It partly gets a bad rap because there are ninja looters who don't take care to denote their occupance of a dungeon and a group goes in and then finds the loot missing.
This is in such an extreme minority of cases that it barely warrants mentioning; back when I was seriously devoted to ninja looting every single dungeon in all of Barovia like clockwork with every reset, I had
one occasion where I came out of the Terg Ruins with all the loot and found a party present, about to dip in. I told them to wait fifteen minutes, handed them a few choice items and went on my way; when I was actively doing this, I left a note outside the entrance of every dungeon I was actively looting, serving as a warning, solely as a courtesy. This what-if scenario of ninja looting denying other groups their valuables is not only infrequent, it's also pointedly entitled in nature. No party is entitled to the gains of any given dungeon. There have been numerous times where a party will set out to a given dungeon, only to find it's been cleared ahead of them by other players. This incident, compared to that of arriving in the wake of a ninja looter, is taken largely with grace and acceptance, followed by seeking a different dungeon to delve in it's place.
Players meanwhile will ascribe motive to the ninja looter that got to the goods before them as bearing some particular malicious intent; as if they are a shadowy figure lurking nearby waiting to overhear people will be going to a specific dungeon, just so they can get ahead of them and 'steal' what they believe is rightfully theirs. In the case of a second party clearing a dungeon, that's it. It's done, go home or find a different venue. There's no possibility of getting anything out of it anymore. In the case of a ninja looter, waiting a quarter of an hour will reset all the loot within,
while also not depriving the party of the XP which is arguably the larger prize to be had. Ninja looting provides a secondary pipeline of valuables to the player market, but instead of being praised for the thankless job of risking their lives with possibly hours between rescues, all for the very likely outcome of walking out with a few thousand gold of vendor fodder trinkets, they are continually ascribed the role of a malefactor, that of the undeserved
thief in the night who takes things that they
don't deserve.
Again, solo play vs group play. These ninja looters could very well be providing the locksmith duties some groups would enjoy.
People tend to avoid the known ninjalooting dungeons because they are the ninjalooting dungeons.
If they were not such, then you would find groups employing lockpickers to these places.
This rationale, which I see wheeled out time and time again in one form or another, that ninja looting is 'imbalanced', that because of the server's intended rewards for group play over soloing, that it should in turn be looked upon with scorn and forcibly made less rewarding, despite being a far harder thing to do and oftentimes completely unrewarding; the hours spent ninja looting dungeons reward you with only coin in easily 95/100 full clears. No XP at all. The gold accrued is frankly trivial to obtain through far less risky and time consuming activities, such as selling herbalist-brewed potions. It is a thankless, back breaking task that is pursued by the truly mad and driven, whom either derive pleasure from the challenge presented and the sheer risks associated with it, or by those whom benevolently want to see valuables rarely seen in the loot tables reach the hands of players.
People only look at the end result; the successful looter walking around with that coveted 1% droprate from the treasury that might go to auction for half a million GP. They don't look at the ninety nine other attempts at ninjaing that saw them walk out with 3,000 GP of vendor fodder, maybe a few scrolls worth holding onto and the thought that maybe next time, surely, it'll be different. Instead of pointing to that ninja that's providing an extra roll of the dice against the loot treasuries for a chance at something people would actually like to trade for and saying they're robbing others of that coveted item, consider the amount of effort put into obtaining it in the first place and how it hasn't actually stopped others from being able to clear that same dungeon.
TL;DR, Ninja looting is a separate pipeline of valuable items that serves to lower the overall cost of valuable goods on the server, adds more gold to the total held by players and is in active circulation and manages to do so without depriving other players of XP, or of an equal shot at the same valuables. Stop vilifying our ninja looters and engaging in demands to make their efforts more difficult; what they do ultimately benefits us all.
