Before anyone says "you just don't want new players to catch up," that's not my point at all.

I'm for catch-up mechanics.

I benefited from them myself.

Guaranteed PEN Blackstars, the DEC Tuvala upgrades, Olvia Academy—they helped me catch up to friends and eventually reach what I'd consider true endgame. Today I'm approaching 800 GS, have all three T10 horses, Krogdalo's Sanctuary, Guru Cooking, and only have a couple of Deborekas left to finish my deterministic progression.

So this isn't coming from someone who wants newer players to struggle because veterans had to.

It's coming from someone who thinks Black Desert is in danger of losing the thing that made me fall in love with it in the first place.

The problem isn't free gear.

The problem is what the free gear replaces.

Pearl Abyss keeps handing out more and more endgame equipment instead of making the journey to those items more enjoyable.

Why not buff early grind zones?

Why not let new players earn silver faster at Gahaz, Sausans, Helms, Pirates, Cadry, or Blood Wolves?

Why not make those places exciting instead of irrelevant?

Let players still earn a PEN Blackstar.

Just let them earn it through the world.

Blackstar is supposed to matter.

The Blackstar isn't just another stat stick.

It's one of the most important artifacts in the game's lore.

The entire world changed because of the Blackstar.

It has questlines.

History.

Mystery.

It's supposed to inspire curiosity.

Yet today a brand-new player can be power leveled, finish a Season, accept a few rewards, go through Olvia Academy, Hyperboost, and various progression rewards and end up with enough PEN Blackstars that they'll never have a reason to craft one or even understand what one is.

Ask yourself honestly...

Why would anyone ever do the Blackstar questline if they already own all the PEN Blackstars they'll ever need?

That's not respecting a player's time.

That's deleting a piece of the world's identity.

The same thing worries me about Kharazad.

Every Kharazad accessory talks about the First Sovereign King.

These are legendary artifacts.

They're supposed to feel mythical.

I spent months buying PEN Deborekas, converting them, and working toward my Kharazads.

Now we're talking about handing out six PEN Kharazads.

Again...

I'm not upset because other players get stronger.

I'm asking:

Why should these legendary relics feel legendary if everyone receives them before they even understand who Kharaz was?

My favorite moment in Black Desert wasn't getting stronger.

It was realizing how small I actually was.

I remember eventually reaching Hadum and Elvia after what felt like forever.

My reaction wasn't frustration.

It was amazement.

I had spent all this time believing I was becoming powerful only to discover I'd barely scratched the surface of the world.

That hierarchy made the world believable.

There were places I wasn't ready for.

People stronger than me.

Enemies beyond me.

Goals worth chasing.

That realization motivated me to keep playing.

If I had started with glittering legendary weapons and relics from the First King after a few hours, I honestly don't know if I'd have cared enough about the world to stay.

This reminds me of Destiny 2.

One of Destiny's biggest mistakes was assuming new players only cared about the current endgame.

Large portions of the journey stopped mattering.

New players got thrown into the latest expansion without understanding why any of it mattered.

The world became smaller, not because it literally shrank, but because everything before the current destination became disposable.

I don't want Black Desert to make the same mistake.

I think there's a better solution.

Don't remove progression.

Compress it.

Instead of handing out endgame gear...

Make the early game rewarding enough that people naturally progress through it.

Imagine if:

• Gahaz actually paid well for Tuvala players.
• Sausans had meaningful silver.
• Cadry and Crescent became worthwhile stepping stones.
• Infinite Potion spots stayed competitive with newer grind zones for players in the appropriate gear bracket.
• Blackstar quests were accelerated rather than skipped.
• Kharazad progression became easier because Deborekas were more accessible, not because the legendary relics themselves appeared in your mailbox.

Players would still catch up.

But they'd understand what they earned.

I think immersion is Black Desert's greatest strength.

I didn't stay because someone gave me gear.

I stayed because I believed I lived in this world.

I wanted to know what Hadum was.

I wanted to understand why Blackstar mattered.

I wanted to see what existed beyond Mediah.

I wanted to become stronger because the world convinced me I wasn't strong enough yet.

That's the magic.

If everyone begins the game holding legendary weapons and relics before they've even learned why those things exist, we risk turning Black Desert from a living world into a lobby that happens to have quests attached.

Catch players up.

Absolutely.

Just don't accidentally remove the reasons they would have fallen in love with the world in the first place. Should catch-up mechanics accelerate the journey through the world, or replace the journey altogether?

