1. May 24, 2020  

    Question regarding ninja rules (warmane vs retail)

    Hi all.

    I have a question regarding the ninja rules and other types of mischievous acts in dungeons and raids in retail WoW. I might be misinformed, but I've read on some forum threads, that the ninja rules in warmane are something unusual for retail WoW. Is this really the case? Did/do the official realms not have any rules regarding stealing items or doing other improper things in dungeons and raids? If this was/is the case, then how did/do players in retail deal with such behaviour?

    Thx for reading
    Edited: May 24, 2020

  2. May 24, 2020  
    I don't think there were any ninja looting rules on retail, people just used ignore button.
    Warmane's ninja looting rules can be found here: http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=65037

  3. May 24, 2020  
    I don't think there were any ninja looting rules on retail, people just used ignore button.
    Warmane's ninja looting rules can be found here: http://forum.warmane.com/showthread.php?t=65037
    I'm well aware of the warmane ninja looting rules. However I have stumbled upon some discussions, where people commented on the difference in dealing with ninjas between warmane and the official servers. And I just wondered why such rules weren't implemented there. Those seem very logical and imho absolutely necessary.
    Edited: May 24, 2020

  4. May 24, 2020  
    And I just wondered why such rules weren't implemented there.
    Nobody is gonna play the same expansion for 10 years, but for 1-2 years max. That same gear is gonna be eventually replaced. After you've pissed off a significant amount of people and you want to do a name change it would cost you money and not points.

  5. May 25, 2020  
    It is correct that retail WotLK had an amazing amount of leniency towards ninjas in dungeons/raids; they later implemented loot systems that removed the possibility. During the first few versions of the game, the game developers relied heavily on server communities to police behavior like ninjas / toxicity and it worked very well for a few reasons:

    Server population was about 1/6th the size that it is on warmane. Pretty much everyone knew everyone by the time you had been on a server for over a year together. There also were a lot less guilds doing end game content by the end of the expansions (I believe my server only had about 3-4 guilds that had killed LoD by the time Cata came out). Those two things meant you had a reputation you needed to care about in order to raid, because guilds cared about their reputation and would kick / blacklist you if you were exposed as a ninja or toxic.

    Additionally, it was a lot harder to get a fresh identity on retail. Blizzard didn't offer name changes until halfway through TBC at the cost of $10, faction change and realm transfer came at start of WotLK for $30 and $25 respectively. Even if you shelled out the $10 per character name change, people that had you added to friends would see your new name and could expose your new identity. The only way around paying for a new identity was making a new character and grinding up to max level at 1x XP rate, which you couldn't just power level yourself with your main unless you paid an extra $13/mo for a new account.

    Warmane's ninja/harassment/racism policies are pretty much the best things they could implement to curtail behavior like that on a server this size. Otherwise, the general apathy towards those things, in addition to the anonymity granted by having a population this size, would allow behavior like that to run amok and likely make the server less appealing to most players.

  6. May 25, 2020  
    It is correct that retail WotLK had an amazing amount of leniency towards ninjas in dungeons/raids; they later implemented loot systems that removed the possibility. During the first few versions of the game, the game developers relied heavily on server communities to police behavior like ninjas / toxicity and it worked very well for a few reasons:

    Server population was about 1/6th the size that it is on warmane. Pretty much everyone knew everyone by the time you had been on a server for over a year together. There also were a lot less guilds doing end game content by the end of the expansions (I believe my server only had about 3-4 guilds that had killed LoD by the time Cata came out). Those two things meant you had a reputation you needed to care about in order to raid, because guilds cared about their reputation and would kick / blacklist you if you were exposed as a ninja or toxic.

    Additionally, it was a lot harder to get a fresh identity on retail. Blizzard didn't offer name changes until halfway through TBC at the cost of $10, faction change and realm transfer came at start of WotLK for $30 and $25 respectively. Even if you shelled out the $10 per character name change, people that had you added to friends would see your new name and could expose your new identity. The only way around paying for a new identity was making a new character and grinding up to max level at 1x XP rate, which you couldn't just power level yourself with your main unless you paid an extra $13/mo for a new account.

    Warmane's ninja/harassment/racism policies are pretty much the best things they could implement to curtail behavior like that on a server this size. Otherwise, the general apathy towards those things, in addition to the anonymity granted by having a population this size, would allow behavior like that to run amok and likely make the server less appealing to most players.
    This sums it up pretty well. There wasn't any need for ninja looting rules since the gear became obsolete sooner or later and name changing was expensive.

  7. May 25, 2020  
    Yes, I see now. Thank you all for the replies.

  8. May 25, 2020  
    Hi all.

    I have a question regarding the ninja rules and other types of mischievous acts in dungeons and raids in retail WoW. I might be misinformed, but I've read on some forum threads, that the ninja rules in warmane are something unusual for retail WoW. Is this really the case? Did/do the official realms not have any rules regarding stealing items or doing other improper things in dungeons and raids? If this was/is the case, then how did/do players in retail deal with such behaviour?

