Yeah, updated my post to get to the previous point. It's a one-sided problem. The initial aggressor has the ability to steal the weapon but the other person has no recourse if the aggressor hides it in his inventory. It's not very fair.
The principle here is that death and defeat should have some consequences -- currently, that includes the risk of losing your equipped weapon and your gold bag.
What alternative consequences might be imposed? Should exceptions be made specifically for enchanted gear? What about other, highly valuable gear that may drop (e.g. grandfathered or super rare 1% drop items)? Those might also potentially represent hard work, months of grind to hit that 1% drop; or may be literally irreplaceable.
So where exactly do you draw the line between fair and unfair consequences?
(These questions aren't rhetorical, by the way. I'm genuinely curious to hear what alternative ideas people might propose. But the current system exists for a reason...)
Losing an enchanted weapon and shield would certainly suck a great deal and set back a character a couple of months of graft. But the irony here is that an enchanted weapon is virtually of no real value to anyone but its original owner (apart from bragging rights). If my paladin loses his Calesvol sword to a thief, the thief will easily find people to sell it to afterwards. If I get my enchanted sword stolen, only trophy hunters might buy it. I'd wager it would be easier to get the enchanted sword back.
I've had my characters robbed while they were downed and/or dead. Usually the person doing so is doing it for a very specific reason and is gracious enough to not simply steal all my belongings, which I think is only fair. I generally go along with it when the reasoning seems to be plot oriented. That being said, obviously no one actually has to as it's not a system but something you'd have to agree to.
Either dropping all your items, or having any/all of your items available for anyone who came along to take off of you while you were downed would be wild! Maybe really interesting. Also, I think a lot of people would lose their shit tbh. It would also make rescues much more diffucult when you suddenly have to figure out whether you take just your friend's corpse or their entire, or part of, their inventory. Honestly I don't see something like that happening. Potentially losing your gold and equipped weapons is fairly punishing already.
Not that you were suggesting any of that but it's where your questions led my train of thought at least.
That being said I definitely get where you're coming from about the enchanted items. Personally I never was a fan of locking them to a player, even now that they can have hands changed. But, also, not hugely worried by it.
I think most people would be surprised that I raised this thread as a acquirer and not someone who lost their weapons. The trigger for this thread was me stumbling across someone else's dropped enchanted weapons without a body and the earnest dragging process of trying to get these back to their owner IC because they play in an opposite timezone. If i'm being honest, i'm not enjoying it.. just like I do not enjoy dragging someone's body back to a healer and paying for their resurrection when they're not even online to RP it out. Do I have to do it? No, but it's what my character would expect a decent person to do. If I didn't they would have been lost in the server reset - There is nothing fun about that. Pvp isn't even a factor.
I find the notion of someone dropping their weapon leading to quality roleplay a bit romanticised, even if they are obtained by another individual due to the very real consequences for stealing I think more likely than not that weapon would never be seen again, especially with how easy it is to get away with it since there's no way to identify a stolen object. If someone wants to go down that path of roleplay they could always demand it to avoid PvP and then it is at least the player's choice to engage or not. But that is only one scenario, equally likely is if someone is alone and killed that their items are obtained by a casual player or someone who can't be bothered and never seen again, dumped in the trash or lost in a server reset.
It may be romanticized, but the best the Team can do is provide a system that allows players to RP good stories. If players are lazy or prefer not to RP their PCs, it's hard to enforce that through systems.
As far as not enjoying it, a lot of people think good PCs have it easier on this server, that it's much harder to play evil. Perhaps they are correct, but if your PC is doing something not fun but because it's right (and what the PC would do), that's how the scales get balanced. Same with dragging a body to a healer. It comes with the alignment territory.
And if you're doing either because of OOC reasons of just wanting to be helpful to your fellow players, that's because you want to be a RL good person. Which isn't always fun either 
Yeah, pretty much!
