such an overused meme, why would anyone make such a garbage video?

Hey there, @Ikaruga

As an old player of ogrefest and retail BDO I have to admit I don’t have as much time today I used to have and I do not wish to invest as much of it in the game either redoing everything. When OF went down the team, which surely has been changing a lot, specified there were plans releasing servers that require less grind to get ready for PvP.
Is that still in the roadmap or do you think it’ll split community too much, NA only, EU too?

You’re actually in luck- Crimson’s current servers have 5x the rates of retail, which means that the mid-rate servers have always existed. When it comes to their roadmap, it’s only the high-rate server that has been discussed as part of their plans for other servers.

I don’t mind grinding levels but frustrating experience such as enchants (don’t know cron rates now) is definitely something I don’t want to go through again.

I am still not confident with the fact the base enchant system is a frustrating experience, designed to make players buy more artisans in retail. I don’t say it should be done like other private servers but a way to not rely on RNG only was already discussed at that time, that’s also when they introduced some guaranted drop system on gear boxes if you were unlucky to get one after a while.
Anyway more details on what devs are planning would still be great as they also threw ideas around of having multiple servers with different settings.

Crimson has made a couple of changes to make the game less frustrating in this regard. Like you mentioned, they’ve added bad luck protection to guarantee drops after a certain point. They’ve also:

1. Increased the chances of success on enhancements
2. Added ways for you to earn pearls by playing the game (which allows you to buy artisans)
3. Added hards and sharps to the loot table for world bosses

You can read about all of these changes on their newsletters.
If you’re the type of player that prefers to buy gear off of the marketplace to progress, you’ll also be happy to find out that that retail has recently revamped the old marketplace into the central market. The most notable improvement of the central market is how they’ve completely replaced the bidding system with a preorder system. Basically, you don’t have to give yourself a headache camping the marketplace anymore- all you need to do is make a deposit and wait. The CM isn’t live for Crimson right now, but will be once they update the game.

@Ricoro said

It’s already too easy to get geared, a high rate server would kill both servers.

That’s not how it works.

Since the idea of ‘splitting the playerbase’ is thrown around a couple times in this thread, I’m going to take the chance to talk about it for a bit. The players who prefer high-rate will play on high-rate, and the players who prefer mid-rate will stick with mid-rate. The issues that people have with splitting the playerbase have always been blown out of proportion. Realistically, you’re never going to be able to tell a difference in the population of a server except in extreme cases. You could be the only person doing scrolls in Kamasylvia and you still wouldn’t be any wiser.

The only time when splitting a playerbase