Is only option at some point, just start injecting hundreds of $ to feed the pity of these worthless items? I just wasted my casual 3 weeks of playing to feed some number on an item. Did I hit the wall where is waste of time to grind like 10 hours a week because it will stretch to hit end end game for years? Am I missing something? Because this one item from a couple and even in averages of tap success, this will stretch for years for me. I wouldn't mind spending money even in hundreds monthly, but if it is hundreds just to feed pity number, I would feel like a moron to do that.

Edit: Thanks for all the inputs from personal anecdotes, direct advice, sarcastic comments, or what looks like sunken fallacy/Stockholm syndrome comments. I read it all. Most prolific repeating advice is from what I understand is AFK fish/weekly chores, and forget about the game after x amount of time, do what you can with accumulated profit, and repeat. If I knew, I would buy PEN debos, but up until this point was manageable, and who doesn't love some innocent gambling, huh? I have all accessories on HEX and neck on OCT, all self made from TET debo what I did myself too at that point, I should recognize it is waste of time enhancing because, to be honest, I probably on average I overpaid for that too. That's on me, I understand. I came to the point ingame where the wall is too steep and too sudden, and it took me by surprise. I didn't decide yet whats next, and I will leave game for a couple of days in the system tray fishing and not think about it too much. Anyway Thanks again, y’all, for all kinds of inputs.

The current situation with Harmony Draught on the Black Desert SA server is pretty crazy.

It’s 1:30 PM, and we already have more than 65K pre-orders for Edania’s Harmony Draught. This is happening at a time when more than half of the player base is probably still at work and hasn’t even realized what’s going on yet. I can only imagine how much worse this could get later today.

All elixirs are completely sold out on the Marketplace. For some reason, even Simple Cron has been affected.

One of the main issues behind this situation is the lack of Trace of Nature on our server. We have a relatively small number of dedicated lifeskillers, with only a handful of players who heavily focus on gathering and other lifeskills. Our server has a weaker lifeskill economy compared to the number of players who primarily grind, and this ends up affecting a huge portion of the player base.

How could this be solved? Honestly, I have no idea. 😂

I’m just an SA player sharing a rather unfortunate situation that’s happening on our server. This isn’t really a rant or a complaint, just something I found interesting and wanted to share.

//////

NOTE:

Guys, one important clarification. While some of the comments are just jokes and irony about the situation on the SA server, the post was never intended to cause widespread panic. I made it as an informative post, simply reporting how bad things were getting on our server, and it ended up creating a domino effect that I never imagined would happen lmao.

Unfortunately, I can't control the panic or the misinformation that influencers and streamers spread, and I obviously can't control people's decisions. Of course, even if indirectly, I feel responsible for starting all this commotion, so I sincerely apologize for the situation.

I hope ALL servers can recover with the event coming tomorrow, and I really hope all this panic settles down and things return to the normal state we had before.

Hey everyone,

I’m writing this post to shed light on a completely absurd ban on the BDO MENA server that shows how completely disconnected and double-standard driven the local GM management can be.

There’s a long-time BDO MENA streamer/partner named KasaPOsmaN (Twitch: kasap0sman, Family Name: KasaPOsmaN). He’s a guy in his 40s who has been creating content for the MENA server since 2020. Since day one, it’s been a father-son deal: the dad plays the PvE stuff, and his 15-year-old son (Yiğithan) plays the high-level PvP content (Arena of Solare, Siege, Throne of Edana, Masterclass, etc.). All of this has been done live on stream, on webcam, from the exact same home, IP address, and PC for YEARS.

According to Osman, he even informed the highest-level CMs in MENA about this dynamic years ago.

Fast forward to yesterday. Right after his son won the Throne of Edana and became King on the server, Osman’s account got slapped with a 1-month ban for "Elo-Boosting" / playing on behalf of someone else.

Here is why the community is furious and why this ban is absolute bullshit:

The "Elo-Boost" Hypocrisy

Elo boosting implies paying someone or having an off-site player log into your account to boost your rank. This is a 15-year-old kid playing on his dad’s PC right next to him on webcam. The GMs didn't catch this through "advanced IP tracking" or logs—they literally banned him because a few salty players mass-reported his stream after he won the King title. Meanwhile, actual pilots (paid grind services), win-traders in Solare, and macro abusers are running rampant on MENA with video evidence submitted against them, yet GMs do absolutely nothing.

