The lack of discussion here about this week's changes to Masses & Caphras drops is the saddest sight I've seen since the last time I quietly quit playing. It means that the majority of this forum has nothing left but Grind-hards who see no consequences in this change. 

...meaning the former LS'ers all accepted it and moved on to more Elvia-ish pastures,

...or they're just not even here anymore.

In that spirit of acceptance, I offer the Best Worst-Case scenario going forward:    Since we already have plenty of evidence in the form of hindsight behind us now, we can safely say that PA will NEVER dedicate the type of focus to keeping even half of the Life Skill profressions up to date Fiscally and Monetarily with the "Muh Spot" crowd.

....not even Close.

It doesn't matter to PA that active PvP'ers and especially the NodeWars-dedicated only make up a fraction of the game's afternoon playerbase.

As a former PVP'er myself, my sincere condolences go out to those people, who've also gotten frankly, even LESS incentives than the lifeskillers have.

Which brings us to Currency:  the current defining core mechanic that all remaining incentives must be tied in with somehow.  Chiefely among them:    Silver which can buy you a lot of things. ...Accessories, Enchanting Mats, even a T9 horse.   But it can't buy you a Boat with 8 cannons.   Infact it can't even consistently buy you the 1000's of Saps to make that boat or the daily quest rewards from Oquilla to make it a better Boat.  But worst of all... it can't buy you direct Parley with another human beings.   And by Parley, I mean indebtedness or grey market IOU's.

Some people in this game currently use their Status outside of the Silver Market to buy Channel "Likes".   That's an interesting outlet to this overall problem and also how I would define a concept like Parley.   It's the closest thing you can have in this game to direct player to player trading currently.    And when we look at all cascading Demotivators in the current system, chief among them is this feeling that Silver is becoming trivialized mainly because it lacks that "human connection" that entire Guilds are often built around in other much more Social MMORPGs.

...

Now of course, the Basement gods and social Pariahs who make up the vast majority of what remains in the official forums have already lost all interest in this topic and are only scanning for some "Gotcha" quote to turn into Forum-PVP because their brains can only focus on Conflict rather than proposals for the well-being for their fellow man.   <-- So there it was, a call out just for them.  I hope we at least get some juicy Austrio-Economist Arm-Chair Austism in return because it's going to be really sad if all they muster in response is blatant Strawmanning or hypocritical tone policing as usual.

...

Now finally for the best worst case Solution we could expect from P.A. and it's a really really simple one:    Crow Coins

Yes you read that right,  Crow Coins as a separate currency for ALL lifeskillers.   I'm saying they Get rid of the stupid trade in "Seals" along with every other half measure that results from lifeskilling (and isn't tied to Farming fodder which is specifically *intended* as a silver sink).  Remove seals from Imperial as well since randos with Mastery gear they bought with Silver are just buying up regular Meals and  Elixers to bundle into Imperials.   ...they didn't Build That!  Those outlets should be exclusive to the people who do the gathering and the training and the pruning and yes even the fishing too.   Processing can go ahead and remain a middle-man between Raw Materials and partially refined ones. 

But everything else like Special Meals, Draughts, Manos, Boats, Wagons, the Gear that attaches to mounts, even rough stone and logs should all be on their own Crow Coin market place.  This would also allow Barteres to sell their Caravels they no longer want. And burnt out Traders could sell their Forest Path wagons (after repackaging them back in to a Registration form).  And if it's isn't obvious by now, the reason for all of this is to make it official that since Lifeskilling will never be ALLOWED to compete with Grinding Spots... that the long term fix is just to separate it from competing directly with the SILVER from Grind Spots entirely.

and once you do that...  you can then allow private trade instances inside of Guilds "halls".   Not just renting, but actual grey markets that only involve Lifeskill Gear, and a much much wider pricing window of Crow Coins in exchange for those items.  It wouldn't be total Anarcho-Capitialism, It wouldn't be impacted by Pearls, but it would be closer than the poorly functioning Silver marketplace currently gets us to that free-er non-communist market. 

...

