The biggest problem on GameZBD

This is basically everything that trumps the notion of just nerfing Horse Training, well said and I agree 110%.
Like others have mentioned, there are a lot worse things that require fixing than the economy via nerfing Horse Training, i.e. the desync, broken classes: Warrior, Witch, and others, etc.
I believe a couple of people are giving too much credit on those who are Horse Training vs the pve grind. I've been here since beta too..from my understanding of what happened in 2018, this was the same reason why Horse Exp was nerfed and naturally, SD rate and release time were also adjusted.

Somehow we're here again?

What happened recently that pushed people to the edge? From the last couple of changes:
1. NW changed.
2. New Meta for Lifeskilling via equipment was implemented.

And yet somehow we point it out on Horse Training, without even concrete data regarding rates/sheets to sight out this variance and impact to the server.
I personally stopped depending on Horse Training from the initial nerf back 2018[approximately], and depended on NW or SD.
The few hours of gaining a Lv30 horse from 2018, to almost a whole day to gain a Lv30 this 2019 is no longer practical.
I'd do it when I have to deal with real life and just afk that shit...only to come back with pocket change. So I don't know how someone can assume that Horse Training is the culprit for the dry economy. If anything the new meta for Lifeskilling - specifically gathering is bringing in more and at a faster rate than Horse Training, provides the users with their own resources [because of the fact that this equipment makes the users into a literal Item Scroll with an added 100% item drop rate] to simply enhance and sell gear...ergo, less boss gear on the market, less enhancement stones on the market, less opportunity for the economy to thrive. Because the majority of people are now capable to sustain themselves and progress.

What is the solution?
Retract the NW change:
Majority of people are dependent on guild payouts, you can only imagine how dead a private server is with the new meta considering the small population we have.

Increase the Drop Rate:
Give the people more reason to PVE Grind so they stop staring at people lifeskilling. Heck even the people lifeskilling would decide to join PVE at that point, boss gear drops are rare as well - when the opportunity of drop increases and there ARE excess to sell then everyone can start helping the economy grow.

There basically has to be a balance in how people can earn so nobody needs to be bitter and paranoid. You can't just nerf something without fully covering everything and how it would impact the whole community, and end up with a dead server...Because that's a possibility, we already came from a wipe from beta. Now you can possibly just kill the server by addressing issues recklessly.

That's my take on this.

 

The big problem of this Private server is not balanced, and here the situation :
1 - Grinding : its should be best thing can offer to players to make Silver an good gear, and of course 75% of player depending on this section ... before Belongings of an Adventurer and Dark Rift was implemented, the drop rate of accessories was normal (for example : i was able get 6-8 Witch's Earring per/hour before, but nerfed and the worse thing is you will not get drop if you fighting with horse from now on, and in Manshaum forest i was able to get 2-3 per/hour, but now after 3 hours i just get 1 even if you grind in Arsha server) i know that you trynig to slow down the game, The accessories is not like weapon/Armor, 1 fail = blow up, the most player don't have or can't make Acc to PEN and still have capotia Set (personaly i fail 3 time to get ACC PEN and lot of TET & TRI).
2 - LifeSkill : after the new manos gear was implemented the player can profit 40% better than before, and , now you can make decent silver from every life skill (Gathring, Hunting, Training ... etc) even if the Imperial horse will get Nerf player can make good silver without doubt this section is buffed to Maximum profit than everything in the game.
after i describe 2 important section lets describe the rates :
Drop : "The Drop rates are good" the drop has Decreased over time , that for sure ... its ok for me if drop rates down but consider the drop rates of Accesories due to thier mechanism.
EXP : exp are dramatically high ... combat exp can make lv 60 less then 2 hour, life skill you can get artisan less than 2 hour ... etc.
Silver : the easy thing you can get in this game ... lot of money and you can't make gear, to make pre-order with 12b just to get PEN Witch's Earring (2b normal price) this is insane, is hard to get PEN Witch's Earring with 12b? of course not, if all player have lot of money they will never sell thier goods and always they keep rarest items for themself, due the high pre-order price player cant get the items they want, now the newcomer will have hard time and of course they leave the game and the new marketplace is not implemented ... this problem will never get solved.
conclusion : im not here to suggest increase the drop rates, my suggestion is making the game balanced, increase all or decrease all, Don't make lifeskill profitable than grinding or lot of silver and no one selling, even the retail is better at this point ... please consider the balance the game.

