I'm writing this because I feel I have an ethical obligation to warn people who plan to stay with this game longterm.

- The Devs do not respect you.

- The Devs do not respect your time.

- You will have things taken from you.

- these can be things you paid for. 

My journey to this understanding was slow.

Pearl Abyss used to be a highly reliable company. They did not change what was not necessary to change. Much of the game was left alone for years exactly as it had been when it launched.

When first bought Black Desert Online we bought a game where five person grouping was permitted across the entirety of the game. 

- That is, at launch, most locations allowed full party participation. 

It wasn't until late into the Kamasylvia expansion this was changed and radically impacted our friendships, abilities to coordinate, and work together. It simply changed the base game we bought. It was no longer an MMO. It was a dictatorial process where PA granted us permission to use some of the game and not others. 

This has expanded over the years to the point where if you are at End Game you being "highly encouraged" by design of the medium to be at one place of PA's choosing and no place of your choosing without deficits. Usually severe.

Further, you now pay to play the game with in game currency. 

It isn't simply that you pay with Crons to hopefully get an absurdly out of reach upgrade. 330 attempts at 3000+ crons per attempt? Factor those hours. 

- This is unreasonable.

In the time it takes to grind these hours? I traveled every single prefecture of Japan, got a job, and acquired a firm foundation in two separate languages.

This isn't a game.

This is a process of wealth extraction from the "consumer" (consumed) to a disembodied overhead which does the barest minimal efforts at creating content.

- Edania looks like a weekend design slop from an undergraduate programs first semester design course in Maya. It doesn't even appear to be more the "asset drops".  It's incoherent. A large castle in the middle of the zone. Some scattered "thrones" set about the map with maybe some random architecture. 

It's been a year since Sovereign Weapons released. 

- This was another complete overhaul of the game.

Formerly Whales and others capable of maintaining a continuous flow of Cron Purchases produced gear which the rest of us worked towards by Second Hand acquisition.

- Most of us could not afford to be "all crons".

- We heavily relied on these rarer "Crafters" to keep the economy alive.

Sovereign Weapons, Kharazad Accessories, and etc. forced us to be equals to Whales in our real life liquidity or grind a specularly absurd amount of hours. 

- With the removal of grouping content ramping up ever since the changes back in Kamasylvia? 

- This also meant, alone. Everything you did was alone. And everything you could do was for your own benefit only.

A few exceptions existed, but those were steadily removed.

Recently the player numbers have dropped so low it appears the company is in a panic to recover or aquired players.

- We've been given so many Crons.

- But for those of us at Veteran status? It's just loss. Loss after loss.

40,000 crons at Christmas is not even remotely approaching progress when you have a 1% chance to Enhance at a DEC.

Most new players won't know this but there is a long suspected Booster to Enhancing if you simply don't play for a long period of time.

- You log out for an exceptional period and come back to streak after streak of Enhancing Success.

- All of this is very thoroughly documented across many guilds over the years. To the point it goes into Enhancing schedules.

This means that new players are always thrown TONS of accelerants upon joining the game, but it simultaneously chases out your veterans who put in long hours to only have those hours of effort undercut by new players being boosted to near-peers in a few weeks.

In a work force this is called Inequitable Treatment. 
- Very likely the only reason we have the Pity system at all is because the EU looked at such gambling as exploitative.

- I'm not actually sure it helps the situation since, as you can see, the amount of hours required per upgrade compared to the hours lost that could have been used constructively to benefit that person's real life? It's highly questionable.

Especially when the company has explicitly stated they are going to be moving to make sure "high end" players are not attendending Tungrad, etc. 

The company is less interested in having this be a game and more interested in this being dictatorial. 

- They've spent years now edging us into only very limited areas of play.

The areas of play we are now permitted as time goes on is increasingly rampent with two particularly terrible mechanics.

- a) one shots

- b) bosses 

The one-shot mechanics demonstrate a kind of profound laziness. The creatures of possessing this ability are numerous and constitute most of the actually decent, but still inadquate money at end game compard to the hours required. You will almost never be making the time back at the rate you succeed unless. Even this set aside, the player suffers a number of long term deficits. Any death to a one shot comes with a potential Crystal loss. This loss has (for years) been more expensive than the money gained per hour. Meaning, your are struggling to overcome a deficit at the start and risking to be put into a greater deficit for any amount of participation. 

