While the r/blackdesertonline page of my BDO worker guide was spammed to uselessness by r/eve trolls lead by Lenny himself, they couldn't go to the official forum page as they have no BDO account. This thread gave an interesting insight into the grinders brain.
One guy flat out claimed that it's impossible to earn 10M/day with workers... just to realize that he is already earning 7M with a much smaller setup. Another guy expressed that grinders make 10M/day if they grind 2 hours a day (yay, that's how I want to spend my play time!). Finally one expressed total ignorance how the market works, not knowing that wood, ore, powder and fruit type items stack by 500, so I don't sell 50K individually.
It's clear that these people never put a thought into anything but grinding and were so sure of them being right that they commented without thinking, even facing mountainous evidence (me being the richest man on a server while playing half as long as my competition). Why? The more fundamental question: how can grinding MMOs exist in 2016, despite WoW introduced much more "fun" content years ago?
The solution is that socials value grinding. The MMO grinds are a kind of escapism for them into a social dreamworld, where you just have to "do your job" and be rewarded. Socials despise the unequal skills, taking risks and making choices. In their ideas all you need to do is follow the norms and do as everyone else. In the real world that leads to being a blue collar worker, while those "selfish assholes" get rich as experts and business owners.
Not in a grinding game! Here we are all equal and work hard together as brothers! Grinding Sausans is a good experience for socials. Not "fun", but warm and cozy. With friends, it's even fun. Finally a place where being a "selfish asshole" doesn't help succeed! Except, look at that most selfish one with #1-2 wealth over his head (literally, as BDO places medals over your avatar)! Damn, it's unfair! He must be grinding no life, there is no other way! Oh wait, he is 54. Oh wait, I'm already making more from the odd workers I have than from an hour of hard work! Damnit, this game sucks balls!
I'm sorry socials (not), but if a game has an economy, no matter how crippled it is, those who play that will make more than grinders. Ironically: selling raw materials is so profitable because of grinders. Grinding mostly generates liquid money (and black stones/shards) and they need stuff for their activities (consumables, gems, craftable gear for max durability, carts, boats, maybe furniture). If I'd be alone in the server, I had to sell everything to NPCs for crappy price. This is the ultimate insult to them: I'm not only becoming rich, but at the "expense" of them. Actually not, I'm offering them a good service and they would be worse off without me, but they don't understand that.
Yet! Because I'm going to spread knowledge in this - seemingly - virgin land of sociality.
PS: I was surprised how respectful and non-toxic they were in their complete disagreement. In EVE the same situation would get me a couple hundred "kill urself publord" answers.
One guy flat out claimed that it's impossible to earn 10M/day with workers... just to realize that he is already earning 7M with a much smaller setup. Another guy expressed that grinders make 10M/day if they grind 2 hours a day (yay, that's how I want to spend my play time!). Finally one expressed total ignorance how the market works, not knowing that wood, ore, powder and fruit type items stack by 500, so I don't sell 50K individually.
It's clear that these people never put a thought into anything but grinding and were so sure of them being right that they commented without thinking, even facing mountainous evidence (me being the richest man on a server while playing half as long as my competition). Why? The more fundamental question: how can grinding MMOs exist in 2016, despite WoW introduced much more "fun" content years ago?
The solution is that socials value grinding. The MMO grinds are a kind of escapism for them into a social dreamworld, where you just have to "do your job" and be rewarded. Socials despise the unequal skills, taking risks and making choices. In their ideas all you need to do is follow the norms and do as everyone else. In the real world that leads to being a blue collar worker, while those "selfish assholes" get rich as experts and business owners.
Not in a grinding game! Here we are all equal and work hard together as brothers! Grinding Sausans is a good experience for socials. Not "fun", but warm and cozy. With friends, it's even fun. Finally a place where being a "selfish asshole" doesn't help succeed! Except, look at that most selfish one with #1-2 wealth over his head (literally, as BDO places medals over your avatar)! Damn, it's unfair! He must be grinding no life, there is no other way! Oh wait, he is 54. Oh wait, I'm already making more from the odd workers I have than from an hour of hard work! Damnit, this game sucks balls!
