I've noticed something a bit unexpected and confusing over the last few months: apparently, the way my server generally deals with loot in 5-mans is strange. Rather than rely on the in-game roller, we pass on all loot, and let people call need on a piece. Then we all roll need or greed on the stuff. If there's an enchanter in group, they can disenchant the loot for the winner on a greed roll and hand over a shard. Lately, though, since Blizzard started allowing server transfers, it seems a lot of the new 70s have come in and told us that this method is a bit weird. Why don't we just use the in-game rolling system? Why should enchanters be expected to automatically be willing to shard gear for non-enchanters without compensation? These are questions that are really alien to most of our server community, but there they are.

So, I thought I'd ask you, dear readers. How do you deal with 5-man loot on your servers or groups? Do you just use the built in roll system? Do you use Master loot? Do you pass and discuss? Is it generally expected that an Enchanter will gladly shard loot for everyone in the group, or is it expected that an Enchanter only need shard his own loot?

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling and using player-made products.

A handful of my guildies and I rerolled early this week on a new-to-us server for a new-to-us type of game play (and yes, I'm exhausted from the whole "Just let me do this last turn-in over here, oh and here are the last six mobs for that collect quest, and then I gotta train, and then top off a few points in fishing ..." thing until 2 a.m. – I'll be needing all the Night Dragon's Breath Dip I can get to make it through the tail end of the work week). I can verifiably report that we have indeed discovered the promised land: a mature, friendly and humorous server population. (And no, I won't tell you which server we chose. This community is mine, all mine!) Although our intrepid little group plans to group all the way up together almost exclusively, I'm sure we'll be picking up the occasional PuGger. But somehow, I don't think we'll run into many problems with loot whiners -- the players here seem to have specced for level-headedness.

On some servers, though, the atmosphere's not so holly-jolly. Mole hills blow up into mountains (and indeed, volcanos) before you can say "Who's in on this drop?" Today, Insider Trader takes a look at an issue that's left many an enchanter completely scratching his head: who disenchants items nobody needs during an instance run – and who gets to keep the results?

Alice from the great gameblog Wonderland loves playing WoW, and posts about it all the time-- I especially like the "The other me is Epic, I'm just an alt" shirt from her latest post. But, she says, "the problem with WoW" is those darn servers it seems we're all dealing with. She's got friends across almost all the servers, including US, EU, and even Oceanic, and yet she can't visit them without paying a fee again and again. In fact, she says Blizzard just changed the client software on the US and UK clients, so that you can no longer access one server from a different client-- you have to buy two seperate clients to access the US and EU servers. For players like me, who only play in one country, it's not really an issue, but for Alice, who just moved to California from England, it's, as she says, "rubbish."

But that doesn't mean I don't have my own problems with Blizzards' (and MMORPGs in general, since most of them are "sharded" in some way) servers-- my friend started his characters on different server than I was on, and so since I joined him, I've now got sixties spread across different servers, and I've got to pay $25 to transfer each character-- if and when Blizzard opens transfers to my already overpopulated server. And then there's the problem of queues in general, which everyone, it seems, is dealing with in larger quantities.

So what's the solution? There may not be one. Free transfers from server to server would keep players happy, but would also freak out in-game economies, bunch populations up (more queues), and cost Blizzard even more time and staff hours to do (which means less spent on development and keeping servers up). It might be nice, as Alice suggests, to put everyone on one big server, but I doubt Blizzard has the technology to do so at this point-- even if it was technologically possible to put all seven million players in a world where they could interact with each other, doing so would require much more of a code overhaul than letting flying mounts run free, and that's not happening either. For the world of Azeroth as we know it, it's unlikely Alice's problem will ever really get solved.

Which leaves room for competitors to step up, I guess-- EVE, Guild Wars, and even MySpace are all listed as alternatives to this problem of "sharding". If an upcoming MMORPG has a great solution to these problems (and a match to the cool style and gameplay of WoW), I'd like to hear it.