Friday, April 2, 2010

Why Not Just Delay When The Disenchant Happens?

Ever since Blizzard introduced the LFD tool in patch 3.3, there have been discussions over how to improve the Need/Greed/Disenchant system they imposed on everyone.  To me the problem comes down to that the system doesn't give you an option to say, "hey, I don't really NEED that, but I kind of want it, so even though you won the Greed roll can we make a deal for it?"  However if the player who did win chose Disenchant, then it's too late.

Almost every proposed solution I've seen typically involves adding a layer, or multiple layers, of additional mechanics.  Adding a fourth option called "Need off-spec," or an option that allows you to compensate everyone else, etc.  In my opinion this is completely unnecessary.  Players figured out looting conventions before patch 3.3 and they can certainly figure it out now.  The only problem is the Disenchant option prevents communication.  By the time that Boomkin can pipe up and say, "hey-wait-do-you-mind-if-I-snag-that-cloth-caster-belt," it's already sitting as a Dream Shard in the warrior tank's backpack.

So I propose delaying when the actual item gets disenchanted.  Maybe Disenchant means you have the option to right-click on the item and turn it into a shard, or maybe they get sharded when you zone out of the instance, or maybe there's some guy you can talk to at the end of the instance that will shard them for you.  It's good to have some safeguards to prevent ninjas, but I think Blizzard would find that if they gave us a chance to work out the edge-case loot scenarios on our own, we'd do just fine.

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