People who ninja for their companions

You highlight "pet" as if it is an afterthought by the designers. I'm pretty sure the companion system, and the ability to gear it is unique to MMO genre. As such it becomes more than just a pet. It is an extension of your character.

Attempting to level from 1-50 without would be do-able, but only the masochists would try

For me I would simply want the NEED option to be selectable for one player only if:

The player's character can equip it.

OR

The player's companion can equip it AND this companion is present in the current party.

Because In my opinion, the only characters (player or companion) who deserve priority on a loot, are the ones who helped to obtain such drop in the first place, and not the absent characters.

And obviously, the loot obtained through the NEED option should be automatically bound. (just the same way items are bound when you equip them).

Welcome back, JMS. Try not to misrepresent me here, however. Inherently, the notion of passing on gear not specifically designed for your class isn't socialist; on the surface, at least, is isn't anything, since we have no paradigm within which to work. What I did say was that giving up a shot at an upgrade solely because someone else "needed" it "more" was socialist in its implications. It's one reason why attempts to refer back to previous points in an online thread can be so unwieldy: you need to provide context, which makes for massively ballooning post sizes.

In a real-life scenario such as you've posted, where it becomes a potential issue of life or death for a human being, I'm going to not only let them have the bread, I'm likely to offer to take them to the nearest fast food restaurant and purchase them a value meal. I live in a large city here in the U.S., with a fair-sized homeless population that clusters in our downtown core. You can't avoid them as they're panhandling. I've bought such folks meals before because it pleased me to do so.

In this game, you don't have the same considerations. Just as my one sparring partner here, the "bean counter" as he calls himself, might say I don't "need" the upgrade from a FP when quest rewards will suffice, and that this differential should be enough to motivate me to forebearance in favor of another player, I'd say someone in this game doesn't need the upgrade to the point of an "I can't play" scenario, and is mostly just upset that they lost a loot roll to someone else.

But it's pointless to get into minutia like that, because it just gets past the point of being reasonable. It's also largely pointless to draw real-world corollaries, which have applications in a paradigm that includes significant penalties for misbehavior (my aforementioned fiscal/incarceration/death penalties). We have no formalized, ratified set of social mores to draw on here, in a four week-old game whose individual servers are still developing personalities that will hopefully progress over years.

At the end of it all, it comes down to "is it an upgrade?" If so, roll Need, as this is how the system is designed to work. It doesn't hold up under much more scrutiny than that, and hasn't even held up in WoW, where it was largely codified (if not originated as a game-side mechanic) over the long haul, as Blizzard has made recent adjustments to alleviate player concern over improper disbursement of loot in an environment that has even less personal accountability than before in the wake of group content now incorporating server groups instead of individual servers.

If TOR reaches that point, some adjustment may be required. Some adjustment may still be required prior to that point. Upgradeable companions are a completely new paradigm in MMOs, which means BioWare will tick a lot of people off while they work the kinks out of the system. My personal prediction (admittedly sourced in nothing more than gut feeling) is NBG won't last the long haul of this game unless they add class requirements to all FP loot drops and then add a smart-looting companion loot box to each boss' loot table for the players to roll on. But we'll have to wait and see.

This is untrue. If you pull the switch on the bioware servers, where is your gear now?

This is untrue. If you pull the switch on the bioware servers, where is your gear now?

I don't disagree, I just view the companion as a glorified "pet" its really nothing more in the end. You can dress a dog up in clothing and give it a name but in the end it is still a dog.

That would be even worse!

It has to be like WoW did it, with only being able to need on gear that fits your class.