Title: Crystallized Despair & Scorching Sun Shard usage in a recepy to create an Indesctructible Upgrade for Crystal Slots
Family Name: Qemist

Region (NA/EU): EU

The way that prices for 'Crystallized Despair' and 'Scorching Sun Shard' have dropped in KR, and have been continously dropping in EU/NA got me thinking about how to tackle this issue while serving the playerbase moving forward without short term band-aids.

First of all, besides requiring high level of gear, spots such as Quint Hill, Crypt, Olun and so on demand attention, proper skill rotations, buff & elixir usage, positioning, etc. to make the most out of them. Being focused also helps avoid dying and losing valuable 'Gear Crystals'. Unfortunatelly, dying at times is inevitable. Many of us have faced a situation where we  got disconnected, experienced lag/desync, fell through the ground, got stuck in place with a 'please try again later' message etc. to which we died. 

Secondly, it just so happens to be that this Wednesday, we're also getting the so called 'Crystal Presets' which will be replacing the current slots in our gear. With these 'Crystal Presets' we're also receiving increased prices to majority of very valuable Crystals that many of us use. Some of these Crystals will be reaching price points upwards of 2 billion. Next to this, we no longer have access to the option of Tagging our Main Characters Gear/Crystals in order to preserve these expensive pieces while grinding difficult spots.

Furthermore, according to the above mentioned, losing crystals feels punishing and not fun while grinding.

Sometimes it's for things that are completely outside of our control. With the planned price changes, it will feel even more punishing.

While I do agree there should be a 'silver sink', my humble opinion is that it should be rewarding and not punishing to players.

Perhaps there's a middle ground?

With all of that being said, this is my suggestion on how to 'kill two birds with a single stone':

- Create a recepy/upgrade system which allows players to use 'Crystallized Despair', 'Scorching Sun Shard' & other paired mats to create 'INDESTRUCTIBLE' Crystal Slots bound to a SINGLE Crystal PER Crystal Page/Preset thus acting as 'insurance' for those particular Crystals/Slots.

- The total amount of 'Crystallized Despair' & 'Scorching Sun Shard' per Crystal/Slot upgrade can be set to around 50-100 each or more, completely up for debate.

- There are a total of 14 destructible Crystal Slots that are used in a single Crystal Page, not counting the Costume Crystal Slot. This means that if a player has a PvP, PVE, Hybrid, and Crypt/Resistance Crystal Page, it would take 56 Crystal Slot upgrades to make all their setups completely indestructible.

- If a player decides to remove/replace an indestructible Crystal from their current Crystal Page, they need to repeat this upgrade process to make it indesctructible once again.

- This approach would help raise the price of 'Crystallized Despair' & 'Scorching Sun Shard' to a more stable point, make the current high end grind spots lucrative and rewarding for a long time, all while giving the new and veteran players a long term option to avoid headaches of losing Crystals while dying at hard to grind spots, such as Hexe, Quint, Crypt, etc.

The amount of veterans and the constant influx of new players that would find this method of upgrading appealing is far greater than of those simply looking to upgrade their 'Vell' or other alchemy stone into a Blessed/Exalted variant for a few DP. The argument that this suggestion is just another temporary solution much like the 'Exalted Fragment' is a very short sighted critic. One must consider the coming value of Crystals, number of players, number of slots and Crystal Pages as well as the number of combinations for Crystal Slots that the players have at their disposal.

Finally, due to the nature and the potential price point of upgrading a single Crystal Slot per page, this suggestion would make the currently planned Crystal prices much more sensible and appealing both short & long term. There is an incentive to buy & sell Crystals as well as upgrade them to make sure they do not get destroyed, all while making the high end grind spots appealing to players looking to make plenty of silver in contrast to their gear, or maybe even finally get their hands on a PEN Deboreka Belt without the huge fear of losing BILLIONS while attempting to grind this spot.

I believe that the current difference in gear required for Quint Hill & Hexe Sanctuary as opposed to the silver per hour they generate paired with the risk when compared to places like Orcs/BM/Jade/Sycraia or even Centaurus/Kratuga is simply put, bad. This is one of the reasons I believe the above suggestion would help keep the prices of Crystallized Despair, Scorching Sun Shard, Blessed and Exalted Soul fragments and the potential Crystal Slot Upgrades in check, thus making these spots as lucrative as they were supposed to be when they initially came out.

