For starters, the same way torches can: spam a bunch of them to cause client-side lag and make your base harder to raid. Especially on consoles, where the hardware struggles to run the game as it is.
Then there are all the other (not-so-)little things PVP players come up with. If there’s any way to exploit aesthetic thralls, they’ll find it and exploit it. Want some examples? Here:
- Can we agree Improved Beehives are overpowered damage sponges 🧽
- Nemedian DLC is pay to win
- Dear admins, what can we as players do against cheaters? - #6 by Kyra
And yeah, I get that this is only a problem on PVP servers. Still, if they implement it and PVP players start abusing it, we’ll have to face yet another flood of “Funcom is killing this game by catering to PVE players”, or an even more popular variant “PVE players are killing this game”.
Even if they implement it so it’s disabled on PVP servers, you’ll still get complaints from PVE players who got banned and then insisted it’s not their fault that they spammed 400 of those in their base and everyone who tries to run by lags like crazy.
EDIT: That said, I still want the aesthetic thralls in the base game. I mean, the people who would abuse them in the ways I described above already abuse everything else they can. If we use those people to decide if Funcom should implement something, we might as well ask Funcom to stop updating the game altogether.