Why I Quit Black Desert Online

When I first started Black Desert Online I was quite enamored with it. There’s a vast world to explore and tons to do in it. Gathering, processing, horse training, horse taming, fishing, and sailing are but a few of the game’s extracurriculars. On top of all of that there are thousands of quests, a trade system, an impressively deep node system, and a whole system of NPC workers. I was a Conqueror’s Package purchaser and during the headstart I found that I was so wrapped up in the world that despite the fact that it was proven that you could hit level 50 in a mere eight hours I quickly hit a point where I had more hours played than levels. There was always more to do and see. I enjoyed all of the extracurriculars and leveled at a much slower pace.

Then I joined a guild and began to feel the need to grind to 50 to help out with guild activities. So I did. About the time I hit 50 is when the illusion started to wear off. Make no mistake there is a lot to do in Black Desert. The problem is that the game doesn’t really encourage you to do any of it. Eventually, you hit a point when you realize that grinding and grinding often is the only way to truly succeed in the game.

When you hit level 45 you only really have two options: spend most of your time in a safe zone or continue grinding to get on the level of those that might attack you. There are tons of PKers due to the open PvP system the game employs, and they aren’t afraid to attack you at a moment’s notice. Should you be in a guild at the time and unlucky enough to be up against a guild, that guild will declare war on your guild, trading 150,000 silver per hour from the guild’s coffers for the rights to not lose Karma when they attack and/or kill you.

This happens even more often when you get to the endgame grind zones where players grind Marks of Shadow or, now with the Mediah update, the highest level grind spots where players that have already hit level 55 get the best XP rates. I won’t be around for Mediah Part 2, but I have no doubt that the Pirate Islands will quickly become a highly contested spot as the only viable place to grind to level 60.

Now, even if the opposing guild does not declare war on you, Karma doesn’t really stop them. If they go negative it only takes a few hours of grinding to recover. Guess what they were already doing when they attacked you? Grinding. For them, it’s usually not an issue. The players that are attacking you are often the most hardcore of the hardcore and the Karma means relatively nothing to them. On the other hand, you may have time restrictions and can’t afford the Karma loss. There are always exceptions, but this is what I’ve generally experienced. Many of the groups that attacked my guild, declared war on us, and subsequently retracted their declaration after stomping us would continue to own the zone even after I had made my way off of the game for the night. Now, this is a natural part of open PvP games, but the core issue is that the heavy reliance on grinding almost forces guilds to contest popular grind spots in a way that begins to feel unnatural.

Being in a guild at the endgame doesn’t help matters. You have guild missions and the occasional guild war, but the game heavily encourages you to do a single type of guild mission: subjugation, otherwise known as more grinding. You have to do subjugation missions to get guild boss scrolls—guild bosses have a chance to drop rare weapons. You have to do other guild missions to get the money for the subjugation missions that give you guild boss scrolls. Other missions often take you to popular grind spots. For example, one guild mission I’ve done a lot takes place in Hexe Sanctuary, which is the spot where you can obtain Witch’s Earrings. When you have a guild of primarily level 50+ players, it is really hard to convince enough of them that any of the other guild mission types are worth doing—even harder still because trade missions have hidden trade level requirements based on the item you’re trading. In fact, in the guild I was a part of at least it was even hard to convince them to do any guild missions that could not benefit them by obtaining items like Witch’s Earrings.

What’s more, there are only a certain amount of missions available on a channel at any one time and you have to wait for a guild to complete a mission before you can take it on if there are none available. Even with this system in place, the game will still send multiple guilds to the same place, creating even more unnecessary conflict. When I have to spend upwards of three hours grinding giants because my guild master decided he wanted to take on a larger mission than we had the numbers for, the last thing I want to do is fight a higher-ranking guild at the same time.

It’s arguably worse on a personal level. When you hit level 50, you begin to get daily missions. Your dailies will award you summon scrolls that can be used to summon bosses that will drop Black Stones, Hunter’s Seals, which are traded in for Black Stones, and a ton of trade-in items that can make you a lot of silver very quickly. Each summon scroll also comes with a quest to defeat the boss that it summons, which will award the you with items that give you even more Black Stones and trade-in items. All of these dailies require you to grind even more of the same mobs you were grinding for guild missions. Often, you will even get a set of dailies that will require you to traverse the map. Then you actually have to complete the boss scrolls—you can complete them whenever, but my guild did it weekly because a full group can benefit from each other’s scrolls. The scrolls are spread out across the map so they are not easy to complete quickly.

When all's said and done your day can potentially be upwards of an hour or two on dailies, three or four hours on guild missions, and then however long spent doing whatever else it is you want to do—likely more grinding. In my experience the Mediah update only made matters worse. As a level 50 Valkyrie with a +15 Yuria Longsword, +14 Vangertz Shield, and all of my armor at +9 or higher, I was spending an extra hour or two completing my Mediah dailies. For me the enemies did not scale well. They were too tanky. Attempting to grind in Mediah often left me with less XP than I had started with. As unfortunate as it is there is nothing else to do in Mediah. It’s just more grind.

There are a ton of things that you could do in Black Desert. You could up your processing and work towards getting Artisan workers so that when it comes time to upgrade your Yuria’s rarity your chances are somewhat better. Or you could spend that time grinding for a Liverto or Kzarka instead, both of which invalidate the higher rarity Yuria. You could spend your time crafting a wide range of items. Or you could grind for a bit, sell the loot, and just buy it from someone else. Alternatively, you could Amity grind the weapons merchant that sells Yuria and flip it on the market, then buy what you need with the profits. There is so much to do but grinding trumps all of it. There is simply no incentive to do anything else. The overwhelming sense that nothing else that I did would matter was what ultimately led to the end of my time in Black Desert.