Current state of the game

Players are getting frustrated around all branches of the game, player numbers are down bad and reaching new lows each and every day. This is due to a multitude of reasons, here are some the community identified. And yes it's the end of summer, people are out to touch grass, but it not only feels different this time, the numbers indicate it is in fact different this time. Also the recent coverage from many Creators could create a downwards trend that if you don't react quickly it could cost you the company, and that doesnt mean Copyright Strike them, that means listen to them a bit more. Anyways here are some of the issues the community has identified: 

1. Stale endgame

2. PvP

3. No real, new, original content has been added to the game that hasn't been dead on arrival since a long time

4. Promises PA makes are being broken with up to a 80% chance

5. Special Treatment for Korea that results in solved and obsolete content for the other regions

6. Community and Player Interaction

7. Close to no endgame goals for PvE players besides gear

8. Countless areas of content being downright dead for years and nobody cares

9. Shitty Guild and Alliance systems that have close to no purpose to players that don't play PvP 

10. General Incompetence when it comes to managing your game properly 

11. Extensive Pay to win that has become more available to dolphins 

12. General lack of response from the devs regarding any issue 

13. Extremely poor performance during the MMO part 

14. Obnoxious time grinding activities that are mandatory to do

1. Stale endgame

Narrowing down the path of progression towards one single item is not only a bold choice when you have a cash shop so useful, because the Pay 2 Win allegations are bound to happen (two Nov Sovereign Weapons roughly will cost 7-8k€), it's also a bold game design choice. BDO is a Sandbox MMO, you can do whatever the f*ck you want and make a profit. You want to train horses? Here is your progression path, that's your market and these are the chores you have to overcome. You want to be a sailor? Heres this system. You want to do dungeons? Here is Attoraxion. Point is you can do many, many different things and move forward. At Least that's the way it was. Over Time most systems became so outdated that PA worked furiously to dumb things down, made recipes easier, narrowed down the progression and gave so much shit away it killed some professions completely. Tell me when was the last time you spoke to someone that trained horses FOR A LIVING, not to get a T10, no to sustain the gear progression. When i started BDO in 2020 i had to snipe a T8 out the market, a friend listed one for me, no other T8s where listed. I was sweating my balls off, and afterwards i felt i had made good progress on my account, permanent progress. F*cking 480 GS gifted tri Shit Timmy feeling good. And when that thing was fully trained up and luckily enough hit all coursor skills Timmy felt really good. That was magic. Today 730 GS Timmy has to run around in circles for a few hundred, in case of the Sovereign Weapons a few thousand hours to make progress on single items that will be replaced by better items when PA feels like it. Tell me what's next to the game now that we have all Deboreka Slots, Sovereign Weapons and Fallen God Armor Pieces. Can't be the end right? Can't be build variety either, at least not for those Items that took thousands of hours to complete. That would piss off your endgame playerbase, pretending as if you guys would actually care about that.
So how to unf*ck this mess, well first of all give professions meaning again. Let's take Alchemy as an easy example, with the recent changes Alchemy has become easier and more braindead than ever. Now instead of watching Anime and managing 80 different ressources it narrowed down to you are watching Anime and managing 30 different ressources. Create more recipes and give Alchemy more complexity again. Create special items that can only be obtained via Alchemy that create a small permanent upgrade to your account but can be obtained more easily than a Pen Deboreka. For example, create Infinity Variants of your elixirs that cost about the same as a hammer of precision and make them tradeable, nobody wants to do alchemy besides the weirdos that enjoy watching Anime all Day. Or create visual Auras for your Charakter that are permanent but costly, I can't imagine that PvE Andys would turn down the opportunity to waste some silver on some slick looks. The fun part is you can tie in other content into this. You have to defeat five calamity 5 bosses to obtain the final ingredient for that potion, aura, skin whatever, simple alchemy that stuff with the bought or crafted item and you have your permanent upgrade. Can't be that hard to think of small upgrades with the extremely inflated Gearscores we have now. 

