Introduction:

Black Desert introduced a feature a couple years ago that was an absolutely game changing. Character Tagging. Character tagging is awesome - it allows you to try out multiple classes without having to sell and rebuy gear, it allows you to explore other classes, and I'd even go as far to argue that it allows Pearl Abyss to make more money via selling costumes, weight, and inventory to players who tag new classes to grind and pvp on. However, this system is without its flaws.

The Problem:

Currently, the tagging system has a vast amount of restrictions in place that lock you out of a different forms of content and has various flaws. For example, you are unable to move a trade item between your character and your storage while tagged. You are also unable to trade to npcs while tagged. This means that while doing something like say, gathering, you are unable to do anything with insect amber, kermes, crystalized bloods, etc that you collect other than just straight deleting them. While these items aren't exactly game changers when it comes to making silver (thats a whole other discussion), you are still restricted doing that content. What are some other examples of content you cannot do? You cannot sell fish you have collected to a trading NPC while tagged and as far as I'm aware that extends to imperial fishing. You cannot turn in trade crates, nor can you move excess imperial crates you made into your own storage. This becomes a problem if I made an extra few imperials and I go to use magnus - I cannot enter with a trade item so I am forced to delete the items since I'm unable to move them to my storage. Now as I've said before, I'm well aware a lot of this content is debatable to do anyways with its current silver per hour - but that doesn't change the fact its still a problem. So what can we do to get around this? Well the most obvious solution is to move all of my life skills over to another character as people have done in the past. While that's fine and all, I'm someone who prefers to have my main class and tag any new class I want to play. Moving all my life skills off of my main and onto an alt is not an attractive idea, on top of the fact its absolutely expensive pearl wise to do so. Let's take a look at what is on my main character and how many pearls it would take to move said life skills over: 

In order to only transfer the pearl shop costumes and exp I'm looking at 41,500 pearls. This is also not including inventory slots, weight, or any tailoring coupons that would be needed to convert other clothes over.  I believe full weight and inventory brings that number up to around 62,000 pearls. Nearly $600 USD. No thanks.

The Solution:

Going back to the problem, I believe all of these are rooted in a single idea that PA does not want you to be able to load up a tagged character with trade items that slow them down, swap to your other character, and move them at full speed. I think that's a reasonable assumption and I don't disagree with them on it, but I think we can keep that in place while still rethinking how to remove the tagging restrictions. So, with that being said, I feel like the solution is pretty simple. Here's what I suggest, step by step:

1 - Remove all trade items off any tagged character during a maitenance to the nearest storage

2 - Restrict the ability to tag if either character has a trade item in their inventory.

3 - Remove all restrictions in place currently when tagged - except for the restriction on magnus not allowing you to move with a trade item
4 - While trade items are on a character - add a new restriction: You cannot swap to your tagged character until your current trade items are removed. This is not the same as the existing lock as you can simply get around this.

And that's literally all it takes. This solves the issue I identified that I believe to be at the core of this problem - it would mean that when you pull out a trade item on your character, you cannot flip back to the other character until you've stashed it away. No more being unable to use trade items, no more PA not wanting players to move crates fast, everyone wins! It keeps PA's restrictions in place while opening up content for players who chose to keep their life skills on 1 character while tagging.

Thanks for taking the time to read this!

-Kinjara

         "You cannot swap to your tagged character until your current trade items are removed"
There's no way to prevent that as the player base discovered with the "you can't swap to your tag until x amt of time has passed" ORLY? char select > load the tagged char. BOOM no wait times.

Honestly I think the reason why we cannot trade items is not because you move slowly with a trade pack as not all trade items do this, but instead because they want you to have to move across the map with the chance of red players or bandits being able to kill you stealing all of your progress.

Being tagged would allow you to keep that safe by moving across the map without repercussions as it's in an unloaded inventory.

Enough nay-saying:

Why not remove the trade restrictions on tagging and then have the tagged char's inventory loaded at the same time instead? If you died the item that was in the tagged char's inventory poofs just like normal.

I know at one point there was rumors going around of being able to access other char's inventories. We can now do that with storages, why not chars? Sounds like a good change to implement at the same time to me.

I personally only tag my sage whenever I want to go somewhere like uw or kratuga then untag when done. I've never copied gear since my main does everything. 

Anything to have less restrictions for tagged characters, but to be honest I'd like to see the tag system removed, and your weapons always just re-box themselves when unequipped so you can move them to and use them on any other class. Then we won't need to have all these arbitrary restrictions.