Played on release, quit before Calpheon, came back during Mediah.  I am 100% not a fan of what PA did with the OWPVP system.  I agree that they shoud have dealt with unfavorable scenarios and valid concerns like camping guilds, or stronger guilds picking on weaker ones, random ganks, and feeding to mobs.  But I don't like HOW they addressed those issues.  It feels like when you're in elemenary school and everyone in the class is behaving, but one or two kids start goofing off -- and the WHOLE CLASS gets in trouble or gets stuff taken away.  It feels like that.  I think they could've addressed those issues in much better ways, even going so far as to reworking entire systems, instead of just turning off the switch completely, which is what they did, essentially.

I am not a fan of ganking, picking on weak players, or guild camping.  Or any other form of valid griefing.  What I am a fan of is the type of organic interactions that BDO offered and was the only game who delivered it.  Those interactions were 100% player-driven content...and that player-driven content birthed OWGVG, which was my personal favorite content in BDO.  It added thrill to grind zones when you knew rival guilds could be around.  GVGs that hours.  Rivalries that lasted weeks or months.  This added so much depth to gearing up and getting good at PVP, and combining gearing + getting good + BDO's fun combat system + BDO's gorgeous landscapes and fantastically designed open world....you combine all of that on top of its organic, player-driven nature, yeah.  I miss it. 

Now, everything is instanced and/or gear capped.  It's like we're being served a scoop of rice and some generic fried chicken and told to eat it when, back in the day, we cooked our own meals with ingredients we picked from our own garden, so to speak.  The rice and generic fried chicken they serve us wouldn't be so bad if it actually tasted good.  But the instanced content they gave us is pretty bland compared to the type of experiences and memories I've had in the past.

My most memorable memory in BDO was on Pirate Island.  This was around the time when players were running Grunil, Liverto was staple, and everyone gunning for boss gear drops from world bosses.  Pirate Island's setup was interesting.  You have a bunch of smaller side rotations around the sides of the island with the main rotation being near the middle, near the docks where everyone lands.  When you enter the island, you will pass main rotation, and main was always a group spot.  While the side rotations were mostly solo.  This was an interesting premise as we don't have spots like this anymore -- Sausan's was like this too -- side/small rotations =solo.  Main roto = group.

I arrived at Pirate Island on my rickety rowboat, docked, and headed to main.  I asked the group grinding there if I could join them, complete random people, complete random interaction.  This is organic, in case you didn't know, reader.  We don't have this anymore.  Anyway, they let me join them.  We were grinding and all of a sudden, one of our group members gets PK'd by a guild his guild was at war with.  We told the attacker to back off, but the attacker kept assaulting our group member.  We flagged and killed him a few times to back up our group member, but he kept coming back, and even if Karma penalties weren't as harsh, we had to stop because we'd go red if we kept doing it.  So, we all had a dec sent to the attacker's guild.  Once we were engaged in war, the attacker left.  We thought all was good and we continued our grind.

A few moments later, a group of players in red (dec'd guild) came in and started attacking us.  We were outnumbered, so we all called our own guilds for backup.  Backup came and soon, they were outnumbered.  We fended them off and held them near spawn which is a safe zone on the island.  The next thing that happened, I will always remember as my most glorious MMORPG moment of all time.  Multiple guilds showed up.  Decs were sent, alliances drawn, and what ended up happening was a massive, multi-guild GVG that lasted HOURS.  I was there for a good 5 hours, I believe, just PVP'ing near the docks, the front bach area, in main, it was MASSIVE.  And GLORIOUS.

After the dust settled and players started leaving, some of the original memebers of the group I was in were still there.  We added each other to our friend's lists and our guilds became cool, joining each other's Discords.  The decs with those rival guilds stayed up for some time and smaller scale, yet equally satisfying (even if we lost) fights occurred.  All this, from a single, organic, player-driven interaction in the open world.  Content that lasted months, thrilling content, and most of all, FUN CONTENT (not just monotonous brainless grinding), all because I decided to ask a random group of strangers if I could group with them at Pirate's main for an hour.

God, I will go full Boomer here.  I miss the good ol' days.

I started playing around mid-late 2017 and I'm largely neutral to positive on the changes. Unless PvP was gutted by the time I had started playing, I was there for the golden age of PvP.  A lot of the time, for the average player, PvP was just duel for spot or getting griefed by someone with gear way better than yours. If I'm being real, that's PvP in most games: people of higher level/GS picking on people weaker than them then corpse camping them until they give up and go somewhere else. I like Arsha because it forces people who actually talk about doing  OWPvP to decide if they enjoy the risk of OWPvP or if they like the power it gives them over weaker players.

BDO pvp was excellent until they added PRI DUO etc etc
however, it was kinda good until they removed the one side war dec

Playing since the second beta and I have mixed feelings, I feel like some decisions were rushed in order to better retain newer players as they were flooding in, but overall I see a net positive when it comes to these changes, I've seen the good and the bad of open world PvP and sadly in my experience the bad tended to outweigh the good.

Certain changes just feel a little unpolished and I hope they iron things out.

I played on and off ever since the beginning. Spent the full 100 dollars at launch to play the early access because it was my first time getting conned and I believed the developers when they said the big b2p price would translate to no p2w cash shop trash. I built a new PC with this game in mind and everything. I was so excited. The first week or so of playtime, where (iirc) it was in beta and then into early access, were actually really enjoyable. Nights were truly dark. You needed lanterns if I remember right. Nothing felt "solved" and everything was still murky and mysterious. People were running around with Yuria weapons. The devs were confident in their product; there were moments on the official forums where people would cry about being murdered in game, and community managers would respond telling them that this was an OW PVP game and that was just the nature of the beast. The game felt like there were endless systems and those systems all felt integrated. I'm not sure if everything really WAS viable, but everything felt viable, or at least felt like it had some purpose. Nowadays there are some systems that feel so disconnected and obsolete that you wonder why it's even still in the game. P2W back then was truly horrible by the way. There's no excuse for how bad it was. The weight limits were terrible, and silver added to it. There weren't all these free pet giveaways. Ghilie suits being tossed into the game shortly after launch saw sooooooo many of my friends shake their head and issue chargebacks on their accounts. Then the game started slowly getting solved. People stopped telling each other to use Liverto and everyone wanted a Kzarka. Awakening came out. PvP started feeling like quickdraw matches for a while. Things were changing but it still felt alright. There was a lot of p2w BS that pushed people out, but if you could look past that, or if you just didn't mind it, the game was not too bad. It had serious issues but there was a really fun core at its center.

I might be getting the order of events mixed up a bit but at some point around here, the crowd that was really into this game for the world and the pve but not for the pvp arted complaining extra hard about being killed in a game that billed itself as a sandbox pvp game. And for whatever reason, instead of just telling them to get over it like they had in the past, the devs began catering to the whims of these people and they changed the karma system to favor the loser in a 1v1, which really blew up the whole karmabombing debate. That issue has spiraled and grown into the system we have today, where basically openworld pvp barely happens and everyone just chills in instanced grind zones or lets themselves be killed so they can exact vengeance when their opponent goes red. I think we've taken some steps forward in a lot of ways, but the devs love taking multiple steps back at the same time. At the moment I'm really not versed enough in the current matters of the game to say what it's like now, but in the beginning things ironically felt grander than they do now, and it felt like there was so much more that was actually worth doing. I miss it. But I don't miss the p2w and a lot of the QoL stuff we've gotten. It's complicated.

Been playing since mid 2016. I think the recent changes to open world PvP have been a net positive. I don't think they're prefect by any means but I do think the current system is better than it was prior to the changes.