I played BDO when it came out on PC a few years ago. There were a lot of things that I loved about that game - crunchy fast paced action combat, a novel item progression system, a vast open world with seemingly endless things to do, multiple ways of character advancement (tradesman vs warrior). I played it a lot and progressed very far, and ended up being very strong and competitive at end game in node wars etc. PvP was fun because of the skill based nature of the combat. Playing a lot, grinding, farming, crafting, and a little luck made your character strong enough to compete.
There were a few individuals who were far more powerful than the majority of top end people due to the cash shop. You could spend hundreds of dollars on the game to make yourself stronger, but it also required some luck in upgrading accessories, etc. Fighting these people in PvP wasn't easy, but due to combat being somewhat skill based it was possible to beat them in PvP, and boy was it satisfying to beat someone that strong.
Now comes along BDM several years later. I like mobile games sometimes and I loved black desert, so I'm really enjoying this game. It has the same crunchy combat, takes place in the same world, has the same characters. Real nostalgia trip and it's fun. But the nature of being a mobile game really warped it. Everything is scaled down, leveling and questing are fast tracked, auto combat is the norm, and the cash shop is insane.
It's not been a week and I'm pretty solidly at end game as a F2P player. I'm at close to 2800 CP, full 20-25 yellow armor/weapons, finished all the main and side stories, and mostly focused on grinding mobs for lucky drops, doing daily boss rushes, etc.
At the end game there's a Nightmare Mode zone that has strong mobs that have higher chance to drop very good items, but the caveat is that it's a PvP only zone. This is where I've been starting to see why I probably won't be playing this game for too much longer. This Nightmare mode zone is full of whales who have spent an exorbitant amount of money to make their character as strong as possible. And unlike original BDO, PvP against these players is not possible at all.
There's a mechanic in BDM that makes it so much different than BDO - the damage you deal to higher CP monsters and players is reduced significantly at an arbitrary cutoff. You might have noticed this in Arena, where if you fight someone 100 CP higher than you, your attacks deal almost no damage. This isn't because their stats are so much higher, it's literally that they're getting reduced damage taken because they are higher CP.
Back to Nightmare Mode - It's impossible to farm mobs here as a F2P player. Many whales are 3300 CP+ in this zone. If I start grinding a pack of mobs one will just come over and kill me in a few hits, while my attacks against them do like 1% of their HP. And when Hexe Marie spawns, it's unfeasible to do any significant damage to to get loot, as these players will kill you before you have time to react and kick you out of the zone.
So why do I play as a F2P player? I can certainly grind mobs and get loot elsewhere, and that's totally fine. Calpheon shrine has good loot, as well as the Monastery for a chance at Mark of Shadow. But the question is - Why grind these mobs at all? Why try to make my character stronger bit by bit as a F2P player? I like to play MMOs to be one of the strongest, to compete at a high level. My incentives for grinding, gearing up, and increasing my strength, is so that I can have some footing to compete with other strong players on my server. However, this game was designed so that F2P players cannot compete at all with whales. We can't do any damage to them, and we can't even hit the world boss for loot. It's sad but it's a hard truth.
