izigame.me

I'm mad that after quitting this game, it still gets recommended to me in my sales section.
So if you're seeing this game on sale, and are considering getting it, read on.
TL;DR:
Pros:
-Looks great
-Fun for a few months
Cons:
-Predatory/manipulative gameplay
-Boring/repetitive
-Grind heavy
-Heavy focus on a broken and rng reliant system
-Extreme in game inflation that continues to rise at an absurd rate
-Empty promises from publisher
-Unstable servers
-Poorly optimized, don't be poor
Since 2018, I've poured close to 17k hours into BDO, half of which was active. I have a pretty good understanding of the game, probably better now that I haven't played in like a year. Like a previous top comment said, the game is designed in such a way to keep you playing, whether that's through a slew of AFKable activities, or through more conventional daily login or event based rewards. That alone isn't a red flag, many games offer the same incentives. But, the red flag is that the alternative puts you in a hole. In other words, if you're NOT logged in 24/7 (doing AFK activities when you're not actively playing), then you are going to fall far behind in whatever goal you set for yourself. Prices are so inflated in this game due to the ridiculous enhancement chances that if you don't AFK overnight, and login daily for rewards, and grind 3-4 hours a day (pve or lifeskilling), then a goal that would normally take a month, now takes 2 or 3 or more.
That's the first problem, the fact that though these incentives to play are "optional,", they really aren't. Login at any time of day, on any server, and you will see hundreds of AFK players fishing or processing at a warehouse, before they leave for work in the morning, and before they go to sleep at night. Think about that for a second. The game incentivizes you to make it part of your day to day routine. That is NOT okay. Your first thought when you wake up shouldn't be "I need to sell my fish and get back to fishing before I leave, I sure hope the Imperial Delivery isn't sold out." I am not sure if the Oasis Chest event is still going on, but for nearly 2 years, to get the max daily rewards for that event, you'd need to be logged in for 6, yes you read that right, 6 hours. Every day, for nearly 2 years.
The next problem the game has is it's shallow, boring, repetitive content. Sure, the first few months will be great, "there are so many things to do, lifeskilling, grinding, pvp, decorating." But once that honeymoon period is over, you realize just how agonizingly boring the game actually is, but it's too late, cause you've already been hooked. You've already spent several hundred hours, or dollars, and can't quit now. So you continue to sink more money, and more time, into a game that doesn't bring you any joy. As another comment said, grinding revolves around doing the same rotation of mobs/enemies for hours on end, daily, for months just to get a single piece of gear (there are 4 pieces of armor, 3 weapons, and 6 accessories, so to go up 1 level in gear, say full TET to full PEN, you'd be grinding 3 hours a day everyday for close to 1.5 years, assuming you're at old softcap which takes 5-6 months to get to). Lifeskilling hasn't been changed in over 2 years, since Fall 2019, and makes no where near the same amount of income as active grinding. So, if you're more of a casual player who only enjoys cooking, or farming, or hunting, or alchemy, good luck ever reaching your goals before you quit. The housing system in the game is also dead content. Essentially, the only purpose to ever spend time in your house would be to install cooking or alchemy tools to AFK lifeskill. Furniture gives negligible benefits to gameplay, and any decent furniture takes an absurd amount of time to grind for. Good luck buying it in the market, as there are either none for sale, or sell for extremely high amounts that aren't worth the silver. Not to mention that spending time decorating is time away from making any income, which puts you ever further behind. The only new content that has been added to the game since Bartering in 2019 was the new group dungeon, which has mostly mixed or negative reviews. It's extremely difficult to complete, and the payoff is abysmal for the effort needed. The game came out in 2016, and only now, 6 years later, are they addressing seriously broken aspects of their game, namely unbalanced pvp, dead grind spots, and desync issues when sailing. Because their focus has been on fixing this dry game of game breaking issues, the game has gotten even more boring. The discord suggestion channel is flooded with new ideas, nearly all of which are ignored.
The rng in this game is king. Nearly everything in the game revolves around chance in some way. From the obvious loot crates, to the enhancing system, to marketplace preorders, to guild quest availability, etcetc. Now rng isn't inherently a bad thing, but when a huge portion of the company's income comes from enhancement related purchases, you can see where a problem arises. Up until a a couple years ago, you could not see the actual % chance of success on enhancements, just a ambiguous "Easy" or "Hard". Even after they added those % chances though, nothing changed. For reference, the chance of going from TET to PEN on normal gear with 0 fail stacks is less than 1%. You might think that's fair, until you realize that normal PEN gear is not even top of the line anymore. If you want the actual best gear, it has a base success rate of 0.0025%, that is after you spend upwards of 100 hours grinding for the necessary materials needed to even ATTEMPT enhancing. And because the game is EXTREMELY reliant on gear, you are forced into grinding for better gear, if you want to keep up with ever increasing costs.
The publisher tried to remedy this issue by increasing silver/hour at certain grinding spots, but that only had the effect of inflating prices even more. Just like in real life, if you print more money, things get more expensive. For reference, a pet in 2018 costed 14 mil silver to place a preorder (which is rng, you could be the first person to place an order, and lose to the 70th person to place the same order). The same preorder was over 60mil in early 2021.
Content is promised but rarely actually comes to fruition. An example of this would be the naval pvp arena, which was promised in 2019, and keeps getting "delayed" year after year while the company focuses on "more important things". When these promises do get worked on, they are dropped, and then abandoned. Several of the current arenas were ghost towns for years before the company decided to rework them or remove them entirely. For one such arena, savage rift, you could wait hours and not be matched with a single person.
And lastly, like most online games, there is an extreme amount of toxicity in the game. Focused around a culture of griefing, it's prevalent in all aspects of the game, both pve and pvp. If you don't give up your spot to someone who wants it, they will either karma bomb you, which makes you a freely pvpable target, or feed you to mobs. In the case of lifeskilling, they will just gather or hunt on top of you, forcing you to either pvp, or leave the area/server. These actions are almost encouraged by the playerbase. The company itself refuses to take action on said players, or bother working on a new system to combat griefing of that nature.
Forgot to mention this previously, but servers are also unstable. You desync often at sea, and when swapping characters, regardless of connection type
Bonus, the game is poorly optimized. If you don't have moderate/upper end rig, good luck breaking 30-40 frames on lowest settings. If you truly want to enjoy the graphics of the game, you need to not be poor.
Edit:Since Lost Ark was released, PA has added a new event where you would need to be logged in for 10 hours everyday to claim max rewards. 10 hours.Just to keep you away from trying a new game.