Ask WoW Insider: /roll abuse?

Welcome to today's edition of Ask WoW Insider, in which we publish your questions for dissection by the peanut gallery -- now with extra snark and commentary by one of our writers. This week Urdunai writes in:

Hey WoW Insider,

This week I have a question about rolling, as in /roll, and the proper use of it. I was recently on a run of Zul'Farrak with my Shaman, a guildmate Fury Warrior, a Healadin, and a Tankadin. The 2 *adins were dating or some such, I'm not sure but it's important to the story. The run had been going really well, and everyone was being very polite on loot drops. Whenever a Blue item would drop everyone would pass and we would discuss it. This is generally not a practice I approve of (The Need and Greed buttons are there for a reason, blizzard was nice enough to provide them) but that was the group's consensus so I kept my mouth shut and did it.

The problem comes in when the Big Bad Pauldrons dropped. Everyone passed and the three platewearers /roll'd despite the fact that they aren't really useful for the Healdin. The Tankadin lost the roll with a 34, the fury warrior came in second, and the Healadin won. After we all /cheer at him for winning them he says "I'm going to give them to the Tankadin" Now I felt like this was wrong, as it was essentially giving the Tankadin 2 /rolls against the warrior but because the run had gone so good and drama free I didn't speak against it. At the end of the night the Warrior mentioned to me that he felt it wasn't right.

This, then, is the question: If you win the /roll is the item yours to do with as you please? It was BOP so certainly he couldn't have picked it up and traded it to her, but was what he did right? We allowed it with no objection and as such we lost grounds to complain now, but for future reference what is the correct way to proceed?

Thanks in Advance,

Urdunai of Earthen Ring

Guess the dating bit was more important to the story than you thought, eh?

The short version is: if you win whatever strange method of /roll protocol a given group uses, can you do what you want with it? Yep.

I've seen what happened here a few times, but it's not very common. I'm not a big fan of it for the reasons you mentioned. I'm torn between, "if she couldn't use it, the healadin should not have had rolled in the first place," and "well, I guess giving it to her boyfriend is better than vendoring it."

We can debate the overall fairness of what happened -- I agree for instances the need/greed dice should be used (raids are a another story) -- but we'll get into clauses and conditions that end up surrounding a Middle East peace treaty in a hurry.

As to your secondary question: if there's a loot policy you don't like, speak up on the first occurrence, otherwise you pretty much lose your right to complain on the rest of the run.

How about you guys? Do you see this happen often and how can he avoid running into this?

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