 

About your second point.

I might be misunderstanding you, but i don't think i am, you seem to hold the opinion that horse training is completely fine, because it only earns you about 40% of what active grinding what do. I got some questions to you about this, why would anyone ever brother getting money by grinding then? If you actively grind for 10 hours you could have replaced that with a day of afk activity, given this if you leave you computer on overnight and while you're at work/school, then you'll come home to 16 hours worth of AFK silver = 6,4 hours worth of grinding money (1.28b silver)
1) This silver IMO is way to much for just 1 not even full day of afk work
2) Your afk activity never contributes towards another players game experience, given you never had to trade your earned items to another player for his/her silver.
3) Given point number 1 & 2 the market will dry up, allot of people have allot of silver, yet few are actively contributing items to the marketplace, any item that would therefore be in demand will be pre-ordered in insane sums, because people are hungry for it.

If the marketplace prices were able to change more reasonable to respond to supply and demand, then this wouldn't be a problem, but right now, the marketplace eats whatever difference there's between the MAX price and preorder.

 

People do afk life skills for a reason.
Do you really think nerfing AGAIN horse training will contribute in fixing the issue? A big no, since the last nerf horse a lot of players quit.
People do afk in game to play other games, work, school, do other activities that is lively rather than spending 24/7 grinding lmao!
Seriously, let us be open minded. The server problem right now is not the horse training AFK, leave them alone, leave us alone.
The server just needs more activities, perhaps gather some GM's who would do that job for free, who would do events not just every weekends but even during weekdays.
The MP will never dry up, how old have you been here again? See the retail MP system nowadays? Just post something in MP and it won't take a day to get a sale.
If you know what is happening or have been playing in retail then you would understand HOW EZ is money here in gamezbd. You just need to research, test and spend enough time.

 

@Kolka. I thought you would of learned your lesson from the last time you nerfed horse training and drop rates. You knocked the population of the server on half. I’d use caution before you go doing that again

 

1. Market has never been as dry as it is now.
2. It isnt? Lets compare 8 hours of intensive grinding that recuire you to be online and focus all your attention on game with 18 hours of having game hidden at tray, where you can sleep, play other games or whatever you want. It dont require any outfits to be efficient at horse training.
3. You dont loose any money, you can earn almost 1,5 bil just for doing nothing. Thats around 1500 caphras/1000hards or 500 sharps.
4. Most of veteran players dont give an f about pearls, with prem you get 4800 pearls daily. For example i have more than 100k pearls and dunno how to spend em.
5. When doing horses you dont care about accessories, you can just preorder PEN crescent for 25 bil just after 15 days of horse training.
6. Population of the server is good and growing. Welp its kinda worse than EU after launch but still higher than 2 yrs ago. Where max population of ONLY NA server was below 1k. And population wont drop after changing horse breeding. I cant call it "nerf". Before update horses were worth more than half of actual value ( 100kk for breeded courseer ) now its almost 400k. Price of horses has grown almost 3-4 times, where you still need only 18 hours to make it lvl 30.

Conclusion, horse price increase and at the same time market start dying. Gathering and grinding are empty as never been before. But you still say that horse prizes changes has nothing to do with it? WOW nice logic there.

 

Exactly, and people still don't get it. They just share what they think should be good for the server where in fact it is not. lol

 

You can always gift me.
Horses requires a lot of pearls, so Kolka should be careful about nerfing it and how he will nerf, like cutting the price will not be a smart decision imo.
Grinding should be buffed for sure, Kolka said in other topic that the server never had a nerf in grinding, but I literally feel it. Its hard to even drop a single accessory per/h now, not to mention other kinds of drops like scrolls and crystals are dropping less too.

