Quote Originally Posted by mosg2 View Post
they added aoe loot after swtor pioneered it. Now they've added the gtaoe on self that it has. It wouldn't surprise me if it was a competition thing. You want new customers to feel comfortable.
RIFT was release ~9 months before SWTOR and featured AoE looting at release. Later, the macro conditional @GTAE was introduced into RIFT in 2013, whereas SWTOR looks to have introduced the same tech, almost a year later, in patch 2.7.

I imagine RIFT wasn't the first game to feature AoE looting, though, but I could be wrong.