Three reasons why not looting in instances is bad team play

This is an old subject, but it came up again when I was chatting with some of my guildies last night.

Personally I don't understand people who don't loot their kills. Ever since questing in the area around Northshire Abbey for the first time conditioned me to find sparkling corpses interesting, I've simply found the lure of the sparkle irresistable. I hate having to leave things behind because I ran out of bag space and will often destroy something that's already in my bag just so I can loot the new drop and make the sparkles go away. Moving on while ignoring them just won't do!

However, I realise that's just me. Obviously everyone is free to handle these things in whichever way they want when they play on their own. However, once you step into an instance group things change in my eyes. I'm continually amazed by the amount of people who just don't bother clicking on the sparkles at all. Once upon a time I might have asked people to loot so I can skin the mobs or whatever, but since it's become so frequent these days and people are always in such a hurry I don't find it worth the hassle of arguing anymore. Nonetheless the fact remains that I simply consider not looting all the mobs in an instance very bad form. Mainly there are three reasons for this:

1. Gold still has value

Money has never been as easy to come by in WoW as it is now, and I think that the poor raider who can't pay for his repair bills at the end of the night is a thing of the past. Dedicated goblins will even hit the gold cap repeatedly, but I dare say that they are a minority in the overall playerbase. For the average player, earning gold is at least still relevant, and there's almost always another goal to sink gold into, whether it's epic flying for all ten of your level eighties or a stable of mammoths.

So even if you personally don't need any more gold, there's a good chance that several people in your instance run are still saving, and by not looting all the mobs you're denying them money. I'll admit that it's a bit of a silly system - since any looted gold automatically gets distributed equally among all party members, why does it matter who loots it anyway? Still, fact of the matter is that only the person who the dead mob was assigned to can actually take its money - which means that if you decide not to click on a mob that has five gold on it, not only are you passing on one gold for yourself, you're also depriving all the other party members of one gold each. They don't get an option to not share their loot with you without hurting themselves, but you deny them their part. Nice.

To be fair, a regular instance mob generally won't be dropping five gold, but even if it's only a bunch of silver, that adds up over a whole instance run and then over the course of dozens of instances.

2. You do like those shiny epics, don't you?

I saw an off-hand comment in a thread on the official forums where someone claimed that after being the only person left in a completed heroic Pit of Saron run, he went back and looted any corpses that people had ignored before and that hadn't despawned yet, and one of them had a battered hilt on it. I don't know whether that's a true story or not, but I thought it was amusing. I wonder how many groups there are in which none of the party members bother to loot anything and miss out on a whole bunch of stuff? But hey, at least they all agree on it.

However, if you've got at least one person in the group who clicks on all the sparkles he sees, items of uncommon or greater rarity will always pop up for rolls. Funny how all those people who "don't care" for loot are still happy to make a bid for stuff that someone else dug up. They could just pass if they really didn't care, right? Let the ones who need the money have it! But no, they still do like money, they just can't be bothered to even put the tiniest bit of effort in to grab it themselves. Let the others loot gold and items for them but don't contribute to the pool yourself.

And yes, I realise it's pretty bizarre when we talk about looting as if it's more work than actually killing the mobs. Unfortunately that's how far we've come these days.

3. Give those professions some love!

One of the little perks of many professions is that they allow you to gain extra crafting-related loot off certain corpses. Many beasts can be skinned, treants and flowers can be herbed, constructs can be mined or salvaged for engineering parts, humanoids can be scavenged for additional cloth if you're a tailor. Except, here's the catch: it only works if they've been fully looted by their rightful owner first. Fat chance of that happening, eh? But why not? Why deny the other people in the party their profession perks? If you were a tailor, wouldn't you also want to gather as much cloth as the game allows? Even if you have a different profession like jewelcrafting, you wouldn't have got that design off heroic Anub'arak on your own either, would you?

Cooperation is a great thing, and two seconds to do your share of looting is hardly asking for much.*

*Then again, I had a healer in heroic Pit of Saron complain today because I pulled an extra mob so someone else could finish the quest to free the slaves. OMG, how dare I waste his time time like that!