 

Much has been said in this thread, and much of it is about consequences and not the underlying reason. The reason for imbalance as I see it is lack of population to be enough for everyone's needs. Hence the complaints of PvP'ers that they have to bash guts out of the same long known opponents or run after peaceful PvE folks, and complaints of AFKers, lifeskillers and crafters that the market is dry. The retail has the opposite problem - a lot of people, the market is flooded and you have to wait sometimes for weeks to sell this or that. And this is the biggest of private servers - currently there are about 5-6 of them, but crimson has an outdated client and you have to quest to get pearls there (and the market is empty as well), and others are hardly known at all, its not "black", but "barren" desert there in every respect. A minimal site, no forum, no players (a single channel on each of them), nothing. I myself stumbled upon Gamez by chance, never thinking a game like BD could have a private server (and many comparable MMOs do not and will never have one). Despite all obvious problems, here you get for free things you will never get on retail, and save the most valuable thing - the precious time of your real life. Yeah, it's simpler to grind silver and buy everything from AH - gear, components and such. But still, here you can get everything you want, even if it would take gathering and processing and alchemy you could avoid on retail, and it would be months faster than on retail. The game as such offers so much possibilities, why stick only to PvP or money or gear and disregard everthing else? There will always be lazy people wanting to get as much as possible doing as little as possible and complaining about things they get for free and always wanting MOAR. As a person who occasionally played on Russian retail for three years as a freebie with little hope to get anywhere over lvl 60-61 before I get old, no good pets, no butlers, no really high lifeskilling levels (it's a game after all, not a full-time job), nothing from the pearl shop stuff... I'm only a week on Gamez, but I will stick to it as long as it will be alive, even if I have to play on it alone as an offline MMO. Notwithstanding that I have to start from scratch here - knowledge, energy, contribution points, quest lines, it will be infinitely quicker here to restore what I had on retail. If you don't like it at all here and are serious about it - go try other BDO pservers for a change. Or open your own one as you see fit, an ideal server "with blackjack and hookers" (c). I want to thank the people who created GameZ - it just needs more promotion, everything else is adjustable and solvable. For the first time I'm having REAL fun playing BDO in every of its aspects. Good luck to everyone else, do not take anything I said personal, no insult was meant. just a tint of sarcasm. But really, you get to know things by comparison

 

what you dont seem to understand is, that even if they buff grinding, why would you bother with grinding?
the biggest portion of people i know that play or played BDO disliked grinding alot. there are barely a handfull of exemptions.

SO even if you buff grinding, why would i bother? yes it might be 1.5, even 2 or X times better than horses, but it requires me to A) be active and B) focus on playing.
both things i can ignore by being afk with horses. in the end i got the silver anyway, so whats the point of grinding if its only a bit faster in a "capped" marathon?
if you could exponentially increase gear this might matter, but here it doesnt.

so the horse problem needs to be addressed with a nerf, definitely.
it might not need a big one, but it needs one.

 

"let us be open minded" "The server problem right now is not the horse training AFK, leave them alone, leave us alone."
These two statements don't go well hand in hand, you want me to change my opinion but leave your opinion out of discussion, that's not really what open-minded means.
If you think horse training is healthy for the server long term you're well in your right to mean that, however i can also mean that I think it ruins the server, and makes it nothing but a AFK-simulator.

If you think horse training is not a MAJOR income influence on the server atm, and therefore leaves people with too much liquid silver but nothing to offer the marketplace, then i would like too hear your argument. I have serious doubt that anyone who grinds and do horse training grinds for the sake of silver, there's just to much of it alone in horse training.
("If you know what is happening or have been playing in retail then you would understand HOW EZ is money here in gamezbd. You just need to research, test and spend enough time")
I'm 640 gs, how long is enough?

 

Top gear players asking nerf, now everything makes sense.

 

1. Okay, let's do some math to break this down. Your average t7 courser goes for about 140-200m, while your average t8 courser goes for 400-500m. Sometimes less, sometimes more. It depends on your luck with how many skills your horse learns. My average t8 takes about 6-10 skill resets to become a courser. The last time I converted a full set of horses into coursers, it took 22 skill resets to make all of them coursers. That was 2 t7s and 2 t8s. That's 5k pearls, or 25 hours of pearls. For me to train that set, it takes roughly 16 hours. That's with premium, a value pack, a +2 silver embroidered training outfit, a Venia Riding Outfit, Master 2 Training, Merchant Wagon and a +10 wheel, a duo manos riding crop, a III blue life mastery necklace, and two duo blue life mastery rings. I don't have the rest of the jewelry since I just blew them up going for tri. I made 480m on one t8, 500m on the other, and 160m per t7. Roughly 1.3 bil. The day before this, I made 4 t7s and made roughly 250-300m since I didn't want to waste my coupons on them and I had to breed them. If I get really lucky, I can make 2 bil in 16 hours from this, but that's with full t8s, with enough skills on each of them, and without breeding them. If I'm really unlucky and get all t7s, don't convert them in coursers, I'm looking at 320 mil at most. That means I make between 20-125 million per hour.