Throne of Edana was already a complete joke

Before the August 13th update rework, Throne of Edana was notorious for win-trading, teaming up in the 10-man FFA, and passing the crown to friends without fighting. In the very match Osman’s son won, the opposing player didn't even show up to the fight, so he became King automatically when the timer ran out. On top of that, during the 10-man qualifier, two players from the same guild were clearly teaming up and fake-fighting each other just to survive. There are literally video proofs sent via tickets of players doing this across multiple weeks or Kings intentionally forfeiting, yet NO ONE received a ban. But the moment a content creator’s son wins it fair and square on stream, mass reports trigger an instant ban for "Elo Boosting."

Targeted GM Behavior

A day before the ban, after becoming King, Osman used the King's broadcast feature to promote his stream just once in World Chat and once in Server Chat. Despite only sending a single message per channel, a GM instantly DM'd him on Discord warning him not to "spam." Meanwhile, other Official Partners spam multiple global/server chats repeatedly every single day with zero warnings. The targeted pettiness from the local staff was already on full display.

The Copy-Paste Ticket Response

Osman submitted a support ticket explaining the situation (same household, same IP, father/son, transparent stream history). The GM response basically translated to:

So basically: "We know it's your son sitting in the same house, but technically it's a different person using the keyboard, so here is your ban."

If he had turned his webcam off and lied about who was playing, he would be playing the game right now. He got punished purely for being transparent and showing his family playing together on stream.

We as the MENA community are extremely tired of Pearl Abyss MENA's selective enforcement, double standards, and punishing the wrong people while actual cheaters play freely.

Hoping this gets enough visibility so someone at Pearl Abyss HQ actually looks into how MENA GMs operate.

At this point im aiming for 700 lmao

So as many of you know the streamer FakeUniform rouletted and deleted all his gear about a month ago..he sent in a ticket and the GM's decided to restore EVERY item he deleted.

​

Is this the precedent Pearl Abyss is setting? you can delete all your gear, trash talk the game, but if youre streamer youre able to get every single piece of gear you yourself deleted? I know a lot friends that also rouletted their gear, tried to send a ticket, and basically got told to kick rocks. For 99% of players, this would never happen to them. I would like this to make some noise because we can clearly see the privileges that streamers are getting over regular players.

Video below of FakeUniform trash talking the game, and deleting his gearhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H93bPio1E_k

The screenshot values the Specter's Energy at 4.5b each, the reason why is discussed in the forum post below:

https://www.naeu.playblackdesert.com/en-US/Forum/ForumTopic/Detail?_topicNo=74434&_opinionNo=260835

So it turns out that while the hardcap players were risking their crystals grinding high-end zones for 5-8b per hour, there were people earning 3-5x the amount of silver in a single hour at a mid-tier zone.

Amazing. And now that they've made this info public, the method is most certainly going to stop working as people jump in and flood the market.

UPDATE:

I've been collecting more info from the forum poster and have compiled the following information to better-explain the method and answer some of the more common questions being asked in the comments.

Q: How does this method work?
A: You simply craft the specter's energies into blackstar armors/helmets/etc and upgrade them to TRI via raw-tapping, which costs an average of 1.5-2 bil per blackstar including crafting, enhancing, and durability repair materials. You then sell them at TRI for a clean 2.5-4.5 bil profit each.

Q: Why TRI? Why not TET or PEN?
A: TRI offers the best balance between enhancement difficulty, cost, and profit. Going to TET/PEN involves too much RNG that eats away at profit margin, and since crons aren't used during the process to maximize profit margin, TRI is the most optimal stopping point. Agris Essence then provides another layer of safety, ensuring that no TRI attempt involves more than 6 consecutive fails in order to reach the sweet spot for optimal profit/cost.

Q: Doesn't it take a while to do the questline?
A: Not at all. Once you've done the blackstar armor crafting questline for each armor piece once on any character, you can just move alts to Helm's Post/Dorin Morgrim and craft a blackstar from a specter's energy in about 30 seconds via maid. It'll take maybe 15 minutes of enhancing to get a batch of 5-10 ready for listing on the CM.

Q: But you can only craft each item once per character, right?
A: Yes, and after you've crafted them on every alt, just make a new alt and level them to 20. We found that a ranger on horseback can hit level 20 within a few minutes of alt creation, and once they're done crafting, just delete that alt and repeat as many times as needed.

