As a lifeskiller and member of "Life", I was heartbroken to hear this announcement today at the Calpheon Ball.

I don't think I can get excited for any of the other changes, content updates, or free stuff we're getting in the future.

Knowing that we're getting this change has literally taken all the fun out of BDO for me.

The only thing in BDO that I was truly proud of was not my lifeskill gear, not my combat gear, not my character level or the treasures items I had obtained, but being part of my guild, "Life", the top lifeskill guild in EU.

Earning guild life points was a unique achievement. You didn't need to invest your time in pushing your lifeskill levels on your main; instead, you spent time on your alt characters leveling their lifeskills.

Being part of "Life" meant leveling lifeskills on alt characters to earn guild life points for the leaderboard and competing amongst ourselves through life fame.

Introducing family-wide lifeskills means the removal of all those aspects. You've taken away the guild identity of my guild "Life"!

Also we will no longer have any "main" lifeskill characters we can be proud of or identify with!

G50 gets uncapped. Wasn't it already hard enough to get there? No improvements to enhancing lifeskill gear. Why can't we use failstacks for them?

As a lifeskiller and member of "Life", I feel betrayed by PA :(

Edit: Perhaps some clarification of the implications of this change:

Generally speaking, lifeskillers can be divided into 3 types: trophy hunter, life fame/guild life point lifeskilling, and normal lifeskillers.

As I described earlier, leveling up alt characters to increase life fame/guild life points was more of a guild-oriented goal striving type of lifeskilling. Where as trophy hunting, where you push your lifeskill levells as high as possible, is more of a personal-oriented way of lifeskilling.

If PA now introduces family-wide lifeskill levels, it basically means that the fame/guild lifeskill lifeskilling is abolished. PA is removing something from the game without replacement and ignoring the passion and love of an active player base that participated in that activity. 

My Suggestion: (Personally, it's somewhat shocking to see that so many people would happily, without hesitation, screw over a minority just for some QoL changes).

Anyway, the best solution I've read and can think of myself is to simply expand the current lifeskill level system instead of replacing it.

In the 'My Information (P)' window, introduce a "Family-wide" tab for lifeskill levels, while keeping the "character"-based tab (the one we have currently in-game). 

Lifeskill fame and guild life points should remain the same and be calculated the old way with the "character"-based lifeskill levels from all of your characters in your family. 

While the new "Family-wide" lifeskill levels tab is used as actual stats for your character. Your family lifeskill level will be calculated as the sum of all character-based lifeskill levels of your family.

In other words, keep the old system, while introducing family wide lifeskill levels!

Quit your whining, this is a good change. I also have multiple high life-level characters but you don't see me being petty. I HATE having to swap characters just to heat a handful of f***ing sealed black magic crystals or use simple-cooking.

How petty and childish can one get? I fail to see how you could possibly think that having all 13 of your characters share your highest life skill level would be a bad thing. So what if you leveled life-skills on multiple characters? You aren't only one.

"it's somewhat shocking to see that so many people would happily, without hesitation, screw over a minority"

Keyword here is "minority". Also, get a life if you are seriously in favour of having to level life-skills on every new character you make.

As the player who's life levels that screenshots represents, I'm sure people can guess how I feel about said proposed changes and which four-letter words im using to describe how I feel about it.   While I am likely the most extreme example of this, having spent thousands of hours over multiple years working on my family fame to the point where even the next highest person is barely in the rear-view mirror, there are literally thousands of players who enjoy the same at a slightly more casual level.   It was something unique and special you did for virtually no gain that could set you apart from just regular lifeskilling.    I'm certainly not thrilled about all the prospect of all that hard work going poof  (between that and my most known descriptor being "The Trading Guy" it was a rough night for myself) and no one I know who has put any effort into purposely raising life fame is happy about it either. Already had 3 of them "quit" since last night.

The big problem is the lack of information from PA about what is happening and how this is likely to take place.  You don't jsut make such a huge change effecting so many people by spending 30 seconds showing some vague screenshot that says "By June we intend to make lifeskill levels family wide" then immediatly moving on to another topic while barely getting in a comment during the transition about "we'll do something about G50 levels".  We have basically no information to go on other then that and naturally with so many questions being asked about it people are just making assumptions or straight up making stuff up.  If you are going to make an announcement like this you better have thought out and decided on a plan that you can share already.

I can understand why PA thinks they need to make this change and I think of a way or two PA could make it work.  Unfortunatly I can also think of several ways they could royally mess this up. With odds like that, you can understand people's confusion and disappointment.  Presumably they would have to increase or uncap the lifeskill levels and merge the gained experience across everyone's characters.  The key word there is "presumably"  because they couldn't even be bothered to tell us in detail, we are just assumign at this point.  Are they actually going to increase the caps?  Are they going to merge the levels or just give us the highest one on the account? What are they going to do with the family/lifeskill fame system in general?  What about the players who spent $ or silver on coupons/costumes (particularly since they just had a sale on all that stuff and are still being sold), are they going to get refunded on those after this Uno reverse card is played? Are they going to throw a bone to those of us who are about to have years of effort washed away?   I could go on for a few more paragraphs but that'd muddle the post.

So yea, this needed and still needs to be handled a little better.  PA, if you are reading this, you really ought to have thought this out a little bit more and given out a lot more information from the get go.  At the very least, I would ask you give us a bit more detail on your intentions and how this would work, if only for the sake of clairity.  At best, you might want to get in touch with a bunch of us and talk a bit about all this.

What I find interesting is that PA made a cavalier announcement about core game mechanics, on the heels of a very unsuccessful change to Trading (so unsuccessful they had to turn it off), and they have multiple threads discussing this change, with this thread reaching 10 pages... and nobody has thought, "we should get on the boards and do some damage control."

I've been off-and-on in BDO since 2017 (I was actually on hiatus during the Trading changes, and only read about them upon my recent return, when I found all traders deactivated), so this isn't particularly surprising, but it is, as I said, interesting. I wonder why PA does this to themselves and the player base. Seems like it wouldn't take much for somebody to post a comment about even a loose plan. As it is, they announce a huge change with no info, and then let the community speculate for weeks to months. 

That behavior says, "we truly don't care what our customers think." I'm not advocating a particular position on the change. Just noting that it is a big change to announce with literally no info on implementation plans.