Black Desert

only real problem I have with the game so far (other than RNG fuck asian RNG shit) is that they compressed 2+ years worth of progression into 4 months.

There was never really a time where the gear game plateaued and core players could settle in and start to catch up experience wise vs hard core once they were on equal footing in terms of gear.

Basically by the time a 20 hour a week player could almost catch up with a nolifer in terms of gear and not get 2-shot, a new patch would come out that brought new gear, better accessories, or new levels on gear and the gap instantly widened again and again.

For the nolife crowd it's been non-stop grinding and people are starting to burn out.

Bondurant said:

Regarding PvP, before Kakao / Daum / Pearl Abyss P2W move, West BDO release gear grind was a casino. You either lose your money and win enough to get to the next hand. At some point having good gear resulted of some kind of online commitment, and / or luck. For concerned people, this gear model wasn't a surprise.

Now, whenever you bring actual money to the table, there's real life money commitment. You can spend days farming ogres, failing DUO / TRI, getting some TER maybe, there's always gonna be some dude buying its way up to the top. And by top I mean we're talking about difference between somewhat balanced fights and 1-2 shot to death.

PvP wise, is it okay to propose some quite big advantages to what we could call "wallet warriors" ? These people sometimes argue they have IRL commitments and they're happy to cut corners with money rather than game invested time. That's why Archeage EU release got ruined fast, nobody-guilds walleting the best gear to 1shot people during PvP encounters.

Solution is simple (yeah), get a low gear ceiling and allow commited people to get better cosmetics. I had fun poopsocking Archeage release being a Primecal and 2shotting everyone "GTA Austera" style, but it's just bad. Most legit MMO PVP guilds like PRX want fair fights. What's fair when any of your players have about 50% more stats than the average player ?

Click to expand...

Let me fix that post for you:

BDO Gear grind is a casino requiring major time commitment. At every point, having good gear is a major online time commitment AND luck.

There was no change to this formula, everything is exactly the same as it was before, there is no way to buy your way to the top.

Sylas said:

Let me fix that post for you:

BDO Gear grind is a casino requiring major time commitment. At every point, having good gear is a major online time commitment AND luck.

There was no change to this formula, everything is exactly the same as it was before, there is no way to buy your way to the top.

Click to expand...

You can buy your way into luck. All MMORPG, if not most, is just...fucking luck. Your gear drop, enchantment, etc....But some games are more grindy than others. Black Desert is a massive grind.....

You can't buy your way into luck. wtf does that even mean. I assume you are talking about Valk's tears, they never added them to our version.

Luck is the one thing you simply can't buy. Even if they added p2w and let you just straight up purchase billions of silver from the developer directly you would still be subject to the whims of RNGeezus for gear and would still need to mindlessly grind for items to sacrifice on the altar of failstacks.

No, you can't. Assuming you can continue to sell outfits (ie unlimited number of buyers), if you spend 150 dollars a week you can get 1 piece of TRI (boss/liv/kzarka) every 2 and a half months, ie after 15 months and 9 thousand dollars invested, they can catch up to where you are today.

deep pockets are irrelevant, the cap on items is what prevents anyone from actually using money as a catch up mechanic. The weekly cap is only 10-12 hours of grinding in silver, something people with tons of time can easily do in a week, and people who grind those 10 hours also gain all of the loot drops (for durability repair, rare items, etc), combat exp, and skill points, which you aren't getting if you just buy it with money, pushing you further behind.

At best, the pearl shop conversion allows players with limited play time to sell a few pets a week and use the silver to buy a few Sharps and Hards and roll the dice on upgrades, just like everyone else is already doing, so that they can focus their limited play time on grinding instead of farming/chopping/mining/digging etc. Which is the new added time gated bottleneck for advancement.

Are you really this dense? As i've already demonstrated you can't possibly buy your way to victory.

If a wallet warrior is very very lucky they might catch up to you yes, but they won't end up with better gear than you. And that's only if you quit the game today and don't log back in until Christmas 2017. Anyone who still logs in will continue to out gear them.

Which is the point. The sky was never falling. The only people who whined and protested about this were shit tier nolife no skillers who relied entirely on their time and luck advantage to 2 shot lesser geared players and ran away from anyone with any skill. See posts from people like Bondurant for an example.

At most, all money can buy is dying in 3 hits instead of 2.

What kind of strawman argument is that? Theres such a negligible difference between person c and person d that it's irrelevant. RNG is far more important in determining who gets geared between those 2 than any other factor. Both grind enough to get skill/levels/gear drops, both have enough time to life skill their way to hards/sharps or alternatively just buy them. They are equal for all intents and purposes.

The real difference is between a and b, but not in the way you've described.

The 20 hour a week guy isn't grinding 2 hours a day, thanks to the artificial barrier of hard/sharp progression that was added with Valencia. Everyone (a b c and d) is spending the first hour of active play time managing workers, brewing beer, dumping alt energy in nodes/crafting/etc.

Player a is spending the next hour farming/gathering etc because in the long run its more sharp/hards than an hour of grinding can buy you. Player b is bypassing that requirement with real money and is getting an hour worth of exp/skill a day.

Player a does his best to catch up on the weekends in whatever 3-4 hour blocks of time he can get, player b can also do this.

So the actual progression of your examples:

Player A: 8 hours of grinding advancement, 40 mil silver
Player B: 13 hours of grinding advancement, 140 mil silver

Players C and D: 70 hours of grinding advancement, 300-500 mil silver.

Player B will never catch up to player c or d, regardless of how much he spends. Even if he could buy a trillion silver directly from the developer he's still 600 skill points and 5-7 levels behind them. But he can't, all he can buy is dying in 3 hits instead of 2, like player A.

He also can't buy enough to 2 shot player a. He will gradually pull ahead of him, given enough time and money spent, but he'll never destroy player a the way that player c and d does.

All player b is buying is an extra hour a day to play the game instead of maintaining the machine.

People crying "p2w" "wallet warriors can buy their way to victory and now 2 shot non-p2w players" should look at your examples, since they prove what I've been saying, so thanks for supporting my point.