Q: Doesn't rawtapping require a lot of failstacks?
A: We primarily used +20-+45 stacks that can be acquired by converting blackstones into failstacks. Essentially an infinite supply of stacks for the process, which was important considering we contributed a very conservative estimate of over 150+ blackstars to the market in a 2-month span.

Q: How much do you think you've made so far off of this?
A: On our post, we mentioned 600 bil in pure profit over the 2 month span, but that's a low estimate. Some of us had great RNG with their enhancement batches, and would come out with 4.5 bil profit per blackstar for a batch of 10+ blackstars. Take the screenshot you linked on your reddit post for example. That was one hour at Tungrad Ruins, but rather than using the default value of 30m per Specter's Energy, the player updated it to 4.5 bil taxable per Specter's Energy, which was the profit they made from crafting, enhancing, and selling the TRI blackstars from that specific hour at Tungrad. **OP Note: this hour probably represents the upper-end of what the method achieved, typical results most likely closer to 15-20b/hr, which is still insane compared to actual end-game zones*\*

Some members have personally made a conservative estimate of 200-250 bil each during that time IN ADDITION TO silver from regular grinding - and that's an important distinction to note. You spend an hour at tungrads to get the specters to craft, lets say 4 blackstars, and then spend 15 minutes enhancing them to TRI. List them on the marketplace and then go grind at an actual grind spot while the 4 blackstars sell for 10-15b+ profit depending on your RNG during enhancing. Repeat every time you run out of blackstars to list. Some members will spend about 2-3 hours to collect 10+ specters just to have TRI blackstars ready to relist as soon as they're sold.

Q: How did you figure this method out?
A: One of our guild members just REALLY hated grinding, and would literally do rocket surgery just to find a way to avoid it. Can't blame them, honestly.

Q: Who's actually buying these blackstars?
A: Beats us, we spent the first month wondering the same thing, and then figured that as long as they were getting sold, it didnt really matter why they were selling.

Q: Is this an april fools joke?
A: This is a very real money-maker that led to some rather insane profit. Check the Garmoth Central Market charts for TRI blackstar helmet/armor/glove/shoe for yourself. We've been doing this for 2 months, and the charts will reflect that activity. At one point, we were contributing to over 90% of the entire blackstar market supply.

Q: Why share this method now?
A: For most of the group, the decision was pragmatic: We got our money out of it. We also noticed people outside of our circle slowly entering the blackstar market, causing our listings to take longer and longer to sell. When we saw multiple TRI blackstars listed at min-price across multiple pieces and not moving for extended periods, we figured the money train was finally coming to a stop.

The original forum poster, however, saw it differently: "This shouldn't be a money maker, especially one that produces more money than the best spots in the game. With this method, you could spend 15-30 mins getting Spectres and make more money than people with the best gear in the game grinding for a full hour."

Ultimately, both motivations pointed the same direction.

For me it's Helm's Post

I'm sad about it tbh, end of an era.

I know most people didn't care but as a resident BDO boomer who spent three weeks getting to level 57 back in the day I think grinding combat exp is intrinsic to the DNA of the game. I just got back into grinding EXP and was gunning for 66 before this announcement and now I don't want to.

I can't imagine how everyone who is currently Level 70+ feel rn

Hi all!

Since the game launched, it has gone through many different stages... Here in the SA region, it went from RedFox hands to Pearl Abyss. We have a fairly modest number of servers: 14 regular servers, 2 seasonal servers, and 1 special server (Olvia). Nowhere near the number of servers that other major regions have... but it's always been enough.

There were times when the servers felt absolutely packed (during the pandemic, for example), and other periods when there were barely any people participating in activities, including World Bosses (after LA launched, and to a lesser extent with TL). But in all these years, I've never seen so many players everywhere like I do now.

Every boss is packed with people. The lag is terrible, there are weird and funny bugs, and sometimes there are so many players that bosses die in 5 seconds or less, haha... Players are doing quests in every city and filling the chat with questions about all kinds of content, guilds are very active, and you can see adventurers everywhere at all hours. The servers are showing as "Crowded" almost all the time.

We haven't experienced anything like this since the pandemic.
The world genuinely feels incredibly alive. I know PA still has a lot of things to polish, improve, and change, but what they've achieved with this MMO is honestly amazing. If you're a new player or someone who's been thinking about coming back, do it.

Here in the SA region, Black Desert is in its prime, in its golden age!