I'm sorry socials (not), but if a game has an economy, no matter how crippled it is, those who play that will make more than grinders. Ironically: selling raw materials is so profitable because of grinders. Grinding mostly generates liquid money (and black stones/shards) and they need stuff for their activities (consumables, gems, craftable gear for max durability, carts, boats, maybe furniture). If I'd be alone in the server, I had to sell everything to NPCs for crappy price. This is the ultimate insult to them: I'm not only becoming rich, but at the "expense" of them. Actually not, I'm offering them a good service and they would be worse off without me, but they don't understand that.
Yet! Because I'm going to spread knowledge in this - seemingly - virgin land of sociality.
PS: I was surprised how respectful and non-toxic they were in their complete disagreement. In EVE the same situation would get me a couple hundred "kill urself publord" answers.
14 comments:
I'm confused, what makes you think this PressDFtoWin guy is a community manager? There don't seem to be any annotations or anything that would indicate so.
Google also only pointed me to this thread, but that in fact seems to indicate he's not a community manager.
It seemed to me reading that thread several of those making comments still do not completely appreciate the advantage of investing the time early into developing a substantial contribution resource. If they glanced back at your previous BDO posts they may have seen you managed to accrue over 250 contribution at around the 3 week mark as a BDO "newb" recognising the value of the resource, and you were primarily making income of one of the easiest cooking items, excess beer.
@Hanura: my bad, fixed. I can't explain why I thought that.
@Thuldiela: of course not. They appreciate only what give rewards RIGHT NOW!
Why are you surprised at the lack of toxicity? Eve is one of the worst games out there for that. Heck even wow has a god awful community in comparison to many other games. Go look at paradoxs community for hoi4, the dragon age inquistion community, the civ series and its fansites, the short time I spent in rift... the list goes on of games where calling others scrublords isn't done and would be met with confusion and /ignored if you did it.
Its why to be frank with you I think its a good thing (for you) that you left eve online and don't plan to go back. even through a rhino hide skin of asociability it must be frustrating they dont even try to listen even if their barbs can't penetrate to sting.
As far as i know the wealth ranking only count liquid silver. Most people constantly use their silver to upgrade gear. And alot have bilions in gear value by now.
So the wealth ranking dont give meaningfull data.
How can grinding MMOs exist in 2016, despite WoW introduced much more "fun" content years ago?
first of all this is an KR game. KR games are all about ridiculous level grind and RNG! Did you play any of them at all? They also have restricted markets and horrible UI. ANd yes you have to play the market to make money.
Second of all what part of your daily "routine" is not grind? every aspect of an MMO is designed to delay and foster grindy/repetitive play. that holds true from the darkages (ultima online) until now (BDO,WOW,whatever).
Like in any other mmo you have to hit levelcaps to be of any value. This game PRs as not having level cap. witch is of course bullshit, right now it is 56. 56 will also enable awakened weapons. When Valencia is completely rolled out it will be a bit higher but as always MMORPGs are made for imbecile retards so I guess that the next content update can be conquered with 56 or 57 weapon awakened chars and somewhat decent gear.
I don't care about #1. In the end it boils down how much silver you sink into the RNG drain. A "feature" many western players are not familiar with at all. This game gives some tools to handle RNG, more so than other KR titles .. but in the end I happily preorder concentrated stones and memory fragments just to see it fail and fail again. Bob will have +20 with a retardedsmile and 2 b silver sunk into it vs me who can't get over +18 with 200+ b sunk into it.
In KR games you have shortterm, midterm and longterm goals and you usually don't complete the longterm stuff over months. your gameplay should be spot on to complete all three. Silvermaking alone can help but don't neglect other slowly growing bars like skillpoint, contribution, lifeskills, health/stamina and level XP.
@Anon: all true, but it's a consequence. If people would hate this, no one would play it and it wouldn't have income. On the other hand people love it and sink money and time into it while grinding. Why?
I have to agree with nightgerbil. EVE is the outlier, other games are not like this. Especially other game forums are not like this. Even a game like League of Legends, with a massively toxic community, enforces clean forums without the kind of behavior you're talking about.
