Been a while since I played this game actively. After coming back and playing a little bit in between other games, I got the urge to reflect on why I grew away from BDO and what would keep me here and playing. In the spirit of New Years and all that. I think I will separate these in order of significance for your skimming convenience since this post will be of some duration. Some I think the game desperately needs while some would be quality of life that is nice to have.

Red = Oh my god this is the worst please PA fix this immediately 

Yellow = Would be a big boon to the game but not emergency

Enhancing/Gear Progression: This system deserves to get absolutely ripped to shreds in its current state. This is the worst offending part of BDO that has driven away countless players and kept countless more from ever downloading the launcher and giving the game a chance. Way too much of your time and effort is spent only for your character to not get any stronger for the time and resources put in. It encourages people to just afk, collect daily rewards, and wait for some event that gives them free gear. Because at a certain point, progressing your equipment becomes so miserable that people stop bothering. I haven't felt happy about a gear increase in a while. Just temporary relief combined with annoyance that it took so long and dread about how much there still is to go. I should not dread trying to progress in a video game, but I do. So I'm complaining about it.

The commonly posed "solution" is just to grind and hoard hundreds of billions of silver and buy gear directly from the market. This is no good. It is terrible advice. Stop telling people to "just buy it lol" because that's not fun. Gone is the rush of breakthrough, the happy brain chemicals from taking a piece of equipment and improving it yourself. No actually, what you're supposed to do is watch this guide telling you how to run in circles at the spot relevant to your current gear (that you got for free in events or season and/or bought from someone else) and hit monsters until you've slaved enough silver to simply buy better gear (from someone else) and repeat for two thousand hours. Exceedingly lame. I want to enhance. I want to tap on my gear. Enhancing should be encouraged more. Because finally hitting that exciting pop is a good feeling. The problem is that the punishment for playing the game that way is too high so I don't do it. The penalty for failing is so severe and the resources to protect your progress are expensive and don't even fully protect your item in the case of accessories. I'll be sitting on tens of billions of silver and thinking "I could throw all of this into enhance attempts and still very likely see zero progress. Best case scenario I don't go backwards or lose anything"

I have ideas on how I'd rather this be done and I'm open to ideas. At the very least I'd like to see enhancement get improved so the blow is lessened when attempts fail. This is a system designed around failing a lot so stop kicking me in the shin so dang hard when I don't hit that single digit percent chance to succeed. This could mean more methods to perform or earn enhancement, less mats required, more ways to protect your item etc. Perhaps some sort of system where your gear will stop being able to go backwards after you tap it enough times without it popping. This is glorified slot machine gameplay anyway so might as well put in a pity system. And don't say failstacks are the pity system. Everybody knows failstacks aren't real. Fake RNG. Just about anything would be welcome except PA's usual strategy to get players moving along tends to be silly stuff like "Event time! Log in for free blackstar :)" and lemme tell you that is not a good way to implement catchup. It teaches people that there's really no point in working hard to progress their characters since eventually its going to be practically handed to them anyway. Simply look into options for making the penalty for enhancement failure less severe. Degrading your stuff sucks if you don't have backups and throwing your hard earned silver down the drain cronning things is incredibly painful in a different way since it makes your time feel wasted grinding like a bandsaw just to stay where you are. We have options in the game like capotia accessories as a backup if you blow up your earring or whatever but they are small comfort when you just deleted something that you spent a lot of time/silver getting because the game decided it wasn't time for you to make progress yet.

The only reason enhancing has stayed this way is greed. It milks the whales and swipers, and its as simple as that. Which sucks, because that also means there's basically zero chance of it ever changing despite how much it holds the game back. But I can hope anyway. Speaking of greed, that leads into my next thing.

Three Purchasable Shop Buffs?

Not sure when they added a third buff but this is really bad. Beyond excessive. Yes, I am very aware that value pack, old moon, and kama buffs are not "required" and that you do not "have" to buy them. I one hundred percent comprehend that they are optional and you can play the game just fine without them. I also know that you can often get a couple days worth here and there as login or event rewards. That doesn't make it any less greedy and stupid for them to make three separate cash shop convenience buffs so they can triple dip and charge for each individual one. Buying 30 days of a buff by itself costs in the ballpark of an average monthly sub payment to other MMO's. And there's three of them available. These should either be made cheaper to buy individually or merged into one buff and -always- sold as one single buff. The game already asks us for money all the time. Its a simple concept: stop trying to milk me or when my buffs expire I will just log off until your next "free stuff" event. Straight up. Because I refuse to be disproportionately invested in a company that feels like they are positively entitled to my money no matter how much of it they already have. I am begging pearl abyss to understand that I want to want to play their game and I don't mind stuff costing money. I want a game that's so good I happily pay money to play it each month. But giving players three separate things that you pay to upkeep is a cheap marketing/sales trick designed to milk people that are susceptible to monetization.

