I have worked on and off in video game industry since 2008. As a QA analyst my job is to break things, replicate issues, test networking etc etc Outside of this, I have over 15 years of experience utilizing Unreal Engine, from personal projects to full fledged indie projects. Notable companies I have been employed with, or under third party agreements.Mate I work in software development and have made many games myself in the past I can tell you a goddamn loot bag is not hard to implement. First of all it's already dropped by pigs. Zombies. When you die. So no it's not a technical challenge it's already in game. As for server drain sure if you never ever removed the lootbag then yea but leaving it for ten minutes? No. The real reason is probably they can't prevent people from using it to dupe and trade criminal items. Please stop with this ridiculous it's too much for the network bs you have no idea what you're talking about
Creative Assembly, 2008 - 2014
Empire TW, Napoleon TW, Shogun II TW and Rome II
Offworld Industries, 2018 - Current day
SQUAD
Redstone Interactive, 2020 - Current day
Beyond The Wire
When working on a project, you have your planned core systems to build the foundation of your game. Each planned system has perf cost allocated, some systems are server side heavy, others more client heavy, some you can balance between the two - All is dependent on the system and if you can offload onto client or server dependent on the headroom you have, and of course the what exactly it is, itself. You figure out how big your perf pie is, and you allocate X system/feature a piece, then adapt it over time as the systems are implemented, and optimizations are done.
Somethings like dropping loot everywhere in the game world, is a low on the priority ladder thing. When you have main systems being implemented and other core features having perf cost set aside for future implementation - Things like items dropping all over the game world, can get very expensive, very quickly. Especially when your game is already very ambitious, with very heavy systems involved, little server side optimizations etc . And then you have 1000s of clients to communicate to the server and back with all this info happening across multiple server nodes. You typically want all the core and major systems in place and optimizations done, before adding the lower priority shit, so you build a stable foundation - So you know exactly how much headroom you have to fit other things in. You don't do this, you end up like one of the 1000s of shit games on Steam that are DOA, due to major stability issues. And as we all know, MO2 has major node/server instability.
There is a reason there's aggressive 'garbage collection' in games with being able to drop loot on the ground. Rust gets by, by making the bags merge into one, if same mat, and items despawn time is based on tier. They can get away with it, because it takes 2min for people to get back to their shit, though it has it's issues, as aformentioned. A large raid happens, tones of bodies on the ground and people mass despawning items = server shits the bed, which then in = client issues start occuring. Something like how rust does things, would not work in MO2 due to the scale of the game and how long it takes to travel. And with how unstable MO2's server infrastructure is, mass despawning items would implode the server into the next dimension.