After reading opinions & discussion from the EU node war community i felt it necessary to directly feedback about the upcoming changes.

My in game name is Damokleez (also known as Baldokleez/Maldokleez - take your pick) & i am the guild master of Rime & the leader of the Swarm alliance. We are currently regarded as a top % node war & siege guild so i feel qualified to feedback on these changes, please upvote if you agree & add your own comments.

Current system:
While the current system needs its changes (more available days to node war in example), it allows pretty much all guilds & alliances the availability of some content and some room to choose where they want to go and how they want to go about doing it. This current system landed in KR i want to say over a year ago now? Many of us have been preparing for this system for a long time. I myself have been pushing my alliance to keep as close to 100 people as possible to be ready for the system whilst having to cap node wars at 50/60/65 players for the past 10 months or so, as we know 100 man node wars were pretty dead and were not very active. Such massive restrictions to this system being changed merely weeks after we get a complete node war overhaul is a huge oversight to guilds & communities like mine who have been preparing for it for a while & takes no care of the effort in running guilds. I will explain more into this when i go over the upcoming participation cap changes.

Upcoming gear caps:
I think i speak on behalf of the majority of the EU node war player base in saying we have little backlash to the concept of season servers/capped node wars/catch up mechanics etc etc in a somewhat controlled manner. I have been playing this game since launch and currently at around 680gs myself which isnt particularly high yet i find this incredibly alarming, those way higher than me im sure feel even more so. I spend more time managing my guild than progressing my own gear but these upcoming restrictions do not promote longevity or progression in either case. The changes will cap out 4 of the 6 available node war regions which is baffling, gear progression needs to handled in a manner than doesnt just punish players who have spent years grinding on their gear, perhaps rotating regions and their tiers or having a much higher spike in caps across the nodes.

Upcoming participation cap changes:
As mentioned at the beginning, many guilds & alliances have spent months trying to build numbers ready for the current system, many merges & alliances have formed in the last couple weeks to adapt and in general these upcoming changes completely undermine all of this. Not only are regions going to be capped by gear but 5 out of 6 regions are maxed out at 50 players which is half of my guild, why are guilds being punished for adapting to a new system that gets flipped upside down a few weeks later? Again this is a massive oversight that will massively harm guilds & communities. I understand the idea of slowly increasing cap sizes but restricting regions to one cap has no logical sense behind it. Lastly i understand as a 100 man alliance we will still have calpheon available but there is no guild longevity in being limited to one region for the rest of our existence and why should we have to exclude our players and go to lower participation caps? This upcoming system also MAJORLY clashes with siege which i will address later.

Upcoming tier changes:
Again on the idea of progression i understand the concept of 'gradual tier increase' to try and introduce newer players and give them a platform to learn. Despite this locking regions to a specific tier does not provide this in any shape or form. Ive been node warring and sieging actively for several years and i can tell you that different tiers across all regions allows for guilds and players to learn alot more and apply tactics & strategies elsewhere. It is true that 30-40 cap node wars on a T4 does not make sense since flame towers and hwacha's are incredibly tanky but i feel further direct changes to these annexes per tier would be better suited than blanket changing an entire region. Even larger guilds like mine enjoy doing different content I.E T2's as it adds a slightly different dynamic to fights when annexes & structures are much weaker and provides a different experience, all players should be able to have this. This change locks out guilds & punishes progression yet again. 

