The following opinion comes from a loyal BDO player who's played every day for the last year, hours a day and has accumulated nearly 5000 in-game hours. I have a dozen awakened characters, but my best and favorite is Guardian (level 61 with 254/258/311 AP/AW/DP). I worked very hard to get my guardian to that level. My characters have also always lived in Serendia 5. It's been my home all that time.

Salient parts of today's patch:

1. the beginner and starter areas were bumped up to 270ish AP

2. three new rift monsters were introduced

So I logged into Serendia 5, my home, and tried the rift bosses first. I love them and am happy for them. Arguably my favorite player versus monster aspect of BDO is the rift bosses because they're challenging, sometimes have excellent rewards  and have no death penalty. Considering one death at level 61 would cost me a week or two of hard PVM grinding, I despise death penalty and love rift bosses for their lack of it.

This said, when I walked up to the edge of the swamp near Kaplan, I immediately got hit so hard by the fogans there that I took 3500 damage in under two seconds. Fortunately I had 4k hp and had time to hit the V key and run, but to do so much damage so fast to a character I worked hard to finally get good enough to do Stars End quest (barely) is disenheartening.

With the last patch where you released O'draxxia you added content for people way above my level and nothing for my level, and now you've not only added more content for super high level people but made it deadly to travel to normal starter and mid level areas. So you not only added content I can't use, but you took away areas I travel through and to every day.

You've pushed me out of my home in Serendia 5, and I'm sore about that. But you've also belittled all the work I got finally reaching 258 AP by making it worthless.

That's the bad feelings. On the bright side, I have one hope:

When I was doing the Stars End quest on my 258 AP character, I spent days and days luring one or two monsters at a time onto the road trying to kill them without dying to complete the quest (which I succeeded). In that time, there was a scumbag guy way above my level who thought I was taking his spot, as if he has the right to keep me from doing a main questline just because he's higher level than me. He killed me (and went red), and I went back to working my quest.

The thing is, though, there's a fundamental flaw with the game if people think they need to kill people over a Player Versus Monster area. It's one thing to kill people to kill people, but the whole concept of defending turf so you can fight monsters is a stupid game design.

Perhaps with all the new areas for people like that scumbag the game can reach a state in which people won't feel they have to fight over monster spots.

I'm still sore that I'm again being pushed out of the game for being too weak even with 258 AP (let alone my other characters with 208 through 220 AP). And I don't honestly see how I'll ever reach above 261 AP even with another 5000 hours of effort. So I hate that the game design is focusing around 270 AP and more instead of 220 AP through 250 AP.

But I'm glad for the new rift bosses, and I'll watch with anticipation to see if the new lands reduce toxicity between monster hunters.

On side note, for more background to me, I was a hardcore Ultima Online player back in the late 1990s, and I play GTAO and Red Dead Online every single day, three other games with unconsensual PVP. I have no problem at all with unconsensual PVP. It's just a bad game design if monster hunting spots are so scarce that people think they need to exclude other monster hunters from participating.

> It's one thing to kill people to kill peoiple, but the whole concept of defending turf so you can fight monsters is a stupid game design.

This is an interesting point that I kind of agree with on a personal level, and I feel like it has a worthwhile discussion behind it.

The problem is...that's what this game is and always has been, and at one time I really, really enjoyed it. I don't anymore. Does that mean that I should try to change the game to do more of what I enjoy? I don't know.

I think the game ought to evolve with its playerbase and not stand too rigid on retaining its core goals that it launched with, because the game is different than it was back then. The playerbase is different. We've seen what happens to games that don't move and flow with the tide. 

I am too new to BDO to know as much as you of the original design (I started a bit over a year ago I think). But what you describe is the evolution Ultima Online had, so there's a reference point for it.

The original design of UO around 1997 or so was that anyone could attack anyone for any reason, but they'd go red if they killed people who reported them for the crime. Red people could be attacked without penalty. I believe BDO's model is probably based on that.