And this in turn, would lead to better social cohesion and incentives for people who like to feel as if they are cooperating together.   The forum's Basement dwellers and silver Speculators here would still have their Silver market and all the PENs they can link in chats.  And everyone else who doesn't want to feel like a Forever-Aloner could finally find their own status or purpose in a more connected community that doesn't just crumble apart into self loathing the next time PA puts out a new set of grind spots that cranks the Silver inflation closer to the Billion-Per-Hour threshold we all know they're quickly heading towards.

The HUGE problem I have always seen with Lifeskilling is that the goods you make things out of, weather they be furniture, armor, weapons, alchemy, processsing, crates, etc, is that the goods you put into making them are worth 3x the value of the finished item. You make LESS money by life processing. If you want to make money Lifeskilling do gathering only, but thats what workers are for. Whos gonna bother gathering when you have a army of a hundred slaves doing the job for you, costing you nothing other than beer? And so then you say whats the point? Life Skilling is dead. Grinding mobs for an hour makes you 10x the money you would have earnt life skilling. Then lifeskiling dies and all were left with again is grinding.

When I started the game in 2016 I went about completeing as many quests as I could so I could get points to put into buying houses and connecting nodes. I built a huge worker empire spanning serendia to calpheon. Investing in gathering nodes along the way to start mass producing armor and weapons and furniture. So I had it all set up for mass production, I made some goods, and nothing sold. No one wants green armor or weapons, no one wants crudely made furnature (the furnature made by workers looks worse than furnature you buy from vendors) and then the only reason why anyone would max out the interior of their house is to get those bank nodes. And all the houses that are in the top 10 BUY their furnature with REAL MONEY. The furniture from the pearl shop as far more diverse and looks way better, its worth much more interior points and the top 10 houses in each location are FULL of pearl shop furniture just piled in on top of each other. So theres no point bothering with decorating your own house with shabby looking furniture when you could spend the points on storage insetad.

Lifeskilling needs a total rework or revalue but PA are never going to bother with that when they make you take the easy route and pay for all with real money. Improving the game COSTS them money. So the worse the game gets the richer they become because they can just sell you the solution to a problem they created. BDO is perfectly balanced... in THIER favour.

this topic amuses me, this forum is populated by the same 30 active and 70 lurker members, devs never look in here, cm maybe, sometimes, but who cares about cm have to say, PA big guys certainly dont.

Yes lifeskills are busted, outdated and left to rot. You can write your concerns and ideas in here but the audience ain't here, your best chance is reddit with 500+ ups MAYBE they pay attention.

The devs are korean, and the mayority of them don't even speak english.

Though they ignore the KR forums aswell.

But in this case the root problem is the lack of monetization. The whole gear progression in bdo is built upon the cash shop. But how would you monetize crafting? Put in clearly P2W limitations?

The thing is that with the enchancing system they have a P2W game, but it's "cleaverly" hidden, so the stupid players don't see it. If they would make it so you can craft like 10item per day (or other limitations) without cash shop, that would be clear P2W even for the stupidest whiteknights.

Even ignoring the monetization issue, the playerbase of bdo is small, hence the market is not healthy enough. The owerwhelming mayority of the crafted items in bdo don't even have 10 trades every day. That's just pathetic. Noone buys anything and noone sells anything due to the stupid market pirces that PA refuses to fix.

Just allow manos with fs and crons

Oh, you mean like this post of reddit that I made?

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/okap1f/gathering_is_dead/

I think it got some good traction here and is drawing some attention. 

Go ahead and show your support. 

Manos weapons affected by fs, and the rest have higher chance by default to compensate the lack of fs. If they would allow fs, their enchamentchance would drop aswell, which would improve it in a sense, but it would not be better for most player.

Yeah I don't see why can't you cron them, so they should make that cronable.

Do both, problem solved. 

The broken market is why Lifeskilling is dead. Plain and simple. for those who TLDR

Why is there no one selling Corrupt oil for instance?

There's several thousand (near 10k) listed on EU market with a recent transaction of today at 2?pm EST. If I had to wager why you might not see any perhaps it's because it's an alchemy ingredient one gets doing alchemy and the alchemist typically saves it instead of selling it.

If they were worth 10 mil a piece the product they went into would go up in value the same and people would still save them to make that product themselves because it's not an easily attainable material.