up for PvP events, so that put a big bullseye on their backs. You'll notice on the Tich boards that it's the Alliance players, like Memory, who like to bring up any alledged ninja-looting rather than any of the alledged Horde victims. Far more egregious ninja loots by Grim Vengeance members (emphasis on plural) and one by the Rabble guild were forgotten only a few days after the incidents, except by those of us who were there.

Epilogue: TO eventually broke up over the summer due to some major differences in philosophy among the guild leadership regarding recruitment and operation of the guild (nothing having to do with ninjalooting and only a little having to do with loot). A core group of the members of The Offenders reformed into The Core. The player who played Sabik no longer plays on Tichondrius, although just to confuse everyone, the character of Sabik is played by someone else in the guild.

[Zarathustra]

The ultimate ninja loot?

I recall reading a post on the Blizzard forums (complete with FRAPS footage to back it up) of a raid leader who pulled a fast one on... his entire guild.

He was the guild leader, master looter for a Blackwing Lair trip, on their first Nefarian kill ever. He looted everything off the corpse, de-guilded, and used his hearth stone.

[Artega]

The ultimate ninja loot?

I recall reading a post on the Blizzard forums (complete with FRAPS footage to back it up) of a raid leader who pulled a fast one on... his entire guild.

He was the guild leader, master looter for a Blackwing Lair trip, on their first Nefarian kill ever.  He looted everything off the corpse, de-guilded, and used his hearth stone.
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I have a new hero now.

[Xanthix]

He was the guild leader, master looter for a Blackwing Lair trip, on their first Nefarian kill ever.  He looted everything off the corpse, de-guilded, and used his hearth stone.
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That blows me away. I can understand (but not approve of) ninja-looting some rare drop in a pickup group, but this?

How can the gain you get from a couple of purples ever compete with the fact that you are now hated by an entire BWL-capable raiding guild, and will likely never be able to join another raiding guild on the server? You would be infamous, you would get hate tells all day long, and half the server wouldn't even run a 5-man with you. That just boggles the mind.

[MongoJerry]

How can the gain you get from a couple of purples ever compete with the fact that you are now hated by an entire BWL-capable raiding guild, and will likely never be able to join another raiding guild on the server? You would be infamous, you would get hate tells all day long, and half the server wouldn't even run a 5-man with you. That just boggles the mind.

I'm guessing that he was quitting the game and figured he'd go out with a bang.

[Quark]

I'm guessing that he was quitting the game and figured he'd go out with a bang.
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Someone on Stormrage did that ... ninjalooted Ragnaros on the guild's first kill, then quit.