BDO is Pay To Win

Why BDO is Pay To Win (And Subsequently, Why BDO Is Bad As A Result)

BDO is a terrible, pay to win game.

Before we can understand WHY it is pay to win, we first need to understand the nature of the game itself. BDO is a primarily PVP, gear based MMO. The 'End Game' of BDO consists mostly of Node Wars, which are basically fights between guilds over territory. To win fights, you need gear. This is crucial to the design of the game: Gear is EVERYTHING. PvP-wise, your gear accounts for about 90% of your effectiveness, unless you happen to be playing Ninja or Kunoichi in which case it counts for about 75% of your effectiveness. I really cannot stress enough how important gear is in this game.

Now that we understand the importance of gear, we need to investigate another aspect of BDO: RNG. EVERYTHING in BDO is subject to RNG. Absolutely EVERYTHING has only a 'chance' of succeeding, where in reality, you will be screwed on most attempts. Enhancing gear is RNG. Gear drops are RNG. Fishing is RNG. Gathering materials and processing is RNG. EVERYTHING is RNG in BDO. It is also worth noting that the vast majority of RNG has a very low chance of succeeding, which is blatantly designed to waste your time and sell you on more cash shop things. More on that later.

After understanding gears importance and the presence of RNG, we need to understand how to GET that gear. Well, for base pieces such as Grunil or Taritas it's fairly simple. You can get them from grinding enemies in various areas, or play the amity game with NPC blacksmiths and buy them for silver. They also tend to always be present on the marketplace. The real problem is in upgrading that gear. That's right, like all eastern MMOs, BDO just HAD to shoehorn in an enhancement system.

Understanding this system is CRITICAL for realizing why BDO is so pay to win, I will therefor explain it in-depth.

The enhancement system, like many such systems in eastern MMOs, is needlessly complicated. It is also completely riddled with RNG. The basics go like this: You have a piece of gear, lets say a Grunil Chestpiece. At its base level, it is considered +0. In order to upgrade it, you need Black Stones, either Armor or Weapon stones (in this case Armor). All armor can be safely enhanced up to +5, meaning it has a 100% chance of succeeding. They also take steadily increasing amounts of black stones in order to enhance, however this is usually not an issue. Regular black stones are plentiful. After +5 on armor (or +7 on weapons), enhancement starts having a chance to fail. In fact, after +10, you have more chances of failing than you do of succeeding. Failing causes three things to happen: A. You lose your black stones. Figures. B. The piece of equipment loses 5 maximum durability (max durability is 100 for all gear, its basically the amount that you can repair up to. Low max durability means your stuff wears out faster). C. You gain a failstack. Failstacks are crucial in this system, upon failing, you gain a steadily increasing chance to succeed on your next enhancement attempt. In fact, there is a whole system to abuse alts (every character has different failstacks) in order to maximize material usage and success, but I won't get into that here as it isn't critical to understanding the system.

What you really need to understand is the loss of max durability. In order to restore lost maximum durability, you need either a COPY of the item you are repairing, or an item called a Memory Fragment. Copies will always restore 10 maximum durability; Memory Fragments restore a varying amount based on the rarity of the gear you are repairing. 10 for white, 4 for green, 2 for blue and 1 for yellow. Remember those numbers, particularly the yellow one.

Now then, going from +0 to +15 is easy for everything but Boss Gear. Boss gear has EXTREMELY low drop chances so you HAVE to use Memory Fragments to fix their durability, and all boss gear is yellow so they only restore 1 durability. But what's this? Your jewish devs have a solution! In the cash shop, you can buy an Artisan Memory, which causes Memory Fragments to repair 3 times what they normally would. You CAN admittedly get this using Loyalties (currency you get for logging on every day), but the cost is so high as to be impractical given the amount that you need.

But memory fragments and artisan memories are just the tip of the iceberg of pay to win. Let's investigate enhancing further.

