heard a bunch of people left retail for this so i tried it

and saw everyone on the leaderboard at lvl 65, marketplace is full of pen gear and no enhancement materials, plus I dc'd more often than regular servers

tried to go back and all my files are corrupted so now i have reinstall

 

To play them both, you simply need two copies of retail bdo, gamez pathed to one of them

 

So do I have to purchase 2 or can I just like copy the folder or partition or anything?

I've never played private servers before, sorry for my ignorance

Also are you familiar with the community, where are they obtaining pen gear from if not from enhancing? Is hacking that abundant?

 

One way is enhancing, the other is buying them off the marketplace.

There are cheaters but they're getting banned quick.

 

You can just copy the Black Desert Online game onto another Hard Drive or Solid State Drive (HD/SSD) or if you only have one drive for your system and games which is really NOT recommendable since it is so much better to have your system on one Drive or Partition and your games on another one that way you can reinstall your system at any time without having to reinstall all your games as well, so just make a folder and call it GamezBD instead and copy your official BDO game files into there then when you install the GamezBD Launcher you just tell it that that is where you have your game files.
A few things you should know before you start being all negative about this project, First and foremost it is completely free of charge and anyone in the whole world can play it, Secondly although it is still a work in progress and some features are not being implemented yet or do not work as intended this is by far the best way to explore the Black Desert Online game as well as just have fun with it without having to deal with the competitive elite-minded-players on the official game that are rich enough to buy themselves victory by spending obscene amounts of money on the game, Third I truly hope that this community will work towards the most important goal in gaming which is to have fun -that is why games were invented in the first place- and to that accomplishment I really hope that the Staff and all the players in general will do their very best to uphold the Rules of conduct that most of all demand respect while playing on this community free of hateful remarks and propaganda since there is already too much of that in the Real-World.
If this is what you seek then you are most welcome to join our growing community and be a part of this wonderful project, however if you are only here to troll or behave badly then you stay on this community will be short.