This is further compounded by your attacks doing barely any damage. You no longer "chunk" enemies in combat. You do incredibly small amounts of damage to them without even so much as a hope of recovering the ability to "chunk" them at any time. This makes combat no longer combat. It is a timer. You go in, you persist in the fight, and do it efficiently so that the timer is reduced at a reasonable rate.

This is all about extracting time from the player's life. 

- This is really ethically should be regarded as some kind of vampirism. 

- For this reason alone a player continuing to play this game should really consider strongly how you are spending your "life points" (time). 

I really do think in the future this kind of treatment of people will be looked at as unethical and acted upon accordingly.

I have, for years now, experienced a bug with Sangoon where attempting to kill the boss MAY result in the entire area being AoE'd at the final phase. I reported this and shortly after the bug stopped. Then returned some weeks later. It has never gone away and has persisted since release. Effectively eliminating my ability to do Boss Blitz solo consistently. I've simply given up trying.

Many other examples of this exist. I was formerly one of the top geared players in the game, but I was never able to kill Golden Pig King when it was main stay content despite that I had gear well ahead of others. Demonstrating either complete incompotence on the dev team's design philosophy or a simple lack of care in design. I now struggle with the same situation at Sorceress, Tenebraum. I cannot clear even the towers in time. 

The design philosophy no longer even seems to care about your gear score. It is just a number determining if you can attend a spot or not. A whole other slew of balancing factors is to be considered instead. Crystals, Foods, Alchemy Stones, etc, etc, and it this appears it will only get worse with time.

My class has always struggled with a -10 Sheet Deficit anyway. Whatever the requirements are for a region, unless we are +10 above its stated entry stats we struggle.

- Do the devs care about this? Answer: Has it ever changed - no.

Far back at the launch of the game the tamer pet was an independent entity. Nearly equal to you in ability. 

- Today the tamer pet largely appears at random, does little to damage, and is anchored at your side. 

- The devs originally gutted its AI out of claims that players were complaining it was like fighting two players in PVP.

- However, they subsequently buffed such classes as Berserker and Striker into absurd levels of meta without any such similar treatment.

This change was forced on us a little by little, but persistent.

We've seen this kind of thing again and again, as well.

They stripped out Heilang's sit and gave it as Auto to the Maegu.

- The sit the Meagu pet does? That's Heilang's.

They stole it from our class and gave it to another.

A similar thing happened with Dosa.

- Tamer used to be able to grind for horse back.

- The devs didn't like this so they made Roaring have a cooldown. Our large AoE.

We could still grind on horse bacl.

- So they made it so you had to do a number of extra combos to conduct the combat.

This still did not satisfy them.

- For a time it seemed this was over.

They created the Dosa. 

- It had a large AoE very similar to Roaring and... wait for it... a Teleport.

- Effectively enabling the Dosa to AoE, kill a Pack, teleport to next pack, and repeat.

This was considered balanced.

Prior to this, but at the same time they were nerfing Tamer into oblivion (When it already struggled to grind competitively) they gave Sage a rapid movement ability on Awakening that a Tamer nor even Valkyrie awakened could hope to replicate.

But were somehow problematic?

This is balanced?

And robbery is ethical?

Well it goes on... they simply deleted Horse combat.

- Poof

Years of leveling up my Unicorn. 

- Advances to OUR classes and OUR combat systems was just... deleted.

It continues...

They then went after Soaring Arts.

- This was called a "glitch". 

- They'd left it in the game since launch and it was one of the recreational things we used to do along with Lahns and Rangers.

- It was a weekend event and daily pass time challenge many of us as friends spent years perfectly.

Well, as with pegasus when it was doing well at jumping over fences? They got rid of it. And yes, that's a thing. They actually deliberately made pegasus worse.

This is far from the only thing they made worse.

- It used to be you could autopath from one location to another and the game would detect the best route and design a path to take you to it. 