Two days ago, I went and grinded at some grind spots that don't even require 200 ap. I won't specify which since there's a likelihood they could see the nerf bat, or if not, then people might try to swarm where I grind. In either case, nobody profits. Anyway, in 3 hours, I made 842 mil after selling all drops + trash loot. That's roughly 280 million per hour. That's 2.24x better than the best horse training can offer. Horse training, at its best for me, is 44% of the income that grinding is. With the worst horse pulls, grinding is 14x the value of training, or training, at its worst for me, is about 7.1% the income of basic grinding.
Lemme remind you that scenario takes 2/3 of my day. If I were to grind for 16 hours at the same spot, I would make 4.48 billion in the same time I might make either 300 mil or 2 bil.

2. Actually, that's not completely true. Horse training actually generates silver for the economy. Despite what some people might think, Trading my items to other players for their silver DOES NOT generate any silver for the economy. When you sell something to somebody else, silver just exchanges hands from them to you.

3. The market is dry because there aren't enough people producing the items that people need. This has nothing to do with how much silver is in the hands of the players right now. It simply has to do with the fact that it takes too long because of multiple reasons, crafting items doesn't generate enough money to be worth the hassle, and that there aren't enough people to provide for each other to begin with.

3a. Crafting items takes way too long because the materials required to craft said items aren't adjusted our server, lifeskilling doesn't provide that much more material to work with compared to retail, and crafting the item doesn't return more items than retail to begin with. If Alchemy produced 10x more alchemy stones than it currently does, our market could be oversaturated instead of empty. If we had 10x more beer per session of cooking and 10x more materials coming from our worker empires, we could have an abundance of beer on the market. But even if that were true, their value doesn't come close to being worth doing besides for your own worker empire. But because things like beer are simple, you will see them come and go on the market. Things like meals, elixirs, and draughts are a different story since they're much more complex to make, requiring multiple steps and many materials that we don't have an abundance of.
3b. The current lifeskilling meta leans towards methods that generate none of the materials necessary for proper production of things like draughts or elixirs, so they're in decline because people would rather do different methods that lead to higher gains in sharps/hards or caphras. Caphras especially.

Taking money out of horsetraining isn't going to change any of this. All the guys with most of the cash are still going to have their silver after horsetraining gets nerfed. The only people that will suffer are people just recently starting or are just coming back.

1. Accessory drops have never been as rare as they are now. Coincidence? Likely not. We're also currently in a population decline, and they split the servers into two.
2a. Intensive? There are 4 intensive grind spots in the game that I can think of, one of which I think is now very easy after ap scaling changed. Gyfin aside, we have aakman, hysteria, and now Sycraia which are intensive. Sycraia is claimed to be a 1bil/hr spot. I think Hysteria and Aakman are around 400-500m? I haven't grinded there long enough to know. My grinding model requires no intensive grinding and is very mindless, yet I make 280 mil per hour.
2b. It takes two hours of grinding to overtake my worst horse training day, and roughly 7 hours to overtake my best horse training day. My best can't be maintained and requires sacrificing every single horse I trained without breeding them, as well as all the pearls I would generate in that day. Contrary to what you think, it does require outfits to be efficient at training. Even with a +2 outfit, costume, and all the rest, my horse training method is inefficient compared to grinding. With where I grinded, you don't need more than 200 ap to make the same money. I was doing it on a Ninja, which is a class bad at grinding.
3a. I lose money irl by leaving my computer on over night. It costs money to generate the electricity to run your computer. Iirc, it's about 30-50 bucks more per month to leave your pc on every day.
3b. On a good night, yeah, you can earn roughly 1.6 bil from breeding a full set of courser t8s. But how often does that happen? I usually make 1 or 2 t8s per batch if I make a t8 out of breeds. If not, it's just all t7s, and that's around 300 mil if I don't reset their skills or 600-700 mil if I do. Your call if you want to waste pearls on t7s.
4. Is that why I always see people asking for pearl gifts to list rare boss gear pieces or enhanced accessories? 4800 pearls per day isn't even enough to reset the skills on a batch of four horses on average. If you have 100k pearls, it means you aren't horse training or stopped long enough to build up a surplus. Otherwise, you'd be out of pearls. If either one is the case, it doesn't affect you and why should you have any say in this matter since it doesn't? In fact, if you have that much surplus, it probably means you aren't doing anything at all. You aren't buying value packs for item collection scrolls for grinding, you aren't buying artisan memories to enhance gear to sell or build failstacks, you aren't buying costumes to make valk's cries for enhancing. So again, what does any change have to do with you or why should you have a say in this matter?
5. See above. Your math is bad. If everybody did this, nobody would have pen crescents since nobody would be making them. Yet people still make them, so I guess it's not the end all, be all you ay it is?
6. Is it? The numbers have tanked since last fall. In fact, the numbers seem to be just about the same as they were around last summer, give or take a couple hundred people. The population seems to drop, then grow in the same numbers. Either we're gaining new players as fast as we gain them, or those numbers aren't to be trusted to begin with.