EVE allows this because that is their niche. This is the only game (which is not unplayable due to bugs) where you can openly harass other players, grief, tell other players to kill themselves, or say and do the most deplorable thing you can think of. The players who want to do this are a small minority, but this is the only place for them. Now you know why CCP loved the Mattani so much. Everything he did that would normally scare players away was actually a great advertisement to the kind of players they are looking for. He's not the bad guy that they put up with, he's the champion of their values.
@Samus: except by their own results, most players are not like this. They found only 10% who went "diverse group play" (and most of these were not toxic, just "hang out with friends" socials), 40% went solo play and avoided the community (probably because it's toxic as hell) and 50% quit fast.
@Goblin,
If everyone took your advice, stopped grinding, and played a market / produced like you do, then at some point grinding would be more profitable than producing.
Its not that grinding < producing/trading/etc... its that the nth trader is still more marginally effective than the xth grinder because n < x .
If the amount of intellectual labor at setting up a supply chain is low relative to the profit, you will convince a few people to try your method out. As more do and the return on "investment" (having to think) diminishes compared to just grinding, the rates of your conversion will slow in proportion (assuming you have a large enough effect to affect that).
It will never hit equalization, because expending any amount of intellectual effort is more exhaustive than executing keystrokes via muscle memory, which means that the price difference between "trading" and "grinding" is merely reflective of the inherent cost/value of exerting administrative effort, plus perhaps bias in time preference for immediate consumption (playing the game rather than playing the market).
As you have said in the OP, for most players the administrative effort is a chore, and grinding is not. Grinding is more of an addictive/comfort activity that defrays the mental costs of accomplishing nothing (playing a video game instead of something productive) by giving an in game accomplishment, because hey if you killed all those mobs "you earned it" .
You're too intellectual to be pacified by this mechanism, and you need another. But like the silver they get from grinding, the MS provide that to you as well. A constant social experiment to continually validate your hypotheses.
In a followup to Nutroll, i'd like to point out that the amount of people able to do actual work is actually falling faster than the amount of people able to generate intellectual fluff is increasing.
So, given current trends, at some point, n will be >x (no matter how much the "intellectual effort" people attempt to convince themselves of their superiority)
"@Samus: except by their own results, most players are not like this. They found only 10% who went "diverse group play" (and most of these were not toxic, just "hang out with friends" socials), 40% went solo play and avoided the community (probably because it's toxic as hell) and 50% quit fast."
...and CCP's response to this was they were in the wrong game. Eve is a game of trolls designed by griefers, made by griefers for the griefers. Their comunity managers are trolls and griefers promoted from those parts of the griefing community where trolling and griefing is most admired.
It is not a surprise to me that if you stop hanging around in the same places as griefers and trolls the amount toxicty you experience will decrease and the amount of common courtesy and at least being given the respect of being heard out will increase for you.
@Nightgerbil: which offers a great business opportunity for a venture capitalist. As CCP HF is an open corporation, he can buy shares against the will of the management, fire the community team and outsources game management to another company (like BDO west is outsourced to Daum by Pearl Abyss or EVE Serenity is outsourced to Tiancity by CCP). This way he can triple the subscriber numbers without changing a single line of game code.
I play Warframe (on and off), which is a Loot-fest like Diablo, but styled as a Sci-Fi shooter. It's a guilty pleasure of mine.
What really irks me, though, is how little both the developers and the player base understands the game they spend thousands of hours with. They make ridiculously wrong choices on how to spend their time. For example you get ~6 faction missions per day, which reward ~3k reputation each. However, these missions also contain (1-10) rare hidden drops, which grant extra rep points when turned in. They are worth significantly less than a mission (on average about 250 each, as the most common ones are worth 100, and the big ones are very rare). You can do a mission in 5 minutes, but finding every last hidden item easily takes another 15.
So you can either get 3k in 5 minutes, or 5k in 20 minutes. And yet so many people search for these items that I have to do these missions solo if I ever want to complete them.
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