- Today you are given a few pre-selected routes you are sent to and then on your way.

This often causes many issues. For instance, you will see in Dreighan this can cause the horse to completely avoid the straight path up to the large bridge at the center of town and instead go in a loop to the far back end near Oluns. It nearly draws a complete circle in some cases. 

- In Kamasylvia there is a large road heading straight through the middle of the planes that it never maps to now despite being the shortest route between one side of the map and the other from any circumstances.

We used to have real darkness in the game also.

- Ever notice that  your camera glitches out and makes intense darkness sometimes?

- The glitch is the bright lighting. The darkness is the default that's been forced out.

We used to have lanterns to counter act this, but it was removed. 

- They could have addressed this with local lighting objects like infintie lanterns, but it was lazier and easier probably for them to just remove it. Why not? They deleted horse combat and Soaring Arts. Things we spent years developing and paid into it. 

What else?

Well, it used to be possible to do Life Skilling without gear. Hards and Sharps were big money back then.

- You'd go and grind to recover energy and then go and pick whatever you wanted to do for life skilling and it made money.

This was all eventually changed so we not only have to get Combat Gear at absurd costs to our real life time or capital.

- Now we had to do it twice!

Remember when I said there's been a long suspected Boost to Enhancing if you don't log in?

- Well there's also a long suspected deficit.

See, Enhancing is a + and - game.

If you failed to Enhance you make a Stack. 
If you succeed you make an Upgrade.

Where's the crafting process?

There is suspected to be a number when you Enhance much similar to Agris. Let's say 900 points.
If you use a +300 Stack then that's 900-300 leaving you 700 points to work with. Do another? 700-300 = 400.
Another? 400-300=100.
At this point, if you attempt to Enhance you will increasingly fail. This is how you used to BUILD Stacks.

You could plan this out.

There are, again, whole in-guild semi-sacred charts of all this from the PvP days when the devs still treated this game with some mild respect.
- like not deleting our stuff or thieving it from us to give to other classes!!!!!!! Simultaneous with punishing us for even existing (nerfs).
- what? they can't make a class without screwing up someone else's to justify the existence of the new one?

In many cases advanced crafters still rely on this knoweldge to create gear. 

- We also plan for losses, not fun, based on this repeated habit of the devs.

Now let's talks about Elvia vs. Dekhia.

You are already paying in Crons (real money) to make your gear go up. If you aren't paying someone else is Whaling and that is the ONLY reason these servers are still on. 

- you aren't the cause.

- The value of your free-playing is the totality of your 'voice's' impact to their ears. 

- If you are paying, even a little, your voice means nothing compared to the whales above you who can literally spend the price of a house for just one of these purple gear items.

Despite this, the majority of "content" is aimed at new and returning players.

- this appears to be an admission they've driven off a lot of their whales and are just hoping to milk from the bottom for as long as they can until the ship's engine goes dry.

- at the same time this further signals to those at the time "we don't care about the time you've invested. we're working real hard to invalidate it."

How many years has it been since the Dark Knight got an update to its outs exclusively? Or how long did it take to see the Witch get pants? 
- The longer you play the more you start to realize they don't even see you as existing. And they aren't going to try.

For some reason, unknown to everyone, Elvia Rhutums exists. 

- But horse combat? That got deleted.

- The stuff we use and pay for gets deleted. Foundationally or fundamentally altered such that isn't what we even bought. But that can exist?

Anyway, Dekhia...

You pay to use Dekhia...

Think about this... YOU are paying REAL LIFE MONEY and TIME (both the same thing) to SUBTRACT from YOUR REAL EXISTENCE so this company can what? Then charge you AGAIN with your GAME CURRENCY (MORE OF YOUR REAL LIFE TIME) just to be graced with permission to play content suitable to your monetary needs?

That's what Dekhia is.

It gets better though!

Think about this...

Elvia is designed to have you Enhancing your Armor... And Alchemy Stone... And Weapons... 

- But above we covered that many players have documented the potentiality of two hidden variables.

a) not logging in for a long period before Enhancing Boosts Success

b) Enhancing continuously for any periods deminishes success

This effectively means the more you play the game the worse your situation gets.