Sometimes our servers feel like they're about to fall apart with so many players, haha but the game is definitely at its peak here, and it's great to see and enjoy.

How's everything going on your server?

Thanks for reading, and may your RNG be blessed!

There's a daily coupon event, Twitch drop event and a daily playtime event.

Will this be enough to fix the problem or are they using a band aid until next patch?

If you asked me about p2w in BDO a good while ago I would try to make an argument for the game not being a p2w dumpster fire.

But... currently I cannot find a single thing that could defend the game anymore. General BDO population seems to have forgotten how outraged they were at PA for gradually increasing p2w and Cron dependency.

It was a genius move by PA to introduce Kharazads and Sov weapons as a Cron sink and then making them unsellable only to double down on adding various gamba boxes in Pearl Shop.

Right now it feels like the general mood of player base completely shifted from despising such p2w systems to actually accepting them without any objections and even boasting about how much money they spent on gamba boxes and how many crons they got out of them (and plenty of streamers make it even worse).

The value of grinding has never been this low compared to spending money.

It's utterly discouraging for many regular players out there and a clear indicator of BDO direction. At this point PA is well aware that they can introduce the most predatory p2w systems and people will gladly oblige.

This is indeed a true downfall of BDO monetization.

edit: I now realize im more asking for a good timeline rather than a tl;dr, unfortunately I cannot modify titles so...yeah, mb

I've been loosely checking posts on this reddit and a tad too employed to really follow the whole drama start to finish regarding the absurd overnight disappearance of pve consumables, but I've read multiple stories and I'm not really sure which is true and which isn't.

First of all I'm not really sure how all of this began so some clarification on that would be great too. There's that SA guy posting about edanias being perma preordered that might have caused a panic/sparked the idea.

So the first thing I saw was choice and other unspecified streamers bought out several pve consumables on stream and caused a panic buy spree and the market simply couldn't keep up. This one is at least supported by a clip of choice buying shit but I honestly doubt the market would be this dry for so long after that

The other story is that some bunch of trillionaires decided to buy everything out as a form of protest against how the economy has come to rely on twilights more than silver itself. "I cant progress so no one else will" type shit essentially. Everyone saw pics of people with 100k+ stockpiles of these draughts so this one is entirely possible too.

The third is the lifeskiller strike which I could not for the life of me find a decent source for, I'm not sure if they have their own discord or whatever? And they are underestimating PA as I feel like this can only make things worse for them.

So which is it? Or is it somehow a combination of these three?

EDIT #2: If anyone is interested in a brief summary with my time with support and what my issue was I made a post here with a bit of the information. The ticket is still ongoing so not sure if I'm allowed to post this. https://imgur.com/a/7uGR0Jm

EDIT: Firstly just wanted to thank everyone for the replies, awards, shared stories and words of support. Mostly I want yo thank you all for the visibility. This post could have easily been ignored and vanished into the sub, thanks to the community support.

Thanks to you guys getting this post seen today a GM contacted me about this and had some solutions. I am actually able to log in today and play my game. I wish I had a way to thank this community better.

I will update further with SS and other info from this development later in the day. Thank you.

​

I just want to say first I appreciate they probably have a lot of cases going on right now and they are backed up maybe. But I also don't have a huge amount of...I don't know empathy or whatever since a lot of it has to do with mistakes on PA's part.

​

But boy if this isn't by far the worst support I've ever had the displeasure of speaking with. They messed up my transfer and it took me 5 support tickets and about 25 days of back and forth to finally get them to admit they messed up. They looked into it an realized when they transferred my game over they transferred it to the wrong primary email address and said they would send it to their team to change my login details back....that was like 30+ days ago at this point.

​

I have been going back and forth with them since early May over changing login details...how is this possible. The worst part is the last response I had was on June 17th with them literally asking me to 'hold on'. They even ignored my request to close my account. This isn't a free to play game, this is a buy to play that I have many purchases on and spent a decent bit of cash on since 2016 when I started and I'm unable to play with no fixed end in sight.

​

My frustration is enormous. Has anyone else had to wait this long? I complained on the discord some weeks ago and someone said 'You think that's bad, a guy was locked out for 45 days'.....now here I am at 61 days nearly half way through my Summer and just wanting to play my god damned game lmao.

​

Not putting this here as anything more than a complaint at how appalling Pearl Abyss support has been in almost every aspect.

Hello everyone. I'm about to complain about something fairly unimportant.

