Black Desert wants to gradually revise existing mechanics and make the game more fun and varied. However, the significant changes to PvP last week caused frustration among some players. Therefore, the Executive Producer is personally addressing the players: Black Desert has become very repetitive, so boring. Now they want to focus on class balance for the next 30 days.
What is the problem? Black Desert has been with us since early 2016 in Europe and has since been steadily expanded with new content. New classes and new areas sailed over from Korea to keep players engaged with content.
However, the core mechanics have not been significantly altered since the release. There has been a buildup of clutter that, according to Jae-hee Kim, the Executive Producer of Black Desert, has led to stagnation.
The Producer says: “The gameplay has become very repetitive. We want to refocus on an exciting MMO.”
The goal of the latest updates was to “clean up” Black Desert and rid it of unnecessary mechanics.
Small changes did not have the desired effect
The various content added to Black Desert was meant to address the problems slowly, without hitting players too hard. However, these small changes did not lead to a solution. Thus, the problems have been carried along, but now the point has been reached where only drastic measures can lead to the desired results.
The problem was intended to be solved with a harsh change in PvP. However, this led to chaos among players.
The foundation is being shaken
Existing meta has become boring: Before the update on 18.04.2018, classes that had skills to trigger the effect “Grabbing” were superior to other classes that could not.
In PvP, which plays an important role in Black Desert, these classes were stronger.
PvP players relied mainly on a single combo that they executed repeatedly to eliminate opponents. However, this meta led to frustration among players who sought other ways to defeat their enemies. Players who did not want to succumb to the mighty combo and wanted to play by their own rules were at a disadvantage in PvP.
Radical change in PvP causes problems: The goal of the patch from 18.04 was to shake up the meta a bit and return fun to PvP. However, instead, this led to some players believing that the patch “destroys PvP”.
The goal of improving balance between classes could not be achieved.
Crowd-control effects are being revised again
But instead of waiting for the next regular maintenance, the developers released a patch on 21.04.2018 that brought some changes to the crowd-control effects that caused such confusion on 18.04.
This is how it was before the patch (18.4.): Before the patch, the effects of knockdown, stun, push, knockback, stun, and grabbing were seen as a set. These effects could be activated twice on the target within 5 seconds.
This is how it is now: The crowd-control effects are now assigned certain numeric values.
| Freezing | 0.7 |
| Knockdown, Stun, Push, Knockback, Stun | 1 |
| Knockback, Airstrike | 0 |
Once CCs on a character equal the value of 2 or greater, no debuffs can be applied to the target anymore. However, the CCs knockback and airstrike can always be applied.
The developers propose a solution
This is what they want to do to combat boredom: The developer of Black Desert promises to listen better to player feedback in the future and admits that they have overdone it with the speed of bringing new content. They will now place more emphasis on internal testing.
It remains to be seen how this will affect new content.
In the next 30 days, they specifically want to focus on the balance of PvP and achieve the goals they have set internally.
In the Korean version of Black Desert Online, players can now date certain NPCs.
