Hello everyone,

As a community the nodewar and siege scene has come together in discussion of the current state of nodewar, siege, and the rewards that come along with them. In this post I'll be covering the discussions we've been having and the suggestions that have come with it. 

Nodewar:
While the community seems to be enjoying the current nodewar system there are a few adjustments that we think will overall benefit the scene and help make the current caps better. 

Nodewar gear & player caps

The main suggestion I've heard is to consolidate the T2 gear caps to match one of the siege caps. This will help streamline the system with caps that we already know feel good and work. In turn with the respective siege caps, scale the structure health of the buildings in accordance with the amount of players on the node. (For example a 30 man node on a tier 2 would have 60% equivalent structure health of a 50man node on T2)

Change T3s to uncapped so that the playerbase has more uncapped content. With progression being a big thing within the game, a majority of content right now does not reward it. As such, instead of just making more content similar to what we already have, this is a low player cap version for those who prefer 30-50 man nodewars for uncapped content.

Siege & Nodewar Lag:
Siege walls are the primary source of lag in Nodewars/Siege. They need to be optimized or fixed to help as such. Other entities such as buildings, players and objects also cause lag.
Centralizing NA servers would also greatly help with the ping disparity between those on either side of the region.

Upon investigation by some players in the community it was found that excessive elixirs/buffs could potentially be a part of the cause of the lag experienced in siege. We would like to see this looked into as siege lag is the worst it’s ever been and it’s impacting the game experience of players who enjoy this content. You can see and feel FPS drops and performance fluctuations from hitting players/mobs/objects while having HP on Crit, dmg nullify & other buffs. More testing would be needed to see if it hurts server/network performance but could be the case.

Other changes we'd like to see help with Nodewar/Siege performance is the removal of all non Nodewar/siege participants from war servers during war time. Another change which may help is similar to the Elvian realm where all NPCs are removed excluding those needed in wars like the general goods vendor, CM vendor, storage keeper & guild/war shops.

PvP Progression:
One of the biggest issues within BDO is the progression system. Currently the only realistic ways to progress are VIA PvE or Lifeskilling. These activities are fun for some but are also hated by many. Instead, the below suggestions will allow for progression while doing PvP. This also has the added benefit of keeping PvP'ers out of PvE & Lifeskilling areas so those who wish to only PvE & Lifeskill will no longer be griefed by PvP'ers.

Supply Boxes

Inflation is a huge issue within BDO, especially after the release of regions following the Serendia Elvian realms. We've come up with an idea to help give rewards to players without directly putting more silver into the economy.

How they work
Supply boxes would be something that could be traded in for various PvP Currencies (RBF seals, AoS token, NW Medals) in exchange for rewards that would be equivalent to PvE. One of the many things to take into account when adding currency or rewards in a game is the market & change. If a new piece of content or balance patch happens which changes the supply, demand or prices in another manner of items this can GREATLY influence how good or bad direct rewards are. Instead supply boxes would be a range of "items" per box that would allow players to pick their reward.
So if a player is going to turn in their medals and sees that the current Caphra market is overfilled & they're at min price they wont pick this, instead they will pick something like a "Gathering box" which may include meat & blood which they can either then use to lifeskill with or sell to lifeskillers who wish to use those resources. It would be a dynamic reward system that the players would have complete control of to help with an ever changing market.
This system would be good for PvP'ers in the sense that they get their rewards for PvP but its also VERY good for PvE & Lifeskillers who need more resources that are currently not obtainable. In North America, Blood, meat & many alchemy items are either preordered so such an amount its impossible to acquire them VIA the central market forcing them to do content they may not want to (Gather/Farm) or may just entirely remove any option to do certain trade skills such as alchemy as its NEVER profitable in many cases.
Because this is a dynamic system its not one that would punish some players or lifeskills like a static system would. If Meat & blood become widely available for whatever reason and the price drops, then PvP'ers will stop trading in their PvP currencies for Meat/Gather boxes (whatever you want to call them). Instead they'd go for another resource that is heavily preordered and impossible to get on the market which they can sell for max profits. This system helps EVERYONE!

Box types & Ideas:
Material Boxes Types:
Ore/Gems/Seed/Fruit/Leather/Blood/Meat/Seafood/Misc.

Consumable Boxes Types:
Elixirs/Food/Potions/Siege items/Item Parts/Other consumables

PvP hourly rates
The money per hour received from PvP is not set in stone, the numbers below are given as what we believe would be good for the game. The final numbers should be decided by Pearl Abyss at the time they choose to implement such a system in the game.
One of the important parts is how much money you receive in your time while PvP'ing. If the supply box idea is implemented we'd like to see the following as rewards for each type of PvP content. You can scale PvP currency rewards to match each tier, along with any bonus items you may give such as the orbs of Honor/Gallantry

A majority of the rewards for pvp in my suggestion should be in PvP Currency used to buy/exchange for supply boxes. Read above for how supply boxes work. All numbers below are up for talks/debate. The main point is rewards for PvP Content compariable for PvE/Lifeskilling.

Nodewars
The first thing with nodewars we must be careful of doing is encouraging snipes. I recommend making the requirement to receive ANY rewards be 50 kills. Not Kills/Deaths but just player kills. 