Next, the more important change, widen the range of gear that is viable in PvP with two changes. Simplify the Gear Caps into one fairly achievable cap, something along the lines of 720 GS with room for min max up to 750 GS, that is viable on simple classes like guardian or Musa, or any other of the braindead classes. Point is when you want to play Warrior or Ninja or any other 20 Finger Class IN PVP you need to get some gear that fits the class. Which brings me to my next point, Gear Variants. Cups for our Accessories and Artifacts could be so good but they are shit. Give us more variants. Why is there only one option for the earrings and not f*cking 20? Why is there only Kutums Hearth for Weapons as weapon transfusion material? Well actually there is Karandas .... stfu it only gives one crystal slot. Instead of trying to mend your shitty drop rates that can’t be improved under any circumstance whatsoever, you implemented an item that is not only worse but serves close to no purpose. Why can't we put Karandas Heart on the off hand and instead of 900 Health it would give 40 Accuracy or 50 DR or 15% Crit Hit or whatever, bring Buffs with Trade Offs you gain 35 AP but lose 25 DP. Why isn't there a Heart for every Boss, including the smaller ones like Rift, Attoraxion, Guild Boss. We could have massively complicated Gear Setups that are fun to theorize and build, especially when each and every Upgrade is obtainable within 20 to 60 hours guaranteed. You have narrowed down the gear progression so much, now you have every option out there. Make gearing exciting again. You expect players to literally run in circles for thousands of hours, do you think players that are invested that much are unable to try thinking once in a while? Yes it's your playerbase, yes we are obviously dumb for playing and paying for this burning pile of shit, players will make mistakes but that's fine because they didn't invest the better half of a year grinding for one item and then it's not even close to best in slot for that class. But atleast give it a shot. The worst that can happen is that Creators will farm this to create guides. What a shame, free advertisement. And players want their "10k hours nothing to show for" grinds. Like the merchant ring, which is quite frankly the most boring overhyped item i have ever seen in any video game. A 5% Tax return? Bro im trying to escape reality playing a video game, not getting reminded that my tax money is getting wasted. Sure the item is giga useful, however its so goddamn boring i can't even begin to mald because i'm already half asleep. Where is my treasure Item that colors the flames of the T10 in different colors. How hype could it be if you have a T10 Pegasus Skin that is unique to the server for a few weeks. How impressive would it be to have a visual representation of your tedious grind that only you and maybe a few others have, like a Giga Chad Armor Skin and not a linkable Item that shows you have a better accountant now because you are in a higher income class.

2. PvP

Our Boy has been butchered, it's time to revive him. 

Open World PvP is dead, BlueSquadron had a good Take on how to fix it at least a little. But you know what would fix it actually? Enforce your ToS and give us back the old Guild War System and remove meta gaming from PvP. We don't need actual Ticket PvP because somebody is going red or rogue on Arsha. If I want to bomb the alts on a World Boss I should be allowed to do so and grind back my Karma fearing for my dear life. Also implement bounties. And instead of BS crystal loss, that we can P2W now hurray, increase the server swap time in increments up to 20 minutes. And to fix karma bombing decrease the karma loss in increments when you kill somebody over and over again, and on top of that tie karma loss to the maximum account Gearscore not the worn. That change could be already implemented idk, i have quit the game a while ago. 

RBF is dead, implement a tie between PvE and PvP and make the time you spend in RBF be a 2x recharge for your Marni Realm, in case you win its 4x. Also make a repeatable quest that refills your Agris to the brim when you win two RBFs. Refill players Energy when they win, refill it to half when they lose, Give yellow and green energy potions as reward. Increase the silver reward to be competitive to PvE. And sort players into platoons automatically, sure there will be solo players still. But this will help many classes tremendously. 

Nodewars are dead. Period. Time for either a new system that is fun this time. Or better go back to the old system for now and develop a new system that you are technically capable of WITH the top nodewar and siege guilds together. I'm sure plenty of people will have a take on what's good and what's shit. We don't want to see 100 caps only, that are a slideshow when more than two guilds attend. I personally would implement a change towards one nodewar region per day that is more dynamic than this one. Maybe if you win your node you can join the attack on a different adjacent node, but you have to win your Node first. Also implement new braindead jobs for people without hands that are maybe a little more exciting this time, just pressing spacebar aint cutting it champ. Maybe Guilds develop a mech suit together with Marni, you finally bring the cannon carriage, a Tier 3 Elephant that can do the Pegasus Glide. The possibilities are more or less endless. 

Sieges aren't as dead, they just lack numbers which is mostly due to Nodewars being dead. I have recently heard about the fact that you more or less can't fly into castles anymore. Well that's a change for sure but it's a bad one. Oh no fun was detected, Players solving the PvP puzzle not the way we like it, lets block players from flying into the castle instead of developing counter play for it. You already teased us with the Guild Dragon. Where is it? Could be a fantastic way of dealing with these horses. Or when you want to be even lazier just copy paste the hawacha and make an anti air variant. Also to make the change work there needs to be a purpose to the gates. To achieve that I would copy paste one of your War of the Roses Bosses, make it the spirit of the castle that supports the holding guild, make it stay in the tent room, make it so it can't be ignored because it  CCs or debuffs you constantly. It loses these mechanics when the gates go down. 

And last thing for PvP.
FIX! YOUR! GOD! DAMN! PERFORMANCE!

PvP should be the carrot on the stick for at least half your player base. It can't be that when you have 12 FPS when inside the castle. It can't be that when the server almost melts when three guilds are inside the castle. 

