Greedy Goblin

Monday, May 23, 2016

Yuria 15: economy based gear progression

In most MMOs, gear is a reward for completing content and also a tool to complete more content. The most notable exception is EVE, where you build your gear via crafting from farmed materials (or buy it from someone who built it). Black Desert Online belongs to this exception: you grab a crafted item and put in black stones farmed by you or someone else. Black stones drop from random monsters (just got one from a wolf near Olvia on a 1 hour alt) and rewarded for killing daily bosses.

The higher you enchant your items, the more powerful they are, but also the more stones they need. Getting a +15 is considered so expensive (not "hard" in the sense of getting mythic raid gear in WoW), that the game makes a system wide announcement that someone just did it:

The rest of my gear is far from perfect, but nothing to be ashamed of for a 3 weeks old player. The leveling numbers were limited not by black stones, but by ingredient gear availability (if you enchant, you damage the gear and it must be repaired by sacrificing similar items):

Of course, getting so many black stones need lots of farming. But not for the player:

Making all the beer and chopping all the timber and mining all the ore took lot of time for my workers and my character, but for me, it's just a few clicks after they are set up once. Which is surely the kind of game I like and can recommend every market-savvy player. You can get top gear just by running industry.

Of course I'm somewhat worried by the longevity of the game because of that: I'll "complete" my gear in a week or two, leaving room only for miniscule upgrades not worth taking. Then what? This means I can't really recommend the game until I see the answer for this question. I hope the answer will be good, because I really like BDO now, but I can't deny that it feels like a single-player game which runs until the player runs out of content. Sure, there are much content in BDO for me, but it's still finite.

PS: the top earring and ring were farmed. Hexe Sanctuary was just the best MMO scenery I've seen and visited it every day until I got bored of it.

PS2: there is luck in the world:

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think your timing of your gear progression will dove nicely with the next update which is due in a couple of weeks I think. This will enable guild pvp warfare of the various nodes and resources. This is the reason there is a 30%xp bonus running until the end of the month. They want as many players at level cap as possible.

Gevlon said...

I hope so. Can you link some announcement about this? Maybe the ruleset of the warfare?

Anonymous said...

From their forums:

http://forum.blackdesertonline.com/index.php?/topic/85931-valencia-part-1-is-coming-to-bdo/

Anonymous said...

Also a very handy map for nodes and resources. Just click the white box in the top left hand corner:

http://www.blackdesertfoundry.com/map/#5/-29.936/-80.552

Anonymous said...

I'll "complete" my gear in a week or two, leaving room only for miniscule upgrades not worth taking.
If gear is the only thing, you have won pre-valencia. This holds true for any game. in some it takes some months in other you are geared on day two. Not only gear, this applies to other aspects of a game too like exploration, crafting, dongeon crawling, raids, rankings, etc.
15th comes the siege system. maybe BDO will get some meat then. Until now is a colorful distraction. Not even that horrible of a grind, I'm still happy.

pre-valencia daum changed mobs so they all have a chance to drop weapon and armor black stones. so your low level alt will get some too. this will end when valencia patch rolls out.