Seriously I just see this as a desperate attempt at player retention. How many people actually quit the game both when they killed guild decs and reimplemented xigncode. I know a bunch of people uninstalled after xigncode. Hell I'm one of them. I didn't want to but it was clear PA had no intention of listening to their players. 

MMORPGs in general are not performing well anywhere on player retention.  This is not a unique symptom to BDO or indicative of anything that Pearl Abyss is specifically guilty of.   If anything, PA is actually with those studios who are ahead of the curve by focusing more on a Single-player (with co-op elements) RPG like Crimson Desert

In other words, most if not all of the non-Whale players of PC games, have been supporting the release of these other titles instead and it's quite the list:  RedDead, Elden Ring, Valheim, LostArk, Path-Exiles, Zomboid, FF-XVI, Naraka, Yakuza, Baldur's Gate, Palworld, etc...

People have come back to a focus on the content Delivery and the fact that more players standing around != more "fun"

This company is disgusting. Charges around abour £50 to get some buffs - I mean Kama and Old Moon and value pack too - without these you play at a huge disadvantage.

I wish them well - I am going away now/ Its too much for this game. I dont get value for my money so .... see you later greedy company.

Pearl Abyss is specifically guilty of not mitigating this somewhat by making some sensible decisions to retain the playerbase.  Instead, they made the worst possible decision to return to xigncode, a horrible buggy, malicious, privacy-violating, system-damaging piece of malware that has encouraged more than a few people to uninstall the game, myself included - I come to check the Feedback forum once a week to see if there's any kind of response, but I'll stop doing that soon, it's clear they don't care one bit about their western markets.

I would choose to forgo all of these "free stuff" events and delay new classes and areas, all of it if I could. Just fix the things that people have been complaining about for years. The turbos are eating up content faster than PA could ever add it in because sweats will always find a way to sweat. And Tuvala Timmies are hitting a disastrously sheer grindwall and/or paywall to get their characters progressed to be current. They graduate season server and exchange their gear, now their next upgrade costs 90 bil. Better clear your schedule. See you in a month or two, idiot.

That's why newbies just quit because that's the first thing they're presented with after completing a season that basically just acts as a tutorial for the game at this point. Handing out cron stones and other goodies isn't going to retain people. They're being so stubborn and arrogant about their game for no reason. Its like they don't want to succeed.

But don't worry, surely once Crimson Desert release. It will be better once we have rebuy everything we have in BDO in Crimson Desert. As they say, "Business is Booming!"

Do you really think anyone cares about 3333 crons?
It's one failed click bs pen and a loss of millions to repair item.

Without pve only channels, free fast travel to any node, unlimited marni, removal of loss of exp and crystals due to death, pity parts for all treasures and progressive enchantment system (no item lvl drop/item disappearance) this game is dead anyway.

While I agree that there are many things to improve (as there always are), I am afraid many players hop on the train of PA-hate and negativity, which is not surprising, since hate sells quite well these days. Many times, players just "get told" that somehing is baad, such as Xigncode, but when asked, they repeat a plethora of misconceptions that fly around, and the things that are true are pertinent to other anticheats as well.

I do not need to defend PA, yet it is sad to see the repeated hate threads from the same people over and over again, while improvements get overlooked. However, I started playing in 2021 and from my experience, I would be happier if I started playing now than back then, because so many systems I hated and made little sense got much better over these years.

Yep. I know I didn't open the game for long and I was about to come back a little bit to play with a friend. I won't. Xigncode shouldn't be allowed since it doesn't respect privacy rights and heats up your comp.

My friend just opened it and the game crashed.

He re-started it, showed me all the changed, including the market now not accessible anymore from the storage (huge mistake and unnecessary, but it is off-topic here). He showed me all the buggs still not resolved.

Then the pearl shop and I agree with you, it's laughable.

PA doesn't deserve my money anymore, it's settled. And finally, I don't come back on their shitty game. We don't have fun anymore there.

And this is exactly what I was talking about. I have AMD processor and did not see any changes in CPU or GPU temps, I have the graphs in front of me all the time, so I would notice. My game does not crash any more than before, logging to other chars is still problematic at times. Marketplace is still accessible from storage. You see how such misconceptions emerge - "a friend of mine told me, so this is true now".