How this effects siege:
While ive mainly focused on node wars this also drastically impacts siege. The reward changes earlier this year were great (despite the liberation reward abuse) and it somewhat reignited siege in EU. There has been pretty consistent fights each week that guilds/alliances of all sizes have been able to get a foothold in. The upcoming changes will make a huge dent on this despite at first glance looking beneficial. The changes will allow a guild/alliance that win a castle to node war during the week except in the region they own, they will be able to win nodes but instead of claiming the node it will go liberated. Sounds great right? Nope! For guilds like mine who wish to actually use the gear they've spent years on our only proper option is currently Calpheon due to all other 4 regions being gear capped (another issue entirely although most of us assumed it was temporary while bal/ser were gone??). This new system only gives 100 cap guilds Calpheon as a node war region and with Calpheon being the only uncapped Siege region you are forced to make a choice. You either play to lose or give up your entire weeks node wars if you win since you cannot node war in the territory you own. Again another HUGE oversight and is literally backwards progression. To play for the win in siege we are either forced to go onto capped gear (backwards progression) or halve our numbers and deny our members content (backwards progression). Almost a great feature but its fallen massively short at the last hurdle and causes more damage than good. 

My own guild:
As of right now we are waiting to see what exactly gets implemented tomorrow but if we get the full global lab changes our node war & siege content will be frozen. Myself & many other guilds will not support this system of restrictions and limitations and refuse to support a decision that undermines our hard work up keeping communities in your game. The concept of punishing players for progression is ultimately plain wrong and i know you will lose many active players due to this, please take the time to read all the communities feedback and make some further changes. 

Any questions please ask below

Personally as a player I find it absolutely neglectful of developers that they didnt even attempt to contact and organize a sitdown and talk with top 20% of guilds in every region to discuss potential changes before bringing patches such as this and forcing it on people. Hell, even sending a simple questionare to just top guilds members from their databases would look like they care.

It is gonna reflect bad on communities, guilds, players and maybe game population itself if developers dont start thinking about these issues from players perspective as well and how changes will influence people that have worked towards some goals together.

They should stop this patch, and discuss the plans and potential big changes with people that actually play the content.

There is so many things to fix in the nodewar system (bad base locations, cannons in trees, skills not working on slopes, some stuff causing performance issues, etc etc etc), but developers for some reason take a step backwards and ruin it further.

It is indeed sad moment in time to be a BDO nw community member.

Im totally with Damokleez and can only hope that these changes are gonna get heavily readjusted else the endgame for many veteran players is gonna be nonexistant. Dont forget that u can easily lose players to Lost Ark or other alternatives if u dont keep your veterans happy.

only giving good stuff to new players wont help in the long run

top tier nw and siege guild btw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DwwjLoq8WY

I cant express how retarded those caps are as nw/siege guild, and how everyone's efforts to gear up has just been made useless. 

in EU we are considering just not giving PA anymore feedback at all. Just destroy your game, we will probably not help you anymore in fixing it. 

Delaying content for Lost Ark's release is also not going to keep people around.

Edit: And stop hand holding new players so much. What made this game somewhat special despite all of its flaws, was that you had to work your way up to the best content starting from nodewars till u've reached siege. The tuvala gear is already enough of a boost for new players, dont cap everything else aswell. 

I won't go into depth on further feedback in this post as I've made it known on other feedback platforms and it misses the point of this post. I just want to reiterate that it feels exhausting to see changes like this pushed through, it makes you question whether feedback is observed at all or if it is what sources you are taking into consideration.

I echo the points made in this post, and must stress how it feels there is an undervaluation for guild/community leaderships and the work they put in to organise large groups of people while adapting to poorly communicated and implemented changes to our potential content.

For if 'credentials' mean anything weight wise, like Damokleez, I am a Guild Master of one of the top, stable medium-larger EU nodewar/siege guilds (Unpredictable) and these changes, and the way that they are applied, make me heavily question my continued approach to running a guild on this game.

I have also helped organise different arenas, setups and discords that assist guilds in trying to create better fight setups within the constraints of all the past NW systems - and while each one was flawed in its own way, this is looking to be the most restrictive so far.

I agree with everything said above, changes are awful and I am not sure what the intention is for these changes.

Completely agree with damo, these changes seem more like a knee jerk reaction to feedback from new players but none of the high-end guilds want to be forced onto 1-2 regions just so they dont have to deal with the horrible caps on gear.