Hi, I did a looking for raid...

And, I accidentally won something i did not mean to roll on. tier shoulders from hagara. I already have mine but i had gone afk after i clicked need on the items i had rolled on. When I came back from my afk I was the only person left in the raid. So i thought hey, maybe I can check my chat log and find someone else that needed the item. I found that a paladin was begging me for them while I was afk. Unfortunately he was not on my realm, so I filled out a ticket and logged out for a few days for the ticket to be answered. The timer on the shoulders wouldn't expire that way and this paladin would find a nice gift in his mailbox. I opened my ticker and... was informed that blizzard could not do anything about it and I would have to keep the shoulders. I'm kinda annoyed by this but I am sure the person that needed the shoulders was probably angry and justified to be angry. Thanks for the time to look at this, hopefully this can be resolved!

01/06/2012 12:11 PMPosted by Maintanker

what i find most frustrating is that it took this blue longer to type out that cookie cutter post than it would have for the appropriate person to take said item from one toon and give it to another. its obvious both toons want this to happen

One thing I've come to see over time is that it's not made "easy" to take an item from a character on one realm and move it to a character on another realm.

The game code has special logic for how and when items are generated - from quests, from looting, from crafting, purchased from a vendor. Until those actions are performed, that particular item does not exist on the realm. When it is created, it is internally unique, in a way that means if I buy Handwraps of the Cleansing Flame on both this gal and my other 85 priest, they aren't the same item. Outwardly, yes, but internally no.

GMs are not given the power to create or generate items. They are given the power to "un-delete" them (aka restore). They can find the database information for a recently deleted item and bring that unique item back. This goes beyond policy; it is developer tool limitations to prevent abuses and other issues.

Now, the next step from there has to do with cross-realm movement of items. It literally doesn't happen except in very specifically defined scenarios:

1) Within an instance server. While in the raid or dungeon, characters are not on their realm server - they are on an instance server. Instance servers are designed to create loot (when mobs die) that can be carried back to a realm. Once the toon returns to the realm, though, the item is now generated and exists on the realm with its unique identifier.

2) In a paid character transfer. There is a lot of code underlying this one and not code that a GM touches. Every item in the character's inventory is copied and replicated on the destination realm - giving it the new realm's unique identifier for that item.

There is zero GM functionality to move things between realms. The item does not exist on the destination realm (not a uniquely identified version belonging to that character anyway). It cannot be created there. It can only be created through the methods the game coding specifies.

NOTE: This is actually why, should an item for any reason fails to make it across during a transfer, a GM cannot restore it. If it's not there, it failed to create a copy on that realm and none exists to be restored. Doesn't matter if they can look at the deleted one on the original realm. They don't have the tools to generate it on the destination realm.


The only way this might ever change is if the Developer's decide there is more value to making it possible than there is danger of it being abused. That won't change what GMs cannot do right now.