Family Name: MsRiker
Region (NA/EU): NA
Suggestions/Comments: I know the new War Dec System is coming soon, but either way, I would like to give my feedback about it.
From my experience and observations, Black Desert Online was designed to be a War game with survival aspects as a foundation and even if people haven't noticed yet, we can observe details the game shows to us, such as:
- Elements that identify this game as an open-world PvP game.
We get two types of notifications: "You have entered a Safe Zone" (when we leave or arrive in a major city or town) and "You have entered a Combat Zone".
When we reach level 50, we also get "Please note that PvP is enabled at level 50" notification when we use the Clear Memory Piece.
These elements mean that no matter if you are grinding or life-skilling, as soon as you are in a Combat Zone, it's clear that you are going to fight anything and anybody in the sea and in the land.
This way, you can realize this is a survival mode: you have to compete for spots, and GvGs will happen naturally as a consequence.
Even if players believe they can play this game "in the way they want", nobody can't escape this battle environment.
Also, to complete the cycle of war, we can't forget that we have node wars and sieges to conquer territories.

- PvE and life skill systems are parts of the war path.
PvE and Life Skill have symbiosis with the PvP system: they are methods to make silver to build your gear and to produce items that are used exclusively for PvP, and also they increase the time to fix towers, barricades in the defense team in node wars or sieges.
You have to remember that GvGs can happen spontaneously during these situations of grinding or life-skilling.
There's no purpose if your guild is ONLY PvE or Life Skill. You don't need 740 gear score for these activities.
This War Dec System dismotivates a player to keep actively improving his gear because we have grinding areas that don't need a high gear score, and also we can be afk to life skills. So the game would become boring.

Despite these details above, the biggest problem is that we have players who refuse to adapt and open their minds to learning and understanding a game that is unique in several ways.
Players complain about getting PK'ed by others, but they forget that PvP is always a two-way street: you can be defeated today by someone, but tomorrow you can be geared and flag a player.
We have plenty of guilds that are able to get their guildmates back, offer to practice PvP, and teach players how to improve in GvGs and Node Wars.
I always observe players preaching about "fairness", but they completely ignore the fact that it's not fair to take away the right of other players to defend themselves, their friends, and allies and punish them with the Karma System.
It's silly to think, "If you want to pvp, you have the Arsha Server", when regular servers just have temporary wars; as soon as they're over, everything returns to normalcy.
I find interesting that PvE and Life Skill guilds have the most toxic entitled players in the server chat, but everybody pretends that situation doesn't exist.
If Pearl Abyss wants to stop griefing, bullying, and toxicity, I would suggest removing the Karma System and War Dec Agreement: Griefers would not be opportunists to karma bomb a player while grinding, and a player would be free to dec any crybully who crosses the line.
So let the boys solve their issues between themselves and move on. BDO's past was much worse, and we all survived the storm.
I would also suggest to replace the Season Server with the Olvia Novice Server.
If the issue is that new players are having difficult adapting, Olvia Novice is definitely the perfect server for beginners: it has character limit points (which makes it exclusively for new players) and it has a time limit (30 days).
Pearl Abyss could extend the time limit to 45-60 days. That would be enough time for a new player to learn all the BDO steps, from the struggle with enhancement system to the open-world PvP environment.
The Season Servers are giving the fake impression that BDO is just like any other game, and this is why new players don't understand why they get killed on the regular servers. The result is we have players insisting on the idea of separate PvE and PvP on different servers.
If Pearl Abyss wants to make easy money, an unpopular suggestion could be implementing a buying account per system.
That means that as soon as a player buys a BDO account, he has to choose what kind of system he wants to play in: open world PvE or open world PvP.
If he chooses PvE, he would not be able to switch to PvP system unless he bought a new account to move there and start everything again.
I know this suggestion would be polemic between players who don't want to deal with the consequences of their choices, but there are players who believes "PvP is an end game", which is not true: PvP can be anytime, anywhere (and soon not so much!).
In conclusion, I would like to say BDO is the only game that can defeat itself, and it's been going down a bad road since 2018 because some players are trying to impose cynical fairness, equality, and now safe space vibes.
These ideas have already sabotaged a lot of good content in the sea and on land, even class performances and node wars.
Sacrificing the dedication of loyal players who embraced all the challenges in the past and invested and supported this game all these years isn't a wise choice.
This new War Dec System is just a blanket covered in gasoline over the fire, and I dare to say it will certainly be the nail in the coffin of this game.