    Thx for reading
    Well first of all we know way better and way more now then back in 2008. Identifying ninja looting as a problem and making rules agianst takes too long. This apply for both retail and Warmane. Keep in mind Warmane exist since 2009 but ninjs looting rules was not added untill 2016. On retail on other hand Ninja looting in WOTLK existed and was a problem, i have personally been ninja looting many times in pug raids back in 2008-2009 period. Blizzard took actions against it in 3.3 adding need before green loot system. Later on they keep trying to adress the problem and added some pretty unclear policy about ninja looters where you can report them and they sometimes remove the item, but it was never bannable. This evolve into personal loot and removing on need/green system all together. And finally in BFA they removed master loot in general. Also that idea that your reputation matter and so on was maybe true in Vanilla and TBC and only for low pop servers. WOTLK rised servers cap to 5k i think and all populated server had few k waiting in queue for a long time. People was ninja looting like crazy and you was always able to find guild or other pugs to play with. You can even see this in Classic today there is ninja looting happening constantly. Even streamers ninja loot all the time and no one really care, they still have plenty of people to play with. Not to mention 10$ for name change or 30$ for server transfer is really cheap price for a item that if you dont ninja loot can possible take many weeks/months to get. As for Warmane the current ninja looting rules is best thing they can do and server have improved a lot tnx to it.

    Also another very similar problem is refusing to play, or leave a dungeon and ask to be kicked. It existed since forever, but it took many years to become really obvious and for Warmane to adress it with policy.

    Overall my point is problems like that take years to identifying and take action against. And no the community cannot and didnt regulate itself for the most parts. It has to be some ruling and penalty from the server GMs themself.

  9. May 25, 2020  
    Well first of all we know way better and way more now then back in 2008. Identifying ninja looting as a problem and making rules agianst takes too long. This apply for both retail and Warmane. Keep in mind Warmane exist since 2009 but ninjs looting rules was not added untill 2016. On retail on other hand Ninja looting in WOTLK existed and was a problem, i have personally been ninja looting many times in pug raids back in 2008-2009 period. Blizzard took actions against it in 3.3 adding need before green loot system. Later on they keep trying to adress the problem and added some pretty unclear policy about ninja looters where you can report them and they sometimes remove the item, but it was never bannable. This evolve into personal loot and removing on need/green system all together. And finally in BFA they removed master loot in general. Also that idea that your reputation matter and so on was maybe true in Vanilla and TBC and only for low pop servers. WOTLK rised servers cap to 5k i think and all populated server had few k waiting in queue for a long time. People was ninja looting like crazy and you was always able to find guild or other pugs to play with. You can even see this in Classic today there is ninja looting happening constantly. Even streamers ninja loot all the time and no one really care, they still have plenty of people to play with. Not to mention 10$ for name change or 30$ for server transfer is really cheap price for a item that if you dont ninja loot can possible take many weeks/months to get. As for Warmane the current ninja looting rules is best thing they can do and server have improved a lot tnx to it.

    Also another very similar problem is refusing to play, or leave a dungeon and ask to be kicked. It existed since forever, but it took many years to become really obvious and for Warmane to adress it with policy.

    Overall my point is problems like that take years to identifying and take action against. And no the community cannot and didnt regulate itself for the most parts. It has to be some ruling and penalty from the server GMs themself.
    Thank you for sharing your past experience in retail and for showing the other side of the coin. As you can see, I haven't played in the official servers, so I didn't know how the player experience there was in reality. If I have to be honest with you, while I was writing the original post, I actually expected to get such replies. The situation you described sounds exactly how normal people would behave. I mean, yeah, some guilds could have spread the information about the ninjas or other rule violators between one another, but I can imagine how some people didn't want to bother with this type of organisational work. Especially players, who just wanted to play the game or didn't have that much free time beside for raiding.

    I will push this conversation to a more philosophical path for a bit. In a society with no general laws to unite its citizens, people would just follow their own interests. They could enter subgroups with internal rules, in order to extract mutual benefits, but not every outsider would agree to their regulations or consider the others' needs. So that's why I can imagine that RDFs in retail, that didn't consist of premades, might have been chaotic most of the time. One might have insisted, that all party members rolled NEED on the items for their MS, but another person could have ignored them and NEEDed whatever they wanted. I suppose that was and still is the purpose of the kick mechanic - to act as some sort of a punishment against those players - but that's a different topic.

