Black Desert Online

I've been eagerly waiting for the sale to grab this because I'm so taken in by this game that I'm already ready to buy the explorers pack, and thankfully it got a pretty hefty discount. But that's just because it matches my style quite a lot. You need to be ready for the grind of your life because there's endless farming in this game. There's a lot of micro management kind of like dungeon keeper if you've ever played it. You set up actual trades with workers you hire, find nodes around the map to create trading routes etc. I won't get in to it because you can find the info easily yourself but to put it lightly you need to put an immense amount of time farming in this game. From mining to cooking, fishing and even horse breeding. Alting is also heavily advised.

As for the PvP, it's also exactly what I love. When you hit level 50, anything in the open world is free for all. You can be ganked and killed anywhere at any time. There's a "karma" stat punishment for it but obviously there's players that don't care about it and just go around hunting people. It's even a way to make money as they can attack other players trading wagons and effectively take their gold, and there's competitive land control where the dominating guild of certain lands can tax players to take that trading route. Like any mmo, the PvP obviously has a heavy influence on gear, but skill plays a huge part in it too, and there's a significant skill cap. There are some classes easier than others but either way, it's very fast-paced combat. It's unfortunate that there's no form of ranked arena like WoW or even battleground, but one can only hope it'll be added.

I'm guessing PvP is your main motive seeing as it's what you asked about, so all I'll say is if you enjoy fast paced combat with difficult to grasp skill ceilings, but also with heavy influence on gear meaning you'll need to work on your trading too, then I'd pick it up. Hell, the base cost of the game is nothing anyway, so you waste nothing in trying it out. You can even get a free 7 day trial, but you can't connect that to a Steam account, so if you wanted to continue progressing on that account, you do it off Steam. Obviously you can start over again on Steam with a new account, the initial levelling phase is honestly incredibly fast. The soft cap is 50 which an experienced player could reach in less than 5 hours, but the hard cap is 56 which takes significantly longer. After that, levels are infinite but scale enormously in xp required.

Others are free to correct me on anything I may be mistaken about, I've been very ill and unable to play games for a long term so I haven't actually played BDO myself yet, but after I discovered it a few weeks ago I've been researching it heavily and following along with livestreams to learn what I can about the game to be prepared for when I'm ready which is actually in a few days all going well. I managed to convince my main close circle of about five or six friends to start playing too which makes it a lot easier, because we all to end up having different interests and learning different aspects of games, so we can share what we've learned and help each other gain knowledge on all the aspects of the game. This is no casual gamers mmo though, that's the main thing to take from this. It's got very in depth mechanics and a lot to learn which would frustrate a lot of players. You need to be prepared to do a significant amount of googling and following youtube guides to learn about some of the end games of BDO.

If you're not focused on heavy grinding all day and by all day i mean all and every day, you don't like RNG heavy games where RNG have it's RNG behind RNG, you don't want to leave your pc turned on at night so you can auto-fish or auto-horse-level while you sleep I cannot recommend it. Unless it sounds like a fun for you then it's a good game. Graphics are pretty, character generator is amazing, story is mediocre but still entertaining, some game mechanics are neat and polished but... everything is meaningless if the sole purpose of game is grinding itself :/
I love griding and to me Warframe is and was nowhere close to definition of grind... but this game is much, much, MUCH more grinding focused than you can imagine.

If you think that the game is not P2W then consider following:
All the fancy stuff costumes and other items from shop gives you faster gathering, faster leveling, higher luck stat not obtainable any other way, faster monster knowledge obtaining (that allows you drop rare items faster), consumables that you cannot obtain other way than through shop that increase chance of upgrading gear (halving cost of upgrade or allowing to upgrade twice depending on how you look at it), faster boats, faster fishing (basically making your income per day much higher) more chances of getting better horse from breeding saving your time on failure, more storage that allows you passively gain more money (by workers crafting), higher weight limit in inventory (almost twice as big) allowing you to take less brakes in farming (which means that no one may try to take your farming spot while you are away and you can carry more money-making junk), etc.

