because America Online Sux

I personally enjoy AoS quite a lot, but it definitly needs some changes.

The biggest thing it should work on is matchmaking. One thing to greatly improve it already without big changes would be to simply not allow duplicate classes. If the matchmaking would be more refined, it could also add a limit to how many "tank, assassin, ranged" classes it can have. It can be very frustrating to play with some slower classes against a sorc, dk and woosa for example. Or with a full lineup of non-grab classes vs 3 bruisers that will just rotate sa and tank your dmg forever.

Give us rewards for playing AoS. It doesn't need to be competitive with grindspots, but AoS should be more than just some pvp fun, at least the ranked AoS. Some examples of how rewards could be: Daily quests to get wins in AoS to get boxes, crons or whatever. Make it possible to trade in the tokens you win for silver (1 Token = 10M silver). Give weekly rewards depending on your rank. Lowest rank gets 100m up to 1b for highest rank or maybe some other rewards like special boxes.

Add a queue for groups that then are only matched with groups. Most of us know that PvP can be a lot more fun if you have friends with you that actually communicate and not just run in and die over and over again. This would bring back a bit of MMO to this RPG.

there's quite a bit of gear and class diversity now.  there really isn't much to talk about other than:

west coast players have ping advantage

ppl that run at higher fps have an advantage (not really a problem with newer classes)

ppl that play god tier classes in low ap bracket have advantage

there's a few outstanding players that defy some of these, but more or less, will have one of these.

the aos population is very low in bdo from what i understand.

i don't remember where i got this stat from, its something like pvpers only account for 30% of the playerbase?

aos playerbase is around 1000 players give or take?

not sure how accurate that is.

they have too many variables to account for:

class to class modifiers (link for info) https://www.naeu.playblackdesert.com/en-US/Wiki?wikiNo=225

pvp skill damage modifiers

at least the gearing stat portion is somewhat clear now thanks to bigandshiny

with this many classes though, true balance really won't be a thing.  ebb and flow i suppose.

it's also weird that PA sometimes nerfs some classes that didn't warrant it and buffs classes that were already oppressive.

play the game mode if you like it.

don't play it if you don't.

until they can clean up the inconsistencies and streamline the variables, i don't see bdo ever becoming 'esports ready'.

if they do tho, who knows?

I think other people touched on it but it's because a lot of people gave up and the south korean developers do not tend to make well on their promises even if on ocassion they 'say they're listening to NA players' or their own

it seems quite a bit of BDO playerbase south korean or not just care about getting gear advantages over others and pubstomping them

While the skill cap in this game is undeniably high, and the aesthetics are beautiful, (most games do mediocre or bad jobs in comparison) this game has quite a few netcode/desync/performance issues like bad optimization for computers or attacks that just 'disappear' and things that get glitched, e.g. emergency escape

True balance would require PA to pay their staff to use actual brainpower and that would affect their bottom line

True balance in a game like bdo is impossible. Sure it could be a bit more balanced, but you will never be at the point where all classes are equally good in all scenarios. It's literally impossible.

Maybe because it's not good enough?

No idea what game you talking about, in BDO FOTM class ( doesn't even matter what class it is ) literally godlike that easily destroy X amount of mid/low classes and once. There is nothing about equality  and balance in BDO, just look at class damage % ratio, for some classes you can't even outgear that crap, like x10 more worth gear not gonna "balance" this crap.

MMORPG by foundation supposed to be imbalanced as F its understandable, whole point of game is that you compensate balance difference by gear, but when trial (free character) facesmash 700gs+, that's not even MMORPG balance, its just greedy cashgrab targeted on FOTM rollers.

One of the larger issues is just Korean PVP concepts in general.

I find the over the top CC mechanics and 3 or 2 shot combo kills to turn me away from wanting to honestly learn the pvp in this game at the depths one would need in order to be even competent let alone GOOD at pvp.

The learning curve is pretty damn large, the concept of stats and gearing is all specific to each class.... it becomes a chore to hunt down the information needed to build your class out correctly, and in turn just makes most people turn away from taking it seriously.

Arena and Battlegrounds is just a sh!t show of CC from my experience. At this point anything that is WAR related or Arena related I just ignore as dead on arrival content.... I know people like to think that BDO has some huge PVP scene, but in reality it is a handfull of the same players who have been doing this Loop since launch, or new players who just don't realize what they are about to step into.

Because the PvP part in bdo is to catch someone with the initial CC. That dance around each other with skills, fishing for CCs is what's difficult to learn. Every ape can learn how to press a few buttons in a row. That does not require proper skill.