Okay! Two months later and I have a pretty nicely geared-up level 53 Valkyrie, in a nice guild full of nice folks, and I'm quitting the game. This will be my third attempt to start over and organize my thoughts about why.
First, I need to state the positive, and there is a lot of it. The combat is a reasonable mesh of positional and statistical. So both gear and technique factor into why you would win or lose a particular fight. Each of the many non-combat skills are well designed, and they overlap, mesh and interrelate in a compelling and sensible way (gathering, processing, cooking, alchemy, fishing, hunting, farming and a few others like that). It's good stuff, and I really mean it. The workers, shops and the supply chains are well done, and they force certain crucial steps to be done by the player, and other crucial steps to be done by workers, so that the whole economy cannot be dominated by someone automating the whole thing. I enjoyed very much getting my gathering skill to 47, my processing to 41, my cooking, alchemy and fishing levels to the high 30s. It was fun, rich, complex and engaging.
Daum has implemented a slew of anti-RMT measures, and the results have worked. Players can only trade low-value items like potions and certain foods. Most other things can be traded on the auction house, but the system determines the high and low prices, and buyers are only allowed to purchase the lowest-priced item (or stack of items). This prevents me from listing corn flour for 7 billion each and having my rich friend choose to buy these as a way to get money to me. Players cannot gift other players money, loot, gear or anything else. So you cannot go online and buy "bdo silver" because the RMTers would have no way of getting it to you (except maybe as a stack of millions of low-value giftable items, all of which would have to be sold and thereby arouse suspicion). They did a nice job on the anti-RMT measures, to the point where players cannot help each other out other than by advice and some PLing. So the game economy is not going to be wrecked by gold farmers. good there.
But in the end all the above is moot, at least for folks like me.
The end-game is PvP. Folks who like PvP came to the game wanting to PvP, and they grind to get their combat levels as high as possible and to grind "world bosses" to get the best gear. They either sneer or laugh at those who "waste their time" crafting. And they are right. You can get all your various non-combat skills into the 30s, 40s and beyond, and then you have done it all, and there's nothing to do other than repeat the same stuff for ever-diminishing level increases, or to hoard cash. But having 100s of millions of silver cannot buy you safety. The end-game for Black Desert consists of highly-geared and high-combat-level PvP. The PvPers are forming into guilds who grind together in teams. These teams take the prime grinding spots, and immediately kill other players who get close enough to be killed (no warnings, they just run you over because everybody knows these are grinding spots and the obvious rule is kill or be killed on sight). That's going to become the norm more and more: open hostility to anyone not in your guild. It's already on the rise, noticeably so from when I started 2 months ago. I'm sure it's going to continue, to the point where each server will have the guild that "owns" it. The dominant guild will then terrorize anyone on the server who is not in their ranks. Since PvP cannot be opted out of after combat level 45, most of the PvP-heavy guilds quickly PL their members to 55 using their grinding regimen, and 95% of the world map are open-PvP zones, this outcome is inevitable. As someone who hates PvP in all forms, to me this means the game is turning into a bad neighborhood, and it's time to move out.