By design.

A few years ago they even started removing the Christmas stuff. Halloween would still show up, but the Santa you see flying around? That was gone. It's only returned in an apparent attempt at desperately convincing players there's still a game here. Look around? You have to pay with your earnings in game just to play end game content while also being asked to pay with your real life earnings just to get to that content. All while being one shot and having your damage (and defenses) basically barely effectual with a random chance at losing everything. 

- Again... by design.

- And yes, everything. Forgot to enhance with crons on?

- At what point does that one mistake cost you a year or more's progress.

Answer: We are already there and have been for a year now.

I really have nothing more to say here. I cannot fathom why they are doing this other than they are planning to wide this game down and shut it off. Perhaps Crimson Desert is more like a module to clone this game over onto another engine. Other games have done that, but the mistreatment of us and the product we originally purchased compared to what it is today? This leads me to think otherwise. There really may be a ten year plan, but it isn't a plan that involved the game as we purchased it. Most of that has been gutted from this 'thing' that was formerly Black Desert Online. 

Play at your own risk. 

real and true

I read the whole thing. Everything said here is completely valid except for the section about class balances. We can agree to disagree but right now rats, iframe super armor classes, anything that can burst damage and trade damage in SA is dominating right now. Its really opinionated but mostly everything else you make completely valid points. This is definately worth a read. 

The complete dependancy on CRON STONES is the most valid thing stated here. 

For example, My first DEC weapon was 125 taps.

125 x 3920 crons per tap = 490k crons

490,000 x 3,000,000 (The price per cron)= 1,470,000,000,000 Silver

My Second DEC weapon was 113 Taps

113 x 3920 crons per tap = 442,960 Crons

442,960 x 3,000,000 (the price per cron) = 1,328,880,000,000 Silver

The problem is, PA doesn't realize how absurdly expensive these things are, and they try and give out crons but giving me a free 1k crons here or there is no where close to what I need to upgrade, let alone for an item thats a 1% success rate.

Hell, to pity a DEC weapon which is completely possible would cost 3,880,000,000,000 Silver

I think PA saw the memes coming saying its Cron Desert Online which is the reason why they took away crons from the Alch Stone process which was a big W, but right now, we need a developer that actually plays and understands the game to see the things that are reasonable and unreasonable.

people should understand the 'joke' regarding the word 'gacha' by now.  If you will recall the Star Wars Battlefield II issue with p2w? (iirc, i didn't not personally experience it, but it was a while ago, when things were shifting to more whale-centric development models)

The thing is... some ppl want their time wasted.  They want to pay MORE to have their time wasted MORE.  So let them.

BC we have whales, and whale food, gacha, this game continues and is very nice, and fun.

IDK if you can go on, maybe you feel you have done it all and stuff like that, and feel there is no more for you except endless repition to click on this upgrade that never comes.  maybe that is enough, maybe it isn't, or maybe you can just enjoy some Solare, idk.  Do a new season character?  Enjoy the questing?  Maybe you can't enjoy it anymore?  But can others?  probably 

It will go on, and it will also be 'gacha'.  So they 'got ya', ooh... oh, my!

it's ok to just take a break, play something else, learn another language...hf

maybe you will play again, and maybe so will some of the others who 'quietly walked away', good for them, if they do or not, they are doing their thing, w/e that may be.

it's ok

consider yourself a player

Everything you said is on point. It's sad to see what this game has become, and what could have been.

I'm also pissed that they took things from Tamer and gave them to other classes;

-Shai summon horse animation (used to be Tamer's for summoning Heilang)

-Maegu fox idle (used to be Heilang's) 

Along with the others you've mentioned. It pisses me off that they not only copied these things and gave them to other classes, but they removed them from the original. Tamer's identity is built around Heilang. They completely dismantled him and removed things that made Tamer special and unique. The original classes don't get ANY respect. Just replaced with hollow/shallow copies.

Tamer (along with Deadeye) will always be my main because I remember how she used to be. I'll always have a soft spot for that class. Just angers me to know what we've lost.