My honest opinion of you is that either, at best, you're ignorant about the game and trying to come up with changes to help the game, even if you're not correct, or at worst, you're woefully uneducated, haven't tested anything, and are just talking out of your rear for an agenda that only suits you. Neither is particularly good, but at least the first has naivete at its core instead of malicious intent. Nothing you've said so far proves to me (or other people here) that you should have a say in the matter.

I think you misunderstand something. Most people come here from retail for one of two reasons: 1. LESS grind. Not necessarily no grind. The amount of effort necessary to reach gear cap here is so much less than retail that it's not even funny. The average time to fully gear up here, which is full pen (and some caphras levels. Probably around 10-15), is around 6 months to a year. I know retail players who have been playing for 2+ years and still are having trouble reaching softcap. 2. Free pearls, which makes the game much cheaper (or even free) compared to the retail version.
They don't need to buff grinding, necessarily. They need to buff material production for worker empires and crafting lifeskills. They need to introduce an actual silver sink to the game, ala either selling players consumables for absurd amounts of silver or selling shakatu luxury boxes for more silver than retail did.

As for why I would bother with grinding: If nobody grinded, we wouldn't have accessories or other items being listed at all. If you don't grind, then you're inefficient and you'll have a much, much harder time getting to peak gear. If you don't grind, you certainly aren't gonna get many caphras levels.

Horse training is the least likely cause of the current state of the server. You forget how exploitable this game was in the past, how much things have been nerfed compared to before. I've spoken with beta players. You used to be able to 1 tap any piece of gear to pen with 25 fail stacks. You used to get a crescent ring out of every 10 soiled rings. You used to get anywhere from 2-5 crescent rings per hour of grinding last year. There are stories of FML members having exploited their way to full caphras just months ago, and they apparently got to keep it. The reason the server is currently in its sorry state is because of poor developer intervention and slow development. They haven't removed the 100s of billions of silver players have exploited their way to leading up to the nerfs we've gotten, or bought off of other players for real life money. When the nerf hits, those players will still be unaffected, and the market will still be dry because things aren't dropping like they used to, because it's not worth it to craft items for anybody but yourself if you even care about them to begin with. This nerf will only affect new players, who need silver to buy their pens and don't already have it, or players selling silver. This won't affect the guys who are high gear score like you, because you can still go grind for your caphras and get stronger, or use the silver you have raked up to control the market but the new guys won't even be able to do anything to touch you in pvp nor will they be able to pre-order any gear to start with because your numbers are simply much bigger.

And if you need more proof of poor developer intervention, look no further than the player Punchiepunchie. He's been around since the betas, is one of the richest and most geared players of the server, and is a guy who makes nice real life money in buying and selling gamezbd accounts. He hasn't been permanently banned by the devs despite making money off the game, and is likely to continue his stay here despite it being common knowledge and completely obvious who he is. There are still speedhackers running around every day.

If what Kolka said in pms was true, we're about to see horse training nearly die. He was talking about applying a 4x exp nerf. If horse training is still 5x exp, that means after the nerf, horse training will literally be 25% faster/better than retail.