3. No real, new, original content has been added to the game that hasn't been dead on arrival since a long time

Well first of all to make things clear. I do not consider grinding content. The scenery doesn't matter. The money doesn't matter. 

We want to see actual content being developed that isn't dead on arrival. 

Loml was nice and all. But you made it useless within three weeks because you decided to gatekeep players from debo earrings. Good Job guys nobody visits the continent anymore. Make life skilling fun. Add Raids. Add Guild activities that not only are worth players time but develop the Guild and the players gear. 25 Minutes of Guild Bosses a week ain't it boss. Atm you add more and more activities that are dead on arrival while 60% of the game has outdated content. Remember Attoraxion? Remember AOS? Remember RBF? Remember that Valtarra Dungeon? Remember that Valencia Dungeon? Remember Mediah? Remember Balenos? Remember LOML? Remember Snow Region? Remember Hunting? Remember Simple Life Skills like Sifting or Grinding? Member Kahn? Oh yeah we used to do Kahn all the time, it was Good Times! Member Pirate Island? Member Trading? Member Worker Empire? Member Fishing? Member Spear Fishing or Harpooning? If it wasn't for Rapolas i wouldn't even know it exists. Member Ships? Member Blue Battlefield? Member Horse Training? Member Artifacts? Oh yeah they added Kabuas Artifact. Good one PA, good one. Member green offhand weapons? Oh yeah we loved green weapons we all had multiple and Caphras where selling. Btw the last piece of original content that i consider content was the magnus and that one was shit on launch, and it just added a bunch of quality of life features. But it felt earned once we got them. Magnus was not only giga because it came out of nowhere it made the game better and had an interesting approach to it. 

4. Promises PA makes are being broken with up to a 80% chance

Well what can i say about that one. It's simply frustrating being lied to over and over and over again. Your balls all go the same way. Somebody pitches J an idea while he is taking a piss, weirded out by the situation he says yeah lets include that in the presentation. Then after that he scraps the idea because he didn't like it in the first place and ghosts everybody that asks what's the status of the guild dragon. WHAT'S THE STATUS ON THE GUILD DRAGON J?? WHEN WILL WE SEE IT? 

5. Special Treatment for Korea that results in solved and obsolete content for the other regions

To me it's not as frustrating because when stuff came out in Korea i started thinking. Most people I know started grinding, which is the more sensible thing to do. Nonetheless I played around on Garmoth.com with the item, and had some ideas. Many to most were shit. This game is just too narrow when it comes to builds in most regards. However, I had fun with that. For people who just ask actual good theory crafters what's the meta, it's easy. They start grinding and are finished three times over before the items reach the rest of the world because localisation in the Age of AI takes 8 months. Unless it's something like artifacts where you have to drop the item you can always stack up on mem-frags, crons, caphras and stacks. 

6. Community and Player Interaction

Marnis Realm. Guild war System. Guild Bosses. 

As a PvE Player why join a Guild? As players of different Guilds, why fight? 

7. Close to no endgame goals for PvE players besides gear

That's a thing I have never understood. People just grind for the grind's sake. Why grind for 740 Gearscore when you don't plan to do PvP? There are these idiots out there that do that. Running in the hamster wheel without purpose. But please cater to these players more. PvE Andy's need content man. Give them Raids. Give them grindable cosmetics. Give them grindable mounts. There needs to be other endgame goals for players besides PvP and to grind gear for the gears sake. 

8. Countless areas of content being downright dead for years and nobody cares

Fishing is more or less dead. When you don't plan to bring it  back why are there still calculations running on every server what level of abundance the fishing spots have? That's surely splendid for performance. Worker Empires are dead. They are worthless. Still players run them because why wouldn't they. Great for performance surely. Khan. Field Bosses are actually the perfect example on how you revived a region of content successfully. When you added the feathers to them people were doing trains across many servers farming those bosses. That was a big W PA. Cooking could use a real upgrade not  only for buffs but new content as well. Maybe Infinite Meals. Maybe a Cooking Utensil that you don't need to repair and can equip it in your Tool slot, but you don't enhance it, you manufacture it. Maybe it has mastery and Cooking EXP. We do have an Amity System with NPCs. Why? The stats behind that are gone and you made clear you don't like clever people. We don't have an Amity System towards players. Why isn't there more RP stuff in the game like marriage or stuff like that but NPC Amity? 

9. Shitty Guild and Alliance systems that have close to no purpose to players that don't play PvP 

5 Million a day and useless Shit. We have Global Peace boys! Why are you in guilds besides Guild Buffs when you don't do PvP? I really don't get it. I do love MMOs for player interaction. But in PvE Guilds there isn't ... any. 

