This is a bad idea. Other people have already mentioned why the inc sac helps make Kraken important. I personally know people that only stay at Kraken when their raid is having a hard time because they need an ink sac or they have friends who do, and they want to do their best to make sure their group kills it so they can get one. Large scale open world PvP can only really exist in any balanced stage if there's adequate numbers on every side, and taking away an incentive as big as the thought of getting an ink sac (or an ink sac split) can pretty easily destroy the already poor balance. There are a lot of people that end up having a lot of fun at Kraken, and a very large part of the reason the server's still alive is the active raid v raid playerbase. It should be fairly obvious how this change is harmful to AR's activity.
Also leaving it as a small RNG drop is pretty silly. I think the admins thought process is that "anyone can roll it so anyone can get an ink sac if they want one, and it'll incentivize PvP since players will want to fight / steal a high value pack." This doesn't work for pretty obvious reasons. Naturally it doesn't matter if anyone can roll it because you have to leave the middle island to turn it in. Guilds would already camp the crafting bench with 30+ man raids and destroy anyone who wanted to craft, and that's with the packs only being worth 150g, which means it's not a huge loss if you miss one. With a single pack being worth 10k+ (assuming this severely devalues the ink sac), strong nations like Pending Collapse, ENDGAME, and whatever name uwu's going to use will just monopolize the pack crafting because it would be ridiculous to let someone craft an ink sac. Small scale PvP likely won't happen in a context like this since anyone with fewer numbers won't be able to craft or steal packs. This might incentivize raid v raid PvP, but abyssal itself isn't a great area to fight raid v raid and ultimately it's too easy to lose a single pack in a scale like this. Abyssal isn't great to fight raid v raid because of a multitude of factors, like common dumb LoS issues, the abyssal island debuff making it incredibly hard to have a decent fight before channeling finished, and the geometry of the island just being ill-suited to fight with large numbers at. As for the second point, it's very, very easy for a player to lose a pack in AA. Kraken takes ~4 minutes to kill uncontested from 100% to 0% (which is arguably too low, but I digress), RD takes ~15 minutes to kill uncontested. It takes like 30 seconds at most to kill the tankiest player in the game. And once that player's dead the pack is most likely gone. At Kraken you normally get at least 2 full wipes before a given raid is able to burn it. With a single, ultra-valuable pack you'll only get one attempt. Once it's stolen, it's incredibly easy to dodge the enemy raid (with shroudlights and incredibly fast eternal merches with corpse breathers) straight to a peace zone turn in (diamond shores, austera, etc.)
The fundamental reasoning behind making a change like this is to: lower the cost of inc sac items (good idea!), and incentivize players to go to abyssal (also a good idea!). The admins seem to have their hearts in the right place, at the least.
But there are plenty of good ways to accomplish both of these things without having to resort to an RNG drop that doesn't even correctly incentivize PvP. An obvious change, already suggested multiple times, would be to just have kraken drop more ink sacs. It leaves kraken as a valuable boss and also lowers the price of individual ink sacs. Nations still do RD regularly when it drops multiple spinal ridges, so it seems like an obvious way to lower the cost of ink sacs without strongly hurting Kraken attendance.
This isn't the only possible change for ink sacs, though. If the admins are strongly opposed to simply making Kraken drop more sacs for whatever reason, they could add it to events in a way that doesn't rely on an RNG drop. Some ideas:
- The hasla rift bosses, which are completely useless currently, could be replaced with a much harder boss that players can fight over. It would require changing Nui spawns etc. since they're currently rather imbalanced at Hasla, but that's a good change anyway. Perhaps, after the bosses from both rifts die (or one rift, in the case of the earlier Hasla), a harder version of Anthalon that has new mechanics that no one has ever seen before can spawn. Something that is fun to fight around and encourages raid v raid PvP. This boss drops an ink sac. If you wanted the drop to make thematic sense you could also make it a squid or something, it doesn't matter. This would triple the amount of ink sacs in the current economy, incentivize raid v raid PvP, and let the weaker factions (east / west) have a chance at getting ink sacs, since the earlier rift isn't just free-farmed by player nations.
- Similar to 1 but for abyssal. Just add a boss that players want to fight over at abyssal, or anything that makes more sense than an RNG pack spawn. It could be, that after the pack bench despawns, a different kraken spawns with different mechanics. Or a king of the hill-like system where nations have to keep hold of mid for a certain amount of time, since it doesn't necessarily have to be a boss. It just has to be consistent.
- Just remove the ink sac part of the recipe, replace it with something else, and buff how much tentacles are worth or let the sac be vendored for gold.
Those were specifically focused on ink sacs and were just random ideas that are all better than the RNG abyssal pack. For incentivizing abyssal, the admins could:
- Just buff the gold the packs give. It already isn't contested incredibly heavily because Kraken tends to overlap with it, most of the time players are pretty tired after kraken and just don't want to bother.
- Make the event less boring. Abyssal currently has an issue where it's super easy to just summon a gally and camp guardstones, and drive around the entire arena, dodging pvp, until people get tired of it and leave. I know because I've personally stalled out abyssals on this server vs PN, east, etc. raids with 4 idiots on my galleon shelling the guardstones, then channeled at the last moment and turned packs in since people left. Rework the channeling mechanic to make it less fragile; it shouldn't require co-ordination between multiple factions to stop 5 jerks with a boat. Make it harder to kill the person channeling. It's super easy for any decent damage class to just honor nodachi and pop anyone channeling mid, regardless of how tanky they are. You could even just remove the channeling mechanic entirely. It burns players out and doesn't really accomplish much in the way of letting players have fun, if they don't enjoy making everyone else super upset with them. The pack PvP tends to be fun in and of itself though. Reworking abyssal to be less terrible is probably the easiest way to fix the event.
- Schedule it so it doesn't overlap with Kraken. If the admins want to keep it as an alternative event to Kraken, then obviously don't do this. Otherwise, the current schedule makes it super hard to attend both, and abyssal tends to get ignored over Kraken for previously mentioned reasons. I personally have much more fun at Kraken, but enjoy aby, so it's sort of lame to me that I can't make it to both.