Pretty much game is full of things that allow you gain better gear faster than everyone else if you have money. For example you as a "f2p" player (after you b2f2p) have a chance of enchanting your gear. Let's say one enchant consumes 100,000,000 silver (obtaining Memory Fragments that allow you repair weapon/gear, obtaining black crystals that are quite limited and expensive, and making failstacks that increase your next chance by 0.01% each or buying same weapon to restore it durability faster) and your chance of succeed is at most 1.5% (with max failstacks - which are the number of failed enchants. Most commonly you would want to get 30 of them before you try to upgrade your main gear and 60-64 is max. After 30 failstacks each next increases your chance only slightly and it's quite risky as you can waste them on upgrading your failstack fodder. Whole sequence look like this - Buy 15 cheap gloves from market/blacksmith, try to enchant them 9 times, go back to blacksmith, repair glove with other gloves, try to enchant 6-7 times, repair again, then buy some more expensive and harder to enchant weapon and try to enchant it 15 times repairing in meanwhile. If by a chance you'll enchant that fodder gear, you would have to start again from beginning with your money AND black crystals wasted). Without failstacks you would have 0.01% of succeeding.
Now... if you want to farm that amount of money you have to spend for example 3 days.

If you compare it to guy that bought things from store you'll find out that he had to spend 2 days on farming money, used artisans memory from item shop to decrease cost of repairing and with higher luck he dropped another copy of said gear from boss to repair it even faster. Meanwhile he dropped 5 ogre rings (rare accessory) while spending the same time there as you while you have got only one spoiled ogre ring ring (thing that you get ogre rings from - you have 0.20% chance that you'll get one ogre ring from it). Because he have so much more money now he decided that he will not spend weeks on upgrading his weapon one level up and instead he we'll buy it from market from other player for 11,000,000,000. Now, so to say... at the beginning of the day you had the same performance in pvp but now, when he got his weapon 1 level higher than you he basically 1 or 2 shots you. Sounds fun.

I had to drop the game few months ago even if I bought preorder because of power creep, never ending farming that heavily favors people who buys stuff, streak of bad luck in RNG heavy game that put me months behind other players even if i have played it daily for 3-5 hours per day. I felt like useless shit in guild wars when just a few weeks ago I was in the top in terms of gear. 1 level is enough to create big enough difference that you'll loose 9 out of 10 fights with same or even less skilled fighter.

If you think that you'll ignore pvp and focus on world i have a bad news for you...
Any player can attack you when you farm. They'll force you out of your place easily, especially when in group. Now... you don't loose anything anymore by dying (Although they may try to make you loose your gear/gems and exp by almost killing you and letting the mobs finish you. You'll loose 2-3 hours of heavy farming this way) and they'll loose their karma... but it means nothing for them. They'll regain their karma in 2 hours of farming and you'll have to farm in a place where you're getting maybe 15-25% of exp and loot that you would get in a first place. If you remember my example with enchanting gear it took (as example of course) 3 days... now you would have to farm there for another 10 days to get you money needed for enchanting...

(Sorry for somewhat inconsistent topic of my answer, i have merged my 3 other posts from few days ago into one as they are still on thread)

Just kidding

Holy shit though. Didn't expect this much of a detailed reply. Thank you. I tried the 7 day trial. I'm already like fuck I leveled up 3 characters that I can't keep as far as grinding goes. So is gear constantly getting upgraded weekly if you can fall behind so quickly? Or do they throw up overpowered pay2win gear on the store weekly?

What does losing karma mean exactly? Less exp gained per hour? I'm not gonna lie. I missed being an asshole on my rogue in WoW. Making everyone in my guild roll one then going into major cities and ganking people. Im confused how its like on free for all no factions. Or is it like groups of people in parties and they cant team damage kinda deal?

I think this is the best combat system I've played in any mmo. General consensus though I'm pretty much fucked joining this game late as far as being competitive.

I can't comment on Black Desert but I've been addicted to Elder Scrolls Online

I was about to post something but Rzehooj pretty much summed it up. A few good things about it is that it has nice graphics, animations, you can enjoy the scenery and stuff and it is superbly optimized, but other than that the quests are shit, story is kinda shit (you wont prolly even understand the story without checking out some videos) and the combat is fun. Too much RNG and grinding.

I don't mind it... Besides getting killed by lag. Have 1 or 2 friends that play it...