10. General Incompetence when it comes to managing your game properly 

Classes are broken for months. Bugs are persistent for years, a bug i have reported over a weird interaction between Guardian and Nova is still in the game 4 years later. Exploits work for eternities. At Least we don't have many bots ... anymore. But cheating is apparently really easy, not that i would know but there are videos out on YouTube. Invisible players. Not banning racists. Lashing out at players that protest stupid decisions. Not banning racists. Also why aren't you catering towards the real degens? Why isn't there an Otter, Papu, Fadus class? I've been on the internet for long enough I know how it would end. ERP with Shais and Otters on Balenos 2 but still you just ban those pedos and move on. Loads of people would dig a class like that. Why did you have to move your servers to US central? The US is a bit bigger than Korea. I know that's hard to grasp but ffs guys they should have been there day one when Kakao handed over the keys. And yeah i mean BDO Console should be its own point but i can't be arsed to write a paragraph for the two people that are still playing it. 

11. Extensive Pay to win that has become more available to dolphins 

Well the pity system for enhancing is good. But it's also lowering the entry level for pay 2 win players because now a Gearpiece has a maximum Value in IRL money. It's basically that thought process I'm able to throw 10k at the game but I can't afford 15k, let's not probably waste 10k. oh wow now it costs 9k maximum lets do it. 

From crons, to fairy, to tent, to loot scrolls, to costumes, to artisans, to value packs, to crystal recovery. This game has a lot of p2w. You can say whatever you want about BDO but two things are equally true and nobody in his right mind would say otherwise, the game has the best f*cking combat compared to any other MMO including niche non MMO games like Destiny and Warframe. And you can spend the equivalent of a house on BDO and not reach the endgame. And having players face another 2k hours grind with an easy way out, aka the sovereign weapons, is not only lazy game design, honestly it's more than a bit shitty. 

12. General lack of response from the devs regarding any issue

Member when Drakania was broken? Which variation of broken Drakania do you mean? Oh yeah she was broken three times... Member Musa one shotting everybody with two skills? Member Striker being broken? Member Zerker being broken? Member Creators making YT videos on speed hacking traders and nobody got banned? Member that one time when Koreans had Js Face as Guild Logos? Oh yeah that fix took them two days. Member BigAndShiny calling out devs for obv mistakes and they didnt do anything? 

13. Extremely poor performance during the MMO part 

I was already yapping a bit about this one but it needs its own paragraph. FIX SIEGE PERFORMANCE

Also this is just the most obv thing, but don't gaslight players trying to find a fix on their end. No it's not our routers. No, we don't use WLAN. No, our computers aren't shit. It's not an issue with our providers. Could you please just man up, admit your mistakes and try working on it rather than gaslight us into chores that aren't doing anything? 

14. Obnoxious time grinding activities that are mandatory to do

LOML chests. Adventure Logs in Mediah Gaining Knowledge.
These tasks are not total shit. I Like the idea behind them.

But the effort you put into them is drastically lower than the player's effort grinding these things out. I like the idea that you don't only progress your account with silver but also time, this ties directly into this. But instead of giving the "free" stats to the bosses in LOML as a reward, you made us collect chests. Hurray for much hype. It's braindead, ultra tedious, unfun in the most extreme way and yet it's mandatory because it's free. 

To quote the great Warrior Poet FakeUni. We. Want. Better.

And we deserve better. 

why would you waste your time like that?

there are literally 100 posts of the same stuff.

You are absolutely 100% right. 

The more the merrier or how was that saying. 

Tbh i cared a whole lot about the game, the annoucement of the new nodewar system and a bunch of other stuff killed my enthusiasm for the game. But seeing this go down like this i wanted to make a post about it. 

Hopefully devs read this +1

They wont. I just wanted to vent and cope a little that i could have a positive impact on a game that i dont play anymore. 

Pearl Abyss has significantly streamlined the gameplay, resulting in a more simplified experience that may lack depth. The game environment has become highly structured and predictable, reducing the excitement of exploration and problem-solving. Encountering aggressive players, if they still exist, is no longer a concern, as players can easily switch servers or retreat to safe zones like Marni. The thrill and anticipation that once accompanied the prospect of engaging in battles have diminished. This is also evident in Guild versus Guild (GvG) interactions; the thrill of unexpected confrontations between rival guilds has been replaced by a more consensual framework that feels less dynamic. Drawing a parallel to real-world conflicts, one could argue that authentic warfare typically does not allow for mutual agreement between opposing parties, as seen in historical conflicts like Ukraine and Russia, where one side typically takes on the role of aggressor.

Simply put, remove the bubble wrapping experiences and let players be players and sort their differences among themselves. If laws are broken, then we will report them and you handle your side. Otherwise let us play the game without an overlord.