Loot: Leaving it All Behind
There are some obvious problems with loot, and Melmoth covers many of the more absurd properties in the World of Warcraft system in one of his wonderful stories. He misses at least two aspects that are peculiar to loot and drops. One is how certain creatures don't drop body parts consistently. Using a boar as an example, sometimes you'll get a snout, sometimes a liver, sometimes both, and sometimes neither. It is possible to rationalise this by considering that you have just killed the creature and that the physical battering you gave it has made its snout a bloody mess, or its liver gets mashed up. But consistency is missing. Is it more likely that a critical hit will mash the body up and normal hits, with their low damage, will leave the carcass intact; or the greater quantity of normal hits mash the body up and critical hits will do so much damage in a short time that most of the body will be left untouched? Either way could explain it, but neither seems to make a difference, nor do they explain magical damage. It also doesn't explain how a boar can be obliterated to the point of having no tusks, snout, liver, intestines, nor recognisable meat left once killed, presumably leaving nothing but boar pulp oozing in to the ground. Maybe at times like that the player needs to step away from the keyboard and work on his rage issues, I dunno.
It would be nice to have an explanation as to why half the boars roaming the world have no livers. It would be more satisfying if there were at least some indication of why the liver cannot be taken, for whatever purpose you need it for. You could kill a boar and then, when you go to open it up instead of getting a liver you get a crushed liver, or an obviously unhealthy liver, offering a reason why you wouldn't take it for your quest or to put in your pie. Ah, if only it were that simple, because the game doesn't prevent you from picking up even the foulest object and, for some reason, this practice can pay well. The problem is that you cannot show every bit of useless loot on a body if it can be taken and sold for profit, but if you don't you get the situation above where you wonder how an animal survives with no intestinal tract. That's not strictly true, because you could show every bit of useless loot, and just let players' bags fill up to bursting point until they need to decide what to keep and what to leave behind, and judging by the number of times this decision needs to be made it does indeed seem like every bit of useless loot is thrown your way. However, we then get to the initial problems Melmoth noted, particularly the vastness of your loot bags.
A quick and easy solution would be to prevent useless loot from being picked up. After all, it's useless. It may offer an extra bit of money for players to gain, but if you remove the income from useless loot it can easily be factored in to the useful loot instead. If this were implemented, we could see ruined organs, or other spoilt quest drops, and not bemoan how so many wingless buzzards are flying around, and it could give us more realistically sized bags, as they won't need to carry so much spider hair or troll sweat. Vendor trash is an odd concept when considered, and one that perhaps needs to be avoided.