It is dissapointing to see Pearl Abyss fail to comprehend their own product in such a manner.  How could developers that literally created these in game systems be so unaware and so careless with their customers?

Pearl Abyss designed areas like Golems, Crypt, Gyfin, Trolls, Hex to actively dodge and have high risk.  It's unreasonable to face tank these areas or even much lower areas with a disconnect.  It allows special attacks, back attacks, and unavoidable damage.

So virtually every single disconnect across a proposed 100,000 concurrent users across all their platforms is supposed to just accept breaking crystals as regular game play?

Luckily if Pearl Abyss doesn't address and actually fix this issue there are ways to avoid it.

Diablo 4

Throne and Liberty

Archeage War

This current system is simply not tolerable or acceptable.  If you play without crystals you signifincantly diminish your income and if you use them you are forced to accept unreasonable penalties.

This topic should never have been forced to be created in the first place.  How the people that designed these systems couldn't see this coming is a shame.

Crystals only became incredibly profitable after the crystal price adjustments. Prior to the crystal price adjustments, the income from producing high-end crystals was marginally small compared to the income from other sources such as Crystallised Despair or the trash loot from monsters themselves.

High-end crystals were difficult to acquire from the marketplace as they were too cheap and the cost to produce them significantly reduced the overall profits. This led to many people hoarding their crystals instead, in the case they lost it themselves. However, with the crystal price adjustment, there has been a large influx of high-end and previously rare crystals on the marketplace. Replacing a crystal is now significantly easier but at a much higher cost, a cost that most are not willing to pay. It would be inaccurate to say that there was a strong market for crystals prior to the price adjustments therefore, making crystals permanent would change little for most players. 

Now, there are may methods on how the developers can ensure that the production of crystals remain a relevant activity in the game and are permanent.

   - Increase the minimum price to a much higher value (e.g 1 billion to 5 billion)

   - Increase the amount of base materials to produce (i.e Red Essence/Red Seals, Magical Shards, Forest Fury, Essence of Courage)

   - Reduce the drop rate of base materials to produce (i.e Olucas, Ah'krad, Elkarr)

   - Add other uses for crystals (e.g material to craft another item)

That does not fix the critical issue.  I realize the point of crystal destruction is supposed to be risk, but it is simply intolerable and a LOSE/LOSE situation for the customer.

Increasing the price, adjusting the rates, other methods does not restore my broken crystals from an uncontrollable and unfair lag spike or disconnect.

Nor does not using proper crystals and losing out silver/hr value every minute of game play.

This is also not a case of seeing a lag spike or knowing in advance and making a proper decision.  I'm down billions already for NO FAULT on my own from only a few rare disconnects.  Had I not used crystals or poor quality crystals during this time I would have also lost billions in income.

I'm choosing to put BDO on hold until this is resolved.  I'm not wasting my time on BDO with this system.

I'm loving all these posts, so glad theres other people that feel the same way.

It is necessary, but there is no real debate on this issue.

The fact is across thousands of people using these crystals it's innevitable that a certain portion of them are going to be unfairy destroyed.  It is Pearl Abyss's responsibility to their customers to take apporpriate and swift action to resolve this.

It is now possible to literally lose billions in a single death, with no real way to avoid it.  The end game content is not designed to be effecient without the use of these crystals.  It's also going to randomly effect various customer more than others.

Additionally, you could easily exploit the system on Arsha to destroy people's crystals while you are literally immune to any and all death penalties on a grief character.

For the record both Pearl Abyss and Kakao refused to fix this issue years ago.  There where serious issus for months when playing the game was very unstable for everyone.  They admitted it and put out public notifications on it.  However, they NEVER did anything about the crystal issue.  Nor took any steps to improve or prepare for having an identical situation.  Whether it was network traffic, server issues, certain locations, DOS attacks or otherwise.  No mechansim was ever put into place to help protect the customers.

You clearly didn't read my entire post. Those are methods of keeping crystals relevant for those who wish to make and sell them, to give a reason for people to supply them to the marketplace in exchange for making crystals permanent.

I would agree with making them permanent and in addition creating a system that would better utliize multiple copies of them.

However, you also made this statement "making crystals permanent would change little for most players.".

The issue isn't about the market itself, but people literally losing billions to a disconnect etc.  That's much more than a little change, it's literally game breaking in some situations.

But if crystals dont have a chance to break on death its not as threatening to feed someone to mobs. I need people to realize their glorious ahkrad crystal just broke because theyre pestering me and log out so i can continue my rotation.

It doesn't matter if we make crystals permanent or increase the quantity and make more ways to obtain them or increase the minimum price, while I actually would like to see some of these changes this doesn't really address the reason for this discussion, which is why OP created the topic to talk about the Unfair -or- Clunky way of having your crystals destroyed due to lag spikes, time outs, disconnections etc...

Even if we all mostly have good internet, there are people playing on wifi or even the same cable...but ISP sometimes has problems from time to time and it's nothing new. Your internet sometimes go out completely out of the blue, whether it be 30 seconds or 10minutes. You WILL get a disconnect after about 10-30seconds of timed out connection.

BDO doesn't return to the game majority of times if you've been forcefully disconnected already, it has no system that gives such players 'protection' against being killed by mobs, because what happens after such a disconnect is that you're still standing there for a while. You think you got logged out, ported out, you're safe, no, you restart your game, log in to that character and it's laying down on the ground, that is a fucked up thing to see tbh sorry for swearing, but that's just so bad to have that happen and see 1-2 red text lines of nice crystals being destroyed because of junky connection. That's no punishment, and what for ? ? That's a flaw of the design.

What we need to talk about is not about ways of obtaining crystals or what to change about their pricing or obtainability, at least that's not this exact topic we're having, but we need to talk about ways to prevent this.

Sure you can buy crystals again if they were really cheap or something else was changed about them, but isn't that just like using a duct tape to keep the door shut just because it doesn't have an actual lock inside ?

There's a small flaw in the system that needs to have a prevention against losing crystals in such specific conditions. Whether it be new code written for it, like for example if game server detects a short connection time out from the user and if there's no inputs from the user (meaning character not doing anything, while the time out counter keeps ticking further) maybe put some protection onto that character, make him not receive damage, make him invisible, no clip, hide the entity, I don't know what, they can choose what's the best approach, but it's something similar to that which needs to be implemented and as far as I know it's not rocket science, because other games have better disconnection detection code where if this happens your character gets an actuall proper, safe, disconnect.

Another example take Dota 2, I know when you disconnect in that game your character actually runs back towards the base, sure you can get killed, but they have code that makes you automatically run towards base, which is the safe route basically.

So let's say you implement a similar code in bdo, say a it scans the proximity around the character and runs away from the mobs in a opposite direction to the point where after specific distance it can no longer 'detect' around you the red dots on the mini map. Maybe not the best way to deal with it, maybe funny a bit, actually I don't think they would be able to implement this in BDO, but it's an idea :) just like some more were above

More importantly, the update just smashed your hopes and dreams as now when other players attempt to mob feed you can simply apply an empty preset and MAGIC, you are no long able to harm other players.

An actual PVPer NEVER complains about people in their rotation.  REAL PVPers are on Arsha.  It's only the FAKE ones that complain ;)