Loot Trading in Classic Update by Blizzard

[Kenneth]

I never thought we would see so many updates on Classic WoW before launch. It seems Blizzard's Classic WoW team is really working towards making Classic the best experience it can possibly be and it only gets me more hyped. Today another blue post came out on the topic of loot trading. Now if you don't remember what they said at Blizzcon about loot trading let me give you a quick run down.

They said loot trading (which wasn't a thing at all in Vanilla WoW) would be available in Classic WoW. The main reason brought up for this by Blizzard was that in Classic a lot of times people receive loot that could have been given to another person via master looting and a ticket is then made. Usually these tickets did result in a GM giving it to the person per request. Blizzard figured why not just skip the middle man, the GM, and just allow loot trading for a short period of time after something is looted like they added back in Wrath of the Lich King.

A lot of Classic WoW fans had major issues with this and it was more than just "that isn't the true Vanilla experience". Some issues brought up are people now rolling need on items they don't need in order to trade it to somebody that does need it in their group of friends. Now keep in mind this loot trading is only available to characters who are there for the kill that the loot dropped from so you cannot roll need on an item, win it, go to Ironforge, and trade it to your friend who wasn't even there. But even with this obvious restriction in place this could happen in dungeon groups where the tank is lets say friends with one of the DPS. A item drops that 2 of the 3 DPS need and instead of just those two rolling on it the tank is now also rolling on it to give his friend better odds since he can trade it to him if he wins. This had 0 restrictions either. In Vanilla you can roll on cloth as plate, mail as cloth, etc. This obviously would be a huge issue.


Blizzard's fix to this problem

Loot trading's 2 hour window will only be available for soulbound gear that drops in raids. This means no dungeons can have the scenario I mentioned above. You can be in a Wailing Caverns with 4 people who are in a group together and feel safe that they won't be rolling on every piece of loot simply to trade to their friends. One issue.

What about UBRS?

In a follow up post, after a lot of people on the /r/ClassicWoW reddit brought up that UBRS was technically a raid since it was 10 man, Kaivax stated that UBRS would be treated as a dungeon with loot trading. So even though you are technically in a raid group when you run UBRS it will not have loot trading available.

Essentially loot trading will now only be in raids because usually raids are groups of people that know each other already and most of the time has a Master Looter assigned anyway.