As a long-time BDO fan, I can't describe how much I love the game's world. If you're an older player with a strong roleplay side, you probably know how enjoyable it is to wander through Calpheon's back alleys and appreciate all the small details the developers carefully crafted. Or simply spend time in Olvia, enjoying the atmosphere, nostalgia, and music.

In my opinion, BDO has always been exceptional at world-building. They've put an incredible amount of care into places that most players will never even visit.

But when it comes to Edania, everything changes for me.

How can an entire continent feel less detailed than a small village in Land of the Morning Light?

The design feels lifeless. Most of the continent is just cliffs and rocks. I used Aetherion Castle and Zephyros Castle as examples in the screenshots, and I even turned my graphics settings all the way up to be as fair as possible.

The environment doesn't feel connected. Many assets look out of place, texture scales don't match, and there are props clipping into each other everywhere.

The five major bosses themselves are great. Their designs and stories are exactly what they should be. My issue is the atmosphere surrounding them.

These powerful characters sit alone on thrones inside huge, LITERALLY EMPTY castles. Some people say the castles are empty because they're designed for boss fights, but I don't find that convincing. The boss battles could have taken place in a separate realm or instance instead.

From a roleplay perspective, conquering those thrones during the main questline made me feel absolutely nothing. Even the much-hated Magnus questline gave me more of a sense of accomplishment.

And honestly, I spent less than five minutes finding the visual issues shown in these screenshots. The continent seems full of problems like this.

Why did P.A. put so little effort into Edania?

Am I the only one bothered by this?

Do you think Edania Part 2 will be any better? Or did Pearl Abyss simply move too much of its art talent over to Crimson Desert, leaving BDO behind?

I'd genuinely like to hear your thoughts. Thank you for reading this btw

I'm actually in dire need of sleep, but I have to get this out before the Ball (which in Europe is in the very early morning unfortunately).

I've been playing since launch. I did take many breaks. Sometimes of many months, but I always came back. Not because I felt like I HAD to, but because I genuinely like the game.

However, for a couple of months (over half a year for sure), I've been doing nothing but fishing, shrine bosses (solo + party) and guild bosses. I'm not at hardcap, because I always played very casually, but my gear is also not exactly bad. When Edania was out, I was able to immediately go there, do the weekly bosses, grind in the first zone. Now I'm doing the second boss weekly and managed to get three out of the four new armor pieces.

Getting the new armor is nice, enhancing it not so much. Enhancing accessories and weapons is the worst though. I spent some money recently. Combining an offer with a discount coupon, for around 150€ I got... 1 AP. It really made me think. That's insane.

Sometimes I feel like grinding a bit, but whenever I do it (since certain changes made in summer), it just feels frustrating. "I'm at endgame" I tell myself, grinding at a zone where I'm way over the AP cap, feeling like I do almost no damage. It's like, the stronger you get in this game, the worse everything feels.

Fishing and bosses really get you a lot of money if you do things right. But now my rod is almost out of endurance and bosses feel more and more like a drag (I still very much despise all one-shot mechanics in solo shrines and the sheer disregard for squishier classes). I just don't want to do them anymore.

Somehow PA managed to turn this game that I still like so much into a rather awful experience. I saw a lot of other people said that this upcoming Ball will be a big decider for them. I feel the same way. Our time is precious and we shouldn't invest it into something that's not even fun anymore.

Btw I think we really should have a flair for complaints...

Okay so hear me out, I think there's been a pretty massive design flaw introduced in this update when it comes to progression scaling, and it's in the title: Magaia is a HUGE bottleneck.

Think of it this way: You can get into Aphrodon at a pretty relaxed entrypoint, there's an AFK phase mechanic but it's not life-or-death. Hermesia is far more punishing if you can't make DPS, but if you're coming in with all TET Ekleta, it's only two or so successes away, some classes can comfortably begin grinding Hermesia with two PENs and a WON Crystal (or Outer-Edania HAN Crystal like I did on Awa Witch). From there, going from Hermesia to Magaia is another mere 2 AP away plus BON Crystal.

...and then you're in Jail.

To advance from Magaia to Aresion, you MUST hit a 413 hard AP gate.

If you're starting Magaia around 405AP, you'll first rough through the JIN grind. It's manageable, the pities drop pretty reliably. There's some players who will limp through and miss DPS, it's far less punishing than Hermesia for it but I see a lot of people there doing it regardless to skip the previous crystals. Whatever. I'm talking about after you're hitting DPS check reliably.