    So I agree with the following statement:

    And no the community cannot and didnt regulate itself for the most parts. It has to be some ruling and penalty from the server GMs themself.
    __________________________________________________ _________________________________________________
    Later on they keep trying to adress the problem and added some pretty unclear policy about ninja looters where you can report them and they sometimes remove the item, but it was never bannable.
    I can see why it wasn't bannable - Blizzard didn't want to lose its subscribers. But what good does it make, if the person already vendored/disenchanted the stolen item?
    Edited: May 25, 2020

  10. May 26, 2020  
    I will push this conversation to a more philosophical path for a bit. In a society with no general laws to unite its citizens, people would just follow their own interests. They could enter subgroups with internal rules, in order to extract mutual benefits, but not every outsider would agree to their regulations or consider the others' needs. So that's why I can imagine that RDFs in retail, that didn't consist of premades, might have been chaotic most of the time. One might have insisted, that all party members rolled NEED on the items for their MS, but another person could have ignored them and NEEDed whatever they wanted. I suppose that was and still is the purpose of the kick mechanic - to act as some sort of a punishment against those players - but that's a different topic.
    It kind of seems that you want to believe that retail had as much of a ninja problem as warmane does. I'll assure you that wasn't the case in my experience on multiple realms and factions during the time.

    I'd also like to point out that RDF didn't exist until 3.3.0 (when ICC came out). In order to gear characters, or do daily heroic quests, you had to form groups yourself; typically that meant making friends with people and running with guildies. In addition, current-tier raids were seldom cleared by PuGs, meaning being in a guild was much more important during retail than it is now. I'll reiterate what I said earlier, being a ninja or toxic in groups when you're the odd man out was a quick way to get you blacklisted by a guild and any other guild they're friends with. That was significant because most realms only had about 10 or so guilds per faction full-clearing normal content, and less than half of those were doing significant hard modes or heroics.

    There are also other things to consider when you're speculating about the 'chaos' that went on during retail:
    Servers were broken up by region, meaning you were extremely unlikely to be playing with people that didn't speak the same language as you. With no language barriers, it was easier to communicate what items people were searching for and what loot rules were. Speaking of loot rules, when RDF came out, it was automatically set to Need Before Greed loot, which unlike the previous poster said, actually came out in patch 1.9 https://www.engadget.com/2009-12-08-...de-page-2.html

    Furthermore, blizzard never officially released server population / cap during wotlk, only total players per region. If you do the math (just for NA), it averages to about 10k accounts in total to each realm. If you omit the fact that outliers would exist (realms with 15k+ or <3k accounts on it) and just consider the average of TOTAL accounts is 2k less than warmane claims to have on at any given time, you might understand that there was a larger feeling of community on retail. You didn't have to organize a bulletin board and realm government to blacklist toxic people and ninjas, word just made its way around because pretty much everyone knew everyone.

    Lastly, as far as your philosophical standpoint goes, there was a point in time where humanity didn't have "general laws to unite its citizens." It's called the stone age.

  11. May 28, 2020  
    But in the end, even though there are rules, people still ninja without penalties. Just recently I reported one that ninjad some gear in a raid from me, pics and all, and the answer was "The issue has been taken care of." == **** all was done.

  12. May 28, 2020  
    But in the end, even though there are rules, people still ninja without penalties. Just recently I reported one that ninjad some gear in a raid from me, pics and all, and the answer was "The issue has been taken care of." == **** all was done.
    Reporting doesn't get you any items, just gets them banned if there's enough evidence.

  13. May 28, 2020  
    Reporting doesn't get you any items, just gets them banned if there's enough evidence.
    I wish.

    I'm just saying so that people aren't lured into false sense of security. Pretty much every pug raid that doesn't explicitly state "I'm ninjaing right now" can do it and just frame as a mistake in loot distribution and voila, there's not enough evidence.

  14. May 28, 2020  
    I wish.

    I'm just saying so that people aren't lured into false sense of security. Pretty much every pug raid that doesn't explicitly state "I'm ninjaing right now" can do it and just frame as a mistake in loot distribution and voila, there's not enough evidence.
    Claiming a mistake was made won't keep someone from getting banned. Not providing the required evidence will.
    What you're saying seems to come from someone who didn't provide all the required unedited screenshots, and is trying to push the blame for a ban not happening elsewhere.

  15. May 28, 2020  
    Claiming a mistake was made won't keep someone from getting banned. Not providing the required evidence will.
    What you're saying seems to come from someone who didn't provide all the required unedited screenshots, and is trying to push the blame for a ban not happening elsewhere.
    A cynical example of not enough evidence. I edited away the names so I don't get banned for "shaming":
    https://imgur.com/a/ruyhLLy

    resto PvE legs drop, I'm the only resto
    enha rolls anyway (he's in group 2 with melee, i'm in group 5 with healers, you can see the resto druid on screen)
    enha loses the roll
    enha says FUKC because he lost the roll he's not supposed to be doing anyway
    enha spam trades the raid leader (raid leader picked up all the items and distributed them manually, as a lot of raids do here on warmane)
    raid leader is confused, tries to double check why the enha is spamming him
    enha lies that he's resto MS
    raid leader thinks he's giving it to me since I won the roll, doesn't realise he gave it to the scammer enha
    raid leader tries to get it back, enha lols away (I have more pics)

    "It's not clear enough what happened, we can't do anything."

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