the problem with the public hive is that a player can go to one place, for example balota airstrip, if he dont find nothing in this server he can logout and go to an empty server and see if can find the itens there, if dont he can go to another server...
and when he are full geared he can come back to a full server and can kill everyone, i see a lot of player doing that, i do that to, and I'm fully geared now...
I just hope that when the game is released has not public hive servers anymore!