Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-26138409-20150308004122/@comment-6697950-20150309185854

For the 4th example, weapons that are equipped on an avatar may be dropped mid-battle. Such weapons are still considered to belong to the player who dropped them, but the item possession data is reset after an hour.

The anime isn't a valid source for a reference. If the book didn't mention items dropping (since it's not important to the current plot), then it's unlikely that the animators would do research or bother with extra work.

For example #2, there's no such line in the novel. But there is a line about Kirito being a juicy target since he's a clearer.

Anyway, on to actual examples. For example, in the Murder Case story, it is implied that PK'ing yields item drops, since it was suspected that Griselda was killed to get the rare ring she had. However, the mechanics of the drop sytem, i.e. whether all the items drop or only certain items drop, and how they dropped wasn't really explained.

Another example is when Coper tried to MPK (getting a monster to kill a player) Kirito to get the quest item that he had obtained. However, the quest item was in his pouch at the time, so all this proves is that items in a pouch would drop on the spot if the player died.

These are all the examples that I remember. The reason why the mechanics aren't explained on the wiki is because the mechanics weren't really explained enough to be covered anywhere.