I'm not against reduced drops and shrapnel, just seems a clumsy way to rebalance. For me at least i can't see point of shrapnel, is an over complex way of giving us universal ammo.
I got mixed feelings.
On one hand, it reduces the clutter, and the less different stacks of materials, the less the question (especially for beginners) will be "should I keep this 3 muscle oil, sell it or TT it?". One reason for the "clutter" the past years has been all types of new crafting stuff that's been implemented; animal oils, enhancer crafting Components and extractors
On the other hand, maybe it's a bit drastical in some cases. A mob I've hunted for years suddently doesn't drop any hides and wool anymore - and it's drops that's been there even Before animal oils.
For good and bad, maybe the Changes are to slow down the "amateur crafting": If you don't loot wool+extractors you won't Craft textures unless you seek the materials actively.
Entropedia: Loot tables on Entropedia will be more crucial than Before. Maybe Entropedia needs to be "cleaned up"; mark all previous drops as "inactive" and hide it (unless you really want to see it), and kind of begin from scratch, to shorten down the 4 page list of stackables from each mob. Also, the maintenance of entropedia will be more urgent for general players; while you usually can live with atrox location being unavailible for 3 weeks, getting to learn wich mobs drops common Resources (like animal hides and inferior cloth extractors) will be more will be more needed - aswell as a smooth procedure to register these drops. Needless to say, there should be an administrator who works Daily with it, in case the website gets compromised again and to keep the computer it's running on patched-up.
Also I hope MA isn't involved with planet-specific drops but let's that to the planet partners, so MA (for instance) doesn't run the bullodozer over, let's say, Next Island drops of Crystals and Cyclops bones (or whatever).
Another less obvious thing is how balancing will act on the markup, as a whole, in the end. Let's say Resources X and Y is commonly used to Craft item Z. Then, to increase markup, MA reduces drop of X. This will some people make less Z, so demand of Y will go down, and it will eventually turn into TT-food. Then, possibly, the ones who still makes Z will have harder to Craft it, and then maybe demand of X also will go down. Or, let's say only Puny Daikiba drops wool. Then everyone and their Granma will, eventually, start to hunt Puny Daikiba to get their materials.