The Node System Is Being Neglected

The node, property, and worker system are some of the coolest and most unique features of black desert so I have no idea why it looks like hardly any thought or effort past the bare minimum has been put into the nodes of pretty much every new area. There's hardly anything interesting to invest in. No branching paths or choices to make. There's hardly anything there at all. And investable property layouts have become flat, lame, and boring. Very ignorable content and that's sad.

I get that magnus storage has sort of defeated some of what we used to do with property since you're not tetrising your contribution points to get more efficient storage slots vs lodging or crafting anymore due to being able to freely move items around. But this system is still being squandered. When's the last time we got a new building type? Have they ever tweaked the way we get and develop workers? Or are we just supposed to wait for events so we can turn in tokens for free instant artisans? Any chance we could tweak/rework or just delete building types that are underused or just not used at all? Make more things craftable? Make more craftable things (that matter and are useful, I should add!) This is a cool system, please utilize it more.

An Actual Swimming Mechanic Please

My characters are superheros that can literally fly and teleport and shoot fire and lightning and junk. They should at least be able to doggy paddle in a faster, smoother, and more maneuverable fashion than whatever atrocity is currently in the game. The weird way you have to slowly and awkwardly steer yourself to the surface after falling in water, getting stuck swimming into terrain cuz you can't simply turn to the side while swimming for some reason. Then you're clipping into the shore until you remember that you have to press E to go up. Your character does that weird gasping flailing animation upon breaking the surface despite being underwater for just a couple seconds. Press space, clip through ground, then teleport up several yards to vault over whatever ledge you clipped into. Congratulations, you're back on land and can move normally again. This should have been cleaned up years ago. Its past due.

Farming Mastery Is Still Useless

Unsure why this life skill just was never updated. I was hoping it would have came with the rest of the manos updates to lifeskills. I get it. They probably said they're working on it or exploring options in an interview or something years ago. I'm sure its coming right along. I have no doubt in my mind that we will see it soon. But right now, there's simply no point to gathering speed and energy consumption when farming. That's so worthless. No increase to growing speed or yield? Getting more alch fruit drops? Moles happen more often? Crops less likely to get weeds or bugs, or chance to fix themselves when it does happen? Surely this wouldn't take all that long to implement and would make farming so much better. Maybe there's no good way to monetize it, is that the problem? Is that why a lot of these systems are getting ignored? Cuz you can't really whale at farming? Gimme a break.

Conclusion

I think I'm going to cut it there since this is already very very long. Also its pretty sarcastic and negative. I apologize for that. But I talk smack about this game because I like this game, and I used to like it a lot more. I think PA has done a lot of good stuff the game since Kakao isn't in the picture anymore. Black Desert is hardly recognizable from how it used to look just a year or two ago. Game has come a long way. But they still do some goofy things that I believe hold the game back a lot. Whenever BDO comes up in conversation I can't honestly recommend people try to get started in BDO because I know exactly what walls they will hit. And those walls don't have to be there. Thank you for your time, if you read all of this.

There is a lot of unnecessary ranting in this post. I read 3 entire paragraphs about the enhancement system before I could figure out that you want some sort of pity system so people don't get screwed over by bad RNG as much. Even the conclusion doesn't really say much about what your post was about.

Maybe try adding a proper TLDR?

Well I have to explain in detail what I have a problem with before I can pose a solution, don't I?

I can't just say "enhancing sux, I don't like when belt explode. Plz make easier thx bye" because then I'll get clueless commenters going "nuh uh! That didn't happen to me so its not a problem! Shut up noob its not that bad!"

The part of enhancing that is bad is that it makes you waste boatloads of time and silver for nothing which increases exponentially if you're protecting your items. And you can't fully protect accessories.

You can explain in detail. But 3 paragraphs of detail is a bit excessive. I'm sure you could express your feedback in a more concise way.