Going from +0 to +15 is easy for everything except boss gear, as previously mentioned, and even with boss gear its more of a mild annoyance. Where the game REALLY starts to kick you in the balls is from +16-+20 (+20 is max). These ranks have special names, +16 is PRI, +17 is DUO, +18 is TRI, +19 is TET, and +20 is PEN. After +15, you start needing CONCENTRATED Black Stones in order to enhance, and here's the tricky part. The materials to make concentrated stones (both weapon and armor) ONLY drop as a rare drop through gathering (or farming but no one farms). The playerbase calls these sharps and hards (sharps make weapon concentrated black stones, hards make armor concentrated black stones). These things are rare, and in high demand. The result of which is that you will almost never win one off the marketplace; either you will lose the bid to one of the THOUSANDS (not exaggerating) of other players bidding on it, or a marketplace bot will instantly snipe it if it goes to direct buy. (Did I forget to mention? Things on the MP start out with an auction bid system, just one more layer of RNG to fuck you) Futhermore, if you FAIL the enhancement (which you will, many, many times), your equipment DEGRADES after +DUO, meaning you are even further back than when you started. Sounds like bullshit isn't it? Well, you'd be right. Only a handful of people in the games history have ever gotten even a single +PEN item. The success chance is so low as to make it pointless to even try. Even once you build up the MAXIMUM amount of failstacks to put towards an attempt, you will still have only about a 20% chance of success going from DUO to TRI. It's about 2% from TET to PEN, and that's MAXIMUM chance.

Now that you understand the enhancement system, you are probably cognizant of how extremely expensive using it is. You have to pay for concentrated stones (you'll never gather enough on your own given their insanely low drop chance), you have to pay for Memory Fragments to fix failures, you have to pay for duplicate items if you aren't using boss gear, you have to pay out the NOSE to get anything past +PRI. If gear is the father of BDO, then money is the mother. Silver costs are huge at max level.

You might be thinking something along the lines of "Go farm silver then you lazy bastard". Well, it's not that simple. There are only a few methods in the game that generate enough silver to even attempt to enhance your gear. I'll list a couple of them, in no particular order:
Active Fishing
AFK Processing
Crate Trading after getting Master 2 in Trade lifeskill
Active Grinding

I hear you thinking from here: "Get out there and do them, fuck you and your WoW mentality of standing around and getting free money". Here's the kicker: EVERY. SINGLE. METHOD. OF GAINING SIGNIFICANT SILVER REQUIRES INVESTING REAL MONEY IN THE CASH SHOP.

Every Single One. Want to go fishing? You HAVE to purchase extra inventory slots or you are wasting your time. Want to AFK Process? You HAVE to purchase extra inventory slots AND weight OR the costume that lets you process from your storage, or you're wasting your time. Want to grind? You HAVE to purchase 4 pets and weight increases or you are wasting your time. Want to trade crates? Yup, once again, you need weight increases.

There is not a SINGLE method in the game of getting a decent amount of silver income that does not require pay to win shit from the cash shop. NONE.

And THAT'S the bullshit of the game. In order to progress, you need gear. In order to gear, you need to enhance. In order to enhance, you need silver. In order to get silver, you need to pay up real money. Its INSIDIOUS how the devs have managed to hide the pay to win behind 2 or 3 layers of 'gameplay', so much so that I am almost impressed with how jewish they are.

I have played since launch, about a year and a half ago, completely free to play, and I have just crested 400 gearscore, which is the low side of average. Took me 1 and a half years to do that. People who pay up with the cash shop can do that in 2 weeks. And I'm not pulling those numbers out of my ass either, I have talked to MULTIPLE highly geared (500+) players and asked them how long they think it would take to put a fresh character at that state, and every single one said between 2 or 3 weeks, after cash shopping that character up. That's how big the difference is.

Let me sum up with a simple statement of fact: You will NEVER be equal to a wallet warrior. They will outstrip you in drop rates, in silver gain rates, in enhancement rates (remember, you can buy artisan memories to cut enhancement costs to a third of normal), or in any other area.

Do not play this game unless you are willing to invest $300+ to bring your character up to snuff, and then shell out another $100+ every month on artisan memories, value packs and costumes. This game is for whales only, and it couldn't be clearer.

If I can leave you with one impression of this rambling discourse on jewishness, its this:

Do not play BDO. Do not trust Kakao or Pearl Abyss. Do not support cash shop faggotry. Do not play Eastern MMOs.

They ALL have this, or something similar.