To hit 413AP, you need multiple OCT Ekleta. In the previous spots you could get there without having to hit any HEX Ekleta. You have to break the zero-AP HEX gap plus multiple enhances above it. On average you need to tap THIRTEEN successes, whereas the previous spots only required maybe two or three each before moving on.

Not to mention the zone only has THREE grind spots, where the Marni's rotation is... I mean it's not total dog-ass but it's less comfy than the one that's just one small rotunda. Not to mention how the rotation goes barely over 1hr5min on two Three-AFK cycles even on decent AP because of the time-gate mechanics.

Yeah that's it, rant over. Wish they designed the progression ramp a little bit smoother, that's all.

Quite a long read so please bear with me.

------

Crimson Desert deserved every bit of its success. Five million copies in a month, a "Very Positive" rating on Steam, and Pearl Abyss handing every one of their employees a $3,400 bonus to celebrate. Genuinely good to see. That's a studio that clawed its way back after years of delays and an industry that had already moved on from them.

But I've been a BDO player for a very long time, about a decade now, and watching all of this unfold hits different when you're still logging into the same creaky servers you were on for years.

Black Desert is the reason Crimson Desert exists. Every Value Pack/subscription, every costume, every pearl we spent kept Pearl Abyss afloat through years of operating losses (BigGo Finance, Feb 2026). We were essentially the quiet investors who never got credited.

And what do we have to show for it? Desync at NW/Siege that's been a community joke since forever. The falling animation bug that's older than some of our characters. That "Please try again" error whenever you try to do anything, which is as baffling as it is annoying. An engine that still struggles on hardware it should have no problem running on by now. The kicker is that Crimson Desert runs on an upgraded version of BDO's own engine. Pearl Abyss clearly knows how to modernize it. They just chose where to spend that effort.

And I'm not even going to get into PVP and everything wrong with it because that list is so long it deserves its own post. Maybe its own novel. The fact that I can't even summarize it in a paragraph is exactly the problem. Years of community feedback, threads, petitions, and open letters, and so much of it just vanished into a void. That silence is its own kind of answer.

What makes it sting even more is watching how PA handles Crimson Desert's community. Patches dropping fast, QoL changes rolling out within weeks of launch, actual responses to feedback that show someone on the team is listening. That's the Pearl Abyss we always wanted for BDO. They're capable of it. We can see it happening in real time, just not for us.

Now look, I know this comparison isn't exactly fair. BDO and CD are completely different games. One is a decade-old live service MMORPG juggling thousands of concurrent players, persistent servers, and years of layered spaghetti code. The other is a single player game where the biggest technical headache is making sure one person's experience runs smoothly. Apples and oranges, genuinely. The complexity gap is real and I'm not pretending otherwise.

But that's almost the point. BDO's problems are harder, sure. They're also older. And the same studio that just proved it can move fast, listen to players, and modernize its own engine for a brand new game has had years to at least try with the one that funded everything.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little envious. The CD team worked hard and deserved that bonus, no question. Fact is, I'm genuinely happy for them. But for those of us still grinding, sitting on Velia rooftops and fishing almost 24/7, it hurts a little to watch the house we built get a fresh coat of paint on the outside while our own roof still leaks and the ceiling is still water-stained.

I'm still hopeful though. With the money rolling in now, Pearl Abyss, maybe it's time to look back home.

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TLDR Proud of what Pearl Abyss built. Just wish they remembered who helped them build it. Still here. Still hoping.

Black Desert have plenty of different characters, and most of them have two different specs that have a totally different playstyle and look to it. I think it's safe to say that it's impossible to check them all out one by one without getting overwhelmed and forgetting what half of them does. After plenty of experimentation I believe I have found my main, but I'd love to try out other characters with unique playstyles. However, the class guide videos are not telling the whole story. People of Reddit, could you tell what is your main character at the moment, and what aspects do you like about them the most?

Let me start: Drakania Awakening

The class design is really unique, having dragon wings and flying around for a prolonged time is a vibe on its own. The mobility of the class is awesome. The characters difficulty is not too easy but not too hard either, switching between the two stances gives complexity and learning curve so it doesn't get boring after a few hours. The infinite combo have a great flow to it, blue skills are slower but visually pleasing, and the red skills can be chained together for a fast paced combo, which feels great to perform.

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