#129 - Feb. 10, 2010, 8:23 p.m.
Q u o t e:
I don't think they actually exist. I don't even want the helmet anymore. I just want one of them to tell me why the hell they refuse to take care of this obvious mistake. A real response, not an automated one.
It takes a long time to sift through a long thread like this one.
As it happens, I've had a chance to look into this situation a bit, and it really is one of those issues that treads several lines.
We strive to interfere with looting issues as minimally as we possibly can. You used an analogy earlier, and I'm going to extend it in an effort to express what actually happened.
In your example, you cited an example of a restaurant giving food to the wrong fellow. And you are correct in that, in that scenario, the restaurant would probably choose provide the food you paid for. While there are a number of things wrong with this analogy (for example, you do not pay for World of Warcraft gear, but rather, access to a World of Warcraft account), there is also a very key difference: who does the actual distribution of the items in question?
A better analogy along the same lines: You enter a restaurant with 10 people. Your group orders food, but first they pick the Chow Master food distribution method. In the Chow Master method, that food is provided to a single individual who then distributes it to the rest of the people in the group. The distribution of the food becomes the responsibility of the Chow Master at that point, and if he gives it to the wrong member of your meal party and they refuse to pass it over to you, it may not even be appropriate for the restaurant to intervene.
Of course, that analogy is also a bit of a fail (as are most analogies), because there certain situations (though quite rare) in which we
will intervene in a matter involving a master looter, particularly those involving a true scam.
This particular issue does not involve the kind of deliberate deception that is typically involved in a scam, but it does involve an error on the part of the master looter, and one that can be a bit sticky. As the others in this thread have mentioned, once the master looter provides an item to a player (or once they loot it via another method, such as Need Before Greed), for all intents and purposes, that item now belongs to the player in question.
Regardless, I believe that enough has been said on this subject, and I will be locking the thread now.