 

You know the easiest solution? Just remove the Kolka NPC and that way we can have more items on the market instead of selling those in the NPC. And why would go for a nerf in lifeskill aspect if ppl can find a way to make money in another lifeskill field? Doesn't make sense right? Thus, just buff the drop rate so ppl can have the motivation to grind for more. And how can you call this game a "Sandbox game" if you will gonna remove or nerf the main aspect of it. BDO is a grinding game and it's not a lifeskill game.

 

^ I could'nt agree more. Stated it all, hopefully they'll consider our comments...

^ Good point. Remove or put cooldown on using Kolka NPC, like limited number to turn in PENs per week, let's say 1-2 pen a week. Because it really encourage people to just push all their weapon/armor to PEN to turn in to Kolka NPC and that's another reason why we don't have enough items on the Marketplace... well in fact before Kolka NPC arrived there's tons of Pri to Tet weapon/armors because people won't bother to push them to PEN since they won't really sell, unless they'll exchange it for Premium..

 

Xenon didn't even need to split hairs because logic, but then again some people are slow in the uptake - therefore I digress. lol

 

As said before and I 100% agree, market is dry because there is no adjustment to lifeskills, so making an elixir takes you hours, or delivering imperials, to get lets say 100m and in the same time you could be gathering or grinding and making much more. At least for elixirs, foods and materials rates should be way higher. And for grinding, lets take hystria for example, I asked my friends in retail their average time to drop a black fragment, they said between 4-6 hrs without LS, so lets say 300minutes, that would give us a black fragment every 30m in average, WITHOUT LS, for my tests recently i`ve been drop 1 per/h or 1h30m, that is no where 10x, not to mention crystals and scrolls, in retail they drop 10 without LS, that would be 100 here, i`ve been dropping an average 40-50. So right now unless Im crazy or doing the math really wrong, server drop rates are somewhat between 4x. This is why you dont have any accessories in market. Even if they literally kill horses there wont be any elixirs, materials or accessories on market anyway.

 

Lifeskilling is just another form of grinding in this game, friend. As for Kolka, I believe he was added so people could sell the pen boss gear they didn't need anymore, even if nobody else would buy it. It also lets you sacrifice a couple memory fragments to skip doing the scroll bosses. But I'm sure someone here will manage to complain about that after horse training gets nerfed.

Hm, you might be right. I wouldn't say the market was full of them, but it was more common to see boss gear enhanced to pri-tet and be put on the market.

 

It pretty sums up the discussion. I think they are bored and all of that so they wanted some nerfs instead of buffing other things and features.
People who have not been playing in a year would never understand how hard gamezbd way back and how easy it is nowadays.
Before EU server was even implemented, the community had like around 300-500 combined NA/EU but now even a lot of people are leaving and getting back in the game, I never see it go below 1k or 1.5k
And they just wanted to point out its the horse wagon training fault lmao! It's been there since the start, it has been nerfed as well and they wanted it to be nerfed again. FUNNY! NOT

 

i know absolutely no one from retail; ofc the sample size with my experience alone is too low.

that comes here for "less grind", they all come here to have gear nearly instantly and do pvp.
so appart from grinding skillpoints, i dont see them grind, which i completely understand; BDOs PvE is horrendous.
thats in my eyes what MADE this server attractive to begin with, easy pvp.
because as nice as the combat could be, as bad are pearl abyss' balancing strats, let alone progression strats.
this server just amplified the pvp experience for many. so ofc, if you can make ridiculous amounts of money with being 24/7 FULL AFK, everyone does it.
why bother investing time, if you can just not invest it (technically you invest time as well ik)
thats all i am, or rather; have been saying.

yes grinding needs to be buffed and other stuff as well obviously.
but horses definitely destroy the flow of the game lol. unless your only intention in bdo is to afk lifeskill; but then you might as well just do it on retail anyway.

EDIT: what i dont get is why you only argue about money, when clearly; horsetraining is destroying the overall game experience.

yes i agree that it should be a viable income source as everything else, but not THIS kind of income.
there is literally no incentive to play the game at all with how horses are designed RN.
the money is completely useless anyway, cause the market is so dry.
its more about what it takes from the game's experience in general. cause you avoid 99% of the game's intended mechanics by being afk 24/7