The thing is, though, that everything was dangerous. Mining, walking from your house to a friend's house, walking to town, etcetera (towns were safe because they had guards who could be called to kill criminals).

Eventally, Origin doubled the land into Felluca (the original open-PVP lands) and Trammel (the consensual PVP lands where guilds could war each other but people couldn't get murdered unless they allowed it).

Trammel became very popular. Felucca eventually became nearly empty (my characters continued to live in Felluca, of course, as that's where I was most comfortable). I used to love mining with strong pvp characters and surprising PKs when what they thought was easy prey would kill them. And my main house was a dueling arena.

Did Ultima Online eventually die because it catered to people who didn't want to be killed walking out of their homes? I don't thiink so. I think the fact they didn't modernize their graphics was the doom.

But we do know one thing. If BDO made consensual PVP worlds like UO did, most people would go there. And the unconsensual PVP zones would become nearly empty.

Is this good or bad? I don't know. I'd say it's both good and bad.

I very much like that I can be attacked outside Calpheon for no reason than somebody wants to kill me. That's like real life without real death. I don't honestly want to lose that.

But I do want it so that people who want to kill me do so because they want to kill me and not because there's a scarcity of PVM areas.

Yes today's update it's the last nail in the bdo coffin (O'dyllita region was the first).

It's just silly to add content to the game that is only available to 1% of players and p2w players.

Without changes 99% of players never ever will exceed soft cap full tet gear.

Best proof: only 23 bs ava pens. ROTFL. This is absurd. Today should be not 23 but 2300 bs awa pens in game.

More: bs armor set it's Epic Fail, Obsydian bs armor set it's even more Epic Fail. 

First: you need better gear then obsydian bs to collect mats for obsydian bs.

Second: some mats cost like heating yellow acc and crystals is ridiculously too high.

Third: time to grind all mats it's inadequately high compared to bs obsydian stats.

They're going about this completely backwards. They keep making content that demands gear that the vast majority of players don't have, then turn around and add catchup mechanics that give you stuff for free. Not only does that trivialize the efforts of everyone that earned gear the hard way, but bores newer players as there is no sense of accomplishment when everthing falls into your lap. AND, because the free stuff only gets you so far, when they finally hit a gear wall, it will feel insurmountable because they never had to work for anything before. Stupid, all of it.

I think you two are looking for a game, that won't sell you off to be content for the big spenders. BDO is not that type of game.

I to am disappointed in this patch. Low level areas are now inaccessible to the average player on multiple servers and channels. Some of these areas are prime gathering areas and those resources will now be limited to a few select channels causing more competition amongst those who enjoy life skills. I had thought perhaps the new content would be instanced leaving the areas open to lower level players while those with high enough AP / DP could enter the areas similarly to Aakman and Hystria. 

I am not disappointed with this patch.  Your low level and gathering areas are unaffected -- just stay off servers listed here and you will not encounter the Elvia Realm monsters.  It's written in plain English.  I'd suggest to read patch notes after every patch.

I'd have to agree.  Nearly everyone in this post is simply wrong.  On every single level.

These newbie zones where NOT for new players.  Even if you start brand new with nothing you should immediately out level and out equip these areas without even trying.

This does only apply to a small amount of servers.

You DID get a notice before logging into the server.

This has been announced for a long time.

You can play you own way, but it's certainly not very efficient.  The amount of time you represent playing vs your gear score even for a non paying customer is very low.

This IS CONTENT FOR YOU if you stay around long enough to work your way up.

The requirement for most of these areas really isn't even that high.  There are SO MANY players already clearing Stars End / Syc.  A LOT of these players will have no issue doing these new zones.

In addition a few of these areas are noted as party loot.  You can't just SAY that's what you want then complain when more and more is available.

So now we will have crowded servers where  eighty percent of players, all lower geared players are forced to be in to few servers. Splitting guilds who now have to find a new home server while trying to cater for all players. This change sucks and I agree it is likely to disappoint or anger many players. Pearl abyss have made a huge mistake here making so many hadum servers. More than half are hadum when only twenty percent or there about of players are geared enough to go there.