I rent 5 servers from www.gameservers.com, costing me $$$ and supporting DayZ SA by providing free public servers for people to play on. I am far from amateur, and I can notice trends when they occur.
The issue is that there has been a VERY noticeable lack of loot available, especially in Tisy Military Base. I host severs which are geared toward PvE players, therefore loot and tent camps are crucial to our type of game play. I have received emails from MULTIPLE players who use my servers, and they all seem to be noticing the lack of loot as well. This problem is not just with my servers; it seems to be a problem with all Public, Third Person servers.
It has been weeks since we've routinely found guns, drum mags, and other loot that used to be quite plentiful a few weeks ago.
I can say with a great deal of certainty that the loot has not been taken by players who are server-hopping, as these servers are void of almost all activity most of the time. I have logged onto servers for a period of 2 hours or longer, and I am quite often the only player on the server. This happens on a very large number of servers.
For people who play PvE style, that's a fun killer. I have never seen such a low population of players on DayZ in my life.
I checked a number of different servers, all void of players, and I checked at all the tents in Tisy, and I couldn't even find a tenth of the loot we used to find, just weeks ago.