BoP is da poop

Bind on Pickup really sucks. I mean it. With hot fudge, whipped cream, and a cherry on top.

I understand the concept. Since a dungeon drop is BoP, if you're wearing the loot, it means you've beaten the boss. You can't have a pioneer group get all the drops, and as they advance and make their old gear obsolete, just pass it to the new round of recruits who will then blow through the content.

Sho, sho. I get it.

But for the first few minutes after becoming soul bound?

That's the dreaded time when nearly ALL the loot drama I've ever experienced has occurred.

I've been fortunate enough to be surrounded by generally decent people. You've always got your random coconut who's a loot whore, just like in any RL group of friends you've always got that one friend who comes with you to Burger King, brings a "buy-one-get-one-free" coupon and insists that since you're already buying your own whopper, he can just piggy back and get his free. No, you idiot. We either split the cost, or I pay like normal, and you get the F out of my sight because if you even try to just switch over to another one of our friends further back in the line and attempt the same scam, I'll take your coupon and then choke you with MY free burger.

But I digress.

Where was I? Oh yes...decent people...

Nearly all the loot drama I've come across has happened by accident, and has been perpetrated by very honest, decent people. People who had no intention of taking a piece of gear away from another player.

A mis-click here, a fat finger there. Generally somebody is trying to pick "need" on another piece of loot, and they click the wrong one.

Instantly soul bound. You're beyond the point of no return.

So we've got a great team of Karazhan raiders. We've all proven time and again that there's no ninjas or whores in the group. Even our substitutes all seem to be decent folks who are generally more excited at playing the game than getting phat lewtz.

And we've got our two tanks, both prot warriors.

We use a loot master system, and simple rolling to distribute gear. If you need it, roll "need". Otherwise pass and we DE everything at the end of the run. Pretty simple. At this point nobody is really filling in an off-spec, so at the very worst, I've insisted that the Pally or sub Druid roll on something that we'd otherwise be DE'ing, just in case they ever re-spec.

Just good clean honest people who work really well together.

Kill Moroes. Some fancy tanking belt drops. Ok, good, you meat heads can duke it out for that one. I'll be waiting on the stairs to clear more ballroom trash.

Loot Master calls out for the roll on the belt...

Both tanks roll....

Tank B wins...

Loot Master asks on voice "Tank B is the highest?"....

After examining the roll output, Amava announces "Confirm Tank B" (yes, we're lame like that. the RL was in the Navy and so we do silly confirmations like that. i dunno, its kinda fun)

Handfull of gratz's go out on /raid....

Loot gets distributed and soul bound to Tank B....

Tank B says, "oh wait, you can have it, i'm already wearing this one".....

Dead silence....

Raid has a heart attack and visualizes Tank A's hand reaching through the fiber optic cables running across the southern USA and coming out the cable modem at Tank B's house and crushing his throat.


Now, sure, I'll blame this one on Tank B. Knowing the game mechanics, you know stuff gets soul bound. You know we move quickly and don't waste time on rolls. Once a roll winner has been announced, and confirmed, the loot gets distributed immediately. Don't be stupid.

BUT gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh

Blizzard, I beg you once again, please pretty please with sugar on top, give us some way to fix stuff like this.

Make it "pending soul bound" for 5 minutes. Or maybe unbound until the equipper leaves the instance.

Anything. Just anything to let us undo these boo boos so the team doesn't have to hate on eachother for the remainder of the run.

Luckily, Tank B has never shown ninja tendencies and you could hear the genuine sorrow on his voice. We all know he's a decent guy. And Tank A is a mature, reasonable person who did not indeed perform that trans fiber optic throttling that I was visualizing. So we were able to continue the raid and stay friends. No hard feelings (so long as it doesn't happen again).

In a strange way, this actually served as a Mithril Spur for Tank A to push the pace of the raid faster and faster through the trash, probably hoping to wipe us in spiteful vengance. Hmmm, some food for though for future motivational techniques....