So currently when you spawn into a Strategus map, that gear is already taken out of your pool and is lost, even if you don't die.
I think the intention is for you to be able to both save the gear you spawn with and loot gear from the field and save that as well.
If that ever gets implemented, I was realizing we could have an infinite flood of throwing weapons and arrows?
I spawn in with one quiver of arrows. My 15 friends spawn in with none. I shoot 15 arrows into the ground and they pick them up, giving them each a quiver of 1 arrow. At map end, this would be "looted gear" and we turned 1 quiver into 15 more quivers.
Suggestion #1:
If you spawn in and don't die, whatever you spawned with is saved. Just that and only that. There is no looting and it doesn't matter if you used up all of your ammo or dropped your weapon. You only save what you spawned with.
Suggestion #2:
Same as #1 except additionally there's a feature similar to the single player game where the winning team gets a loot box, perhaps as part of the web interface. The easiest thing is probably to ignore in-game looting and simply give the winning team a 10% chance per item of recovering that item. e.g., you defeated someone that had 50 mail shirts. You have a 10% chance, 50 times, to recover a mail shirt from their army. It either gets automatically merged into your inventory or maybe you have to check-box approve the items (I would just do the auto-merge and let people discard what they don't want later.)