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"This week on Ask WoW Insider, a reader has a suggestion, not a question, to put forth to you readers.  It's about a problem lots of folks are having lately, with the servers as full as they are:One thing that has been annoying most people is the ninjas who spend their time waiting for players to take down a pat so they have unobstructed access to the quest items or loot/ore.  It happened to me even with the Oil-stained Wolf quest last night in the expansion. People waiting to steal poo! Sick!  Why should the players who take down the pat be disadvantaged and lose out on the ore?The rest of the question and your chance to answer after the jump.How hard is it to put a little mechanism into the game where if you run up to a node, you automatically get all the threat of the pat?  A debuff might be a good solution, too -- if you steal the ore, you get a debuff which turns you into a slug with a high threat range, or an inability to get gold or drops.  That will stop the ninjas, right?Shalyn  It's an interesting idea -- generally, Blizzard keeps out of game mechanics and ingame mechanics separate, but a few times they've mixed them up (i.e. the AFK \"Deserter\" debuff you get when you leave a battleground early).  What if they did have a debuff or some kind of ingame penalty for ninja-ing nodes, kills, or even items in raid groups?  I think the coding would be tough to do (how do you know when someone means to ninja a node or not?), but the question remains: would a debuff like this stop ninjas for good?  What do you think?  Answer in the comments below, and if you have a question for our readers, send it to ask@wow.com (please send questions in -- we need new question fodder), and you might see it next week.  Previously on Ask WoW Insider..."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.engadget.com/2008/11/24/ask-wow-insider-the-ninja-debuff/>