T1 Nodewars:
150M per Loss / 500m per Win

T2 Nodewars:
500m 250m per Loss / 1.5B per Win

T3 Nodewars:
1.5B 500m per Loss / 3B per Win

T4 Nodewars:
2B 500m per Loss / 3.5B per Win

Arena of Solare
One of the main concerns brought up to me for Arena of Solare is win trading, alt accounts & griefing. All of which are an issue with AoS even without any rewards, i suggest the following fixes either way:
- To help with win trading, make the currency & rewards worth doing but ONLY received at certain rankings.
- To help with Alt accounts, require a gearscore to participate in ranked content. I'd suggest around 660, this is up for debate though on the exact Gearscore requirement
- To help with Griefing, actively punish those recorded and proven to do such actions. Along with encouraging winning VIA rewards should help deter such actions.

Money for AoS!
Currently AoS is very unrewarding and we see very low player activity within this content. There are many reasons to which i'd attribute this to be (looking at those BSR earrings) but thats for a different post. My main concern is making AoS an activity that progresses your account & rewards climbing the ladder.

Add increasing rewards per hour equivalency to each ranking. You can estimate the average game time & the worth of 1 "AoS PvP Currency" and scale it to each tier.

Example | If the average game takes 15min, you'd make each match at Radiant Spear give roughly 250m (Worth of PvP currency) per match to make a 1B per hour average.
Beginner - No Rewards
Apprentice - No Rewards
Skilled Soldier - 250m per hour
Dawn Spear - 350m per hour
Shining Spear - 500m per hour
Twilight Spear - 750m per hour
Radiant Spear - 1B per hour
Solare incarnate - 1.3B per hour

Red Battlefield
Red battlefield is some of my favorite casual pvp content but as such doesnt reward players with much money for the amount of time & effort spent within it. I also see a huge issue of players who'd like to enter RBF but get stomped by players with more gearscore than them. I'll be going over how i think both should be remedied below.

RBF Rewards
Scaling rewards for the following actions in RBF:
- Taking objective points
- Holding said points
- Getting player kills, but limit this to unique kills, so people cant kill trade kills
- Damage given, Damage Healed & Debuffs applied. This allowed for those who may not "Snipe" kills to still get their reward but also allowing support classes like shai to benefit from playing their respective classes.

Winning should also reward more than losing to help encourage everyone to play to win instead of playing to mess around.
For the point i talked about above, have a minimum amount of points required to receive ANY rewards but also give bonus rewards to any additional points player receive for said actions.

Uncapped RBF:
0 points - No Rewards
Average RBF player - 600m per hour
Above average player - 800m per hour
Top 3 RBF players - 1B per hour

Trial RBF:
0 points - No rewards
Average RBF player - 400m per hour
Above average player - 550m per hour
Top 3 RBF players - 750M per hour

Trial RBF
Reintroduce Trial RBF with this system. Allowing for players to play on trial characters BUT cap the rewards they can get to be lower than uncapped so those with gear are benefitting and rewarded for having progressed their account. This allows for a low barrier of entry to RBF PvP but the best money is at the top end.

Garmoth RBF Rework
The Garmoth map is one of my favorite PvP areas & is a really good RBF map excluding the "gimmick mechanics". 

Thank you to FoulTarnished for assisting with the writeup of this post.
Edit for grammar
Edit, lowered rewards for NW losses after discussion. Clarification on AoS rewards

For those concerned about Open World PVP, my next forum post will be going over that & I already have several ideas in workshop that im working on with a group of people. If you'd like an announcement for when the post will be made or would like to help with the next post and its ideas join us at the Nodewar Hub: https://discord.gg/FRKFKGR4Hj or DM me on discord: Jonneyfive#5555

"Upon investigation by some players in the community it was found that excessive elixirs/buffs could potentially be a part of the cause of the lag experienced in siege. We would like to see this looked into as siege lag is the worst it’s ever been and it’s impacting the game experience of players who enjoy this content. "

Do you have any evidence of this?

This seems like random BS, how could you even investigate their servers? Did you hack 'em?

It is true that using defense nullifying damage elixirs do give a slight fps drop to you due to the extreme target frame switching on hits, but that hardly affect the servers or others, and this was reported years ago (and ignored just as usuall btw). And the rest of the elixirs just give raw stats so that ain't any different than any other elixir.

good post

For the "Elixirs & Buffs" adding lag to servers. You can test it but hitting large groups of players in other areas of the game while having a low amount of buffs vs having a high amount of buffs. You can especially see this from Dmg Nullify / HP on hit / etc. I do think buildings may also come into account for lag but thats not something we can really test or prove.

i think the rewards for nodewar are too low as well. if you lose, you spent 2hrs and you only get 150mil. i couldve been grinding somewhere and gotten 2bil instead of doing pvp

Baseless investigation

Its funny how you recongnize inflation and yet after stating not wanting to add more silver into the econ you ask for insane amounts of money for nodewars, again for aos, and yet again for rbf

I never argue for more silver if you read the post. The increase in rewards is based on the Supply Box idea which I go into depth and mention should scale based on the Silver worth

So a Meat Gathers box would give X amount of silver worth of meat.

He is using silver amounts as a baseline not saying to give raw silver how can you be so stupid LMAO