A Rare you already have now goes to your next character

A Rare item is one copy per character. Six characters means your account is entitled to six copies. Until today the server threw five of them away.

You know the moment. You are farming a Rare head piece for the squad, it drops again, and the pool window will not let you touch it because the character you happen to be playing already has one. So it sits there for five minutes and disappears. The only way to get a second copy was to log that other character in and kill the thing again on them.

Not any more.

What happens now

When a Rare drops and the character you are playing already has one, it goes to the first character on your account that does not — in the order your character list shows them — and the server tells you exactly who took it and which bag it landed in:

`` You already have a Silver Mitts, and it is Rare -- so Yakapo took it. It is in their wardrobe3. ``

It lands in whichever bag that character's own layout files it in, so gear turns up where they keep gear rather than clogging their inventory. !squad bagpref still decides that, per character, exactly as it always has.

The drop is only lost once every character on your account already has a copy. That is the rule, and it is the whole rule.

Things worth knowing

• Nobody ends up with two. The Rare rule itself is untouched — each character still holds exactly one. All that changed is where a copy goes instead of the bin.
• Pass still means pass. If you genuinely do not want the thing on anybody, hit Pass and it goes away like always. Doing nothing is what sends it to the next character, because that is the common case and it should not need a button.
• You do not have to be running a squad. This is about your account, not about who is summoned. The receiving character does not need to be out, or even to have been logged in this month.
• If that character's bags are completely full, the item goes to their delivery box instead, and your squad collects it at their next summon. !squad box shows anything waiting.
• It is yours immediately. !squad fetch <character> <item> pulls it back to whoever you are playing, the same as anything else on the account.

Party loot is unchanged

This applies when you are looting alone — which, with a squad of your own characters behind you, is nearly always, because squad members are trusts and trusts do not take a share of the pool.

In a real party with other players, loot behaves exactly as it did before. A drop somebody present can still use is never quietly consumed by somebody else's offline character. The only thing that changed for a party is that if you win an item outright and cannot hold it, it goes to one of your own characters rather than being destroyed.