Loot Spawning, Empty Servers and the playerbase

[tandwan 250]

So we're currently playing on a new server (well old, but new to us) and we've encountered very few guns on the server as a whole. We gather that this is because someone is hoarding loot on the server but we were curious about a couple of things.

Does the game keep up with every single weapon, say an M4A1 in the inventory of players on and offline and use that to determine the spawn rates of the CLE? I understand that hoarding can adjust the gun spawns, but do offline players do so or only online?

[EzyStriderPS4 191]

To the best of my understanding the CLE will not include Player Inventories.  I am not sure about buried stashes, barrels, crates, or tents.  I'm leaning towards the fact that they do, but in the past, Q&A with developers revealed they did not count toward minimal, nominal, and maximum CLE counts.  But that was pre-1.0, it may now be different.  I believe stashes and tents do count towards the total available on the server. The game does a CLE check every 5 seconds and respawns loot to create shortages, supply&demand, and balance throughout different regions!   The highest tier and most rare items have a maximum cap, and when reached, those items will NOT spawn. Duplication is apparently still possible, as players have openly admitted to it.  I'm not one of those jive turkeys, nor do I know or care for finding out how.  That $H1T breaks the game for others.  The possessive mentality is poisonous to community survival.  I am in the process of searching out camps, investigating practices of other survivors through observation, and making informed decisions to restore balance on my home server, on which,  I haven't found AR's, or SMG's in the last month.