The way things are now, considering how risky these spots are, how little they already reward and how much worse it's about to get, it's not very motivating to grind.

For example, the player grinding Quint Hill/Hexe has spent over a trillion silver in gear, as opposed to the player that had just started seasonal farming Centaurus/Kratuga. The one grinding Quint Hill/Hexe is at the current rates making at best 200-250 million silver more, all while taking the risk of losing 2 billion an hour or more through Crystals.

This is simply not fair to the dedicated veterans.

Thanks to whomever reads.

The solution for this "problem" would be if the devs would stop adding more pointless items for no reason when the game is already cluttered with way more items than what it's economy can handle.

And your suggestion would not change anything:

1, It would be way too expensive. With it's cost it would never worth it to have 'em instead of replacing it. If you spend 2-4B on crystal replacement for a signle slot then that is completely user error and you should seek guides instead.

2, Even if it would be cheaper, your suggestion is only a temporary solution as after everyone have their undestructable slots, noone would buy these again.

3, Hexe and quint is already best spots in the game, as for crypt this would hardly change anyhting u already need specific setup for that. Newerthless highend, high rewarding spots should be high risk high reward a.k.a if you mess it up and die u should pay it's cost, as intended.

And no, most crystals never going to reach the new limits that they added. The hype will soon vanish and most of 'em going to be back where they was.

Thanks BDO update, when my crystals get crashed, I leave the game... it's an abusse 

I have said it many times, I will say it again: death penalty must be removed. Period.

Especially since it is expolited by griefers.

This game punishes player for almost everything which is a complete disincentive to play.

With the new crystals max prices, they should be unbreakable, with the option to enchant them.

The same loss of exp is sick for me, there are moments when this 1% is me gaining .... for 2 weeks.

I feel your pain Senemedar. Unfortunately, I don't think it's in PA's interest to completely remove death penalties.

This is why I have proposed a middle ground, something that could at least help people circumvent the pain of losing expensive crystals, all while promoting the high end spots and making them lucrative as they should be considering the investment required to grind them in the first place, which includes a lot of time, money and effort.

In an ideal world, BDO would not have death penalties, much like no other successful MMO has. 'Silver sinks' as we call them would be implemented in other ways. If punishing players were such a brilliant game design system, I'm sure more games would implement it. Obviously, this is not the case.

Furthermore, there's always the case of griefers. This issue can go both ways (offender/defender). Despite most people not liking it, duel for spot has been a thing for a very long time, karma bombing, feeding to mobs, and many others. After all, once upon a time we lost XP when dying in PVP too. However, I believe this to be a much larger problem/topic for EU/NA that should be discussed in another thread so as to not lose track of what the goal of this post was. The topic is aimed towards 'Gear Crystal' protection, as well as fixing resource prices aka 'Crystallized Despair' and 'Scorching Sun Shards' in relation to their reward for grinding high end game spots.

Finally, if we can't have 'Gear Crystals' work much like Lightstones at these new price points (be indestructible by default), then I believe my suggestion to be one of the better solutions. I'd love to see other players suggestions in a similar light, that would attempt to fix the prices of the high end mats, as well as help players feel less punished when dying, especially considering the newly planned prices for 'Gear Crystals'.

Perhaps there's someone out there with a potentially better adaptation/suggestion, so hopefully they choose to be vocal about it.

Personally, rather than having a permanent protection for the crystals for a high price, id rather have a one-time protection for crystals for a small to medium price. That would keep up demand for this item ad infinitum.

Using the scorching shards to craft that protection sounds like an acceptable idea to keep up the prices for these drops in the long term, though I would also be fine with some other items being used (especially those that are currently in low demand and high supply, and especially when sourced from lifeskilling).

However, I would still give you my support for this idea OP, it seems like a good idea in its basics, and i would like to see some protection on crystals for higher end zones.

(Another, more selfish reason for wanting that item to be one-time use is so karmabombers can still be fed to mobs if they insist on griefing, and it will still cost them something precious. If they had permanent protection on their crystals, there would be no way to defend oneself from this type of griefing any more at all)

I support the idea of both or either-

permanent or one time crystal protection mechanics

You could also have the one time crystal protection break every time that you die rather than only when a crystal would have broken by rng. This would give players a consistent and predictable cost of death instead of rolling IF a crystal breaks and then also rolling IF its a cheap disposable crystal or an expensive heartbreaking one. It would also allow them to conserve rare crystals like rebellious and kydicts

I think that permanent crystal protection would have to be way overpriced to be put into the game, and I think that people would still pursue it if it was overpriced..  Similar to how people pursued infinite pots pre pity pieces and weekly quests, when it didnt make any mathematical sense to do so. There is just something really pleasing about the permanence and QoL that it offers.

Alternatively, could make permanent crystal protection slot items need a new treasure drop + these expensive crafting materials to make protected slots feel really special and earned while adding additional grinds into the game

I wouldnt be surprised if PA was already thinking about crystal protection mechanics when they were developing presets, it could be a neat addition 

it's called "parasitic game design", where you just glue an entirely unrelated thing on top.

that stuff is extremely lazy/fast to implement due to the fact they have zero connection to the rest of the game, and offers new "content", but just for very short, as those are basically one-time things.

we have the same with artefacts/lightstones. most of them are already entirely unsellable without any use.

unlikey that's gonna change, after all the whole reason to implement things in such a way is to NOT have to care about a proper integration into existing mechanics.

Thanks for being vocal about the topic Minarya. I appreciate your input.

In regards to your adaptation, I like it, but I do have my reservations as I have considered it on the day I wrote the post. Obviously, having it be a one-time thing would mean that the economy would always be spinning and we know for a fact that there would be a permanent demand for the said items that 're-charge' the Crystal Protection, eg. Crystallized Despair/Scorching Sun Shard much like how there's demand to re-fill Alchemy Stones.

However, the reason I have suggested a more permanent solution instead is because I believe that most of us would prefer a sense of finality and less micro-management, which BDO is already cluttered with to no end. We have so many things to look at and consider, from repairing, experience/other scrolls, to elixirs, draughts, food buffs, church buffs, furniture buffs, loot scrolls, agris/coin, villa buffs, villa drop buff, repairs, alchemy stones, event buffs, black spirit buffs (drop rate), etc.

There is simply way too many things to watch for if you are looking to be efficient and not 'waste' any of your time or resources. I don't think there's a whole lot of people out there that can genuinely say they enjoy this revolving door. Ultimately some players resort to 'coping' mechanisms by saying they don't care about 'min-maxing' their time and efficiency in terms of their buffs & loot scrolls losing time and/or expiring. Reasons as to why they lose uptime can range from duels, griefing, to any other in-game/irl reasons, thus they say 'it's whatever', but in reality, we would all appreciate it not being 'a thing'. This is why PA made the Fairy upgrade where she auto-uses certain items such as elixirs/food, in order to help players feel less burdened. Unfortunately, this still didn't tackle the fact that we have to watch for other things that we cannot simply use through the fairy (villa buff, etc.), or the issue that we eventually wind up wasting resources if we completely relax and lose the concept of time. For example, we plan to play for a while but are unsure as to how long, we wind up wasting resources as the fairy auto-uses them when we'd like to take a break. No matter how miniscule this may seem at times, it's still inconvenient and a nuisance knowing that you're wasting seconds, minutes or more from your buffs just because it's either that, or you using those buffs yourself and constantly paying attention to the fairy, etc. Or how about when you have 45 minutes left on your church/furniture buff, and would like to use your Villa Shop 50% drop buff, but don't want to waste 15 minutes of less efficient grind so you resort to going back to town just to grab another church buff and then back to your grind spot. Obviously this is not very convenient for anyone.

TL;DR

In conclusion, my opinion is that having a more permanent solution would mean we could relax and not think about yet another thing in a giant list of 'buff/repair chores'. I believe there is a lot of QOL improvements that can be made there before we add any more 'one-time' mechanics to the game that would just further clutter it.

Or they can just switch to their empty crystal preset and not lose any crystal anyway.

The lightstones are a good example of what would happen to crystal prices if they would not got destroyed on death. They would sit on min price...

If there would be an one time prevention instead, the only difference would be that they would sit at price equal of the preventing item instead of min.