There was something I noticed during the Quakecon Gameplay Footage, and perhaps many of you did as well.

Nick did not stop to loot any corpses, except the one they took specifically to tell us about instanced loot.

He had a good reason too, stopping to loot every corpse would have taken time away from showing us action packed gameplay and bogged down the demonstration.

This highlights an interesting point though: "If you wanted loot you would need to stop and loot every corpse."

Can you imagine the problems in grouped play, teaching new players that when an enemy goes down they should keep fighting and not all stop and run to the corpse in order to loot it?

Even if you have a group of friends that know to wait with looting until after combat, there will be a lot of time spent chasing down bodies that where killed with ranged attacks or rag-dolled and landed far from the battle.

Clicking corpses to get loot is a mechanic that dates back to the days RPG's where turn based.

In 'previous generation' MMOs, with auto attack and tab-targeting, looting during combat is not a problem, you just right click once and an extra menu opens up in your already menu filled UI, giving you need/greed/pass options.

But for today's action RPG's, opening a menu every time you kill an enemy, has arguably become an outdated mechanic.

The idea of looting corpses comes from PnP RPG games, but my experiences there, are that: your game master will never allow you to go through bandit's backpack looking for gold, while there is still combat going on around you.

It is in fact much more realistic to clear the entire dungeon, and only when the party knows it is safe, they will declare "we search the place for loot" at which point all corpses, chests, bookshelves and tables yield their loot at the same time. With possibly secret or locked cashes requiring extra effort or clever thinking to get into for bonus loot.

TL.DR? Just read this bit:

ESO looks to have great combat and I feel it would be a shame if you interrupted your heroic adrenaline filled rampage, every 3 minutes, because there are several dozen goblin corpses that need to be looted.

I would like it if ESO came up with an entirely new system, that would optimize the flow of the gameplay, by offering specific 'safe' areas in which there is time for distributing loot and doing inventory management.

You still get rewarded with loot from every enemy, but you are forced to wait until you finish the combat in order to collect it. Perhaps you must finish 3 or 4 fights before you get to the next 'safe' spot and receive the loot from all those fights at once.

Delivering multiple instances of loot all at once, has another advantage. You create a specific rest time in which to do inventory management; Instead of having to throw items away in order to have space for something good you might find later, when there is no time to manage your inventory, you can see what you get and make room for the specific items you think are valuable and leave the rest.

Even though loot is instanced, you could use those 'safe' areas to see what other group members got and ask them if they will trade with you.

Optionally other mechanics could be added, like clearing the loot list if you party wipes before reaching the next 'safe' point. That way even though you could clear a dungeon with kamikaze runs, you would get less loot as an additional death penalty.

ESO has an area-looting option. You just have to "loot" one enemy to get all your items in a specific area.

It's basically instant looting from what I have read.

There's AoE-looting, I believe, in the game. So, there really is no worry to this.

Yeah, it looks like it's loot one, get everything in the area. Also, there's not going to be much in the way of ragdoll physics going on--Too many things going on at once, the simulated physics would be a server load nightmare, especially in Cyrodiil's mass PvP.

I doubt anyone would do rag dolling server side, its definitely a client side technique. (though you could make it somewhat predictable by having the impulse from the killing attack be calculated equal for each observer)

You make a good point though, most computers would not be able to handle a siege weapon rag dolling a tightly packed group of 2 dozen or more players. Especially if it was just knock back and didn't kill them outright, meaning the server would still have to be keeping track of where the flailing bodies where each tick.

The biggest problem is the latency issues--If my client says I got the kill, and your client says you got the kill, but I have bad latency, even if I really did have the kill, the server has to resolve that, which leads to wonky behavior where corpses go flying, land, then start sliding around. Death animations with no ragdolling at least take out the flying part of the strange behavior.

Save the physics for big things, like falling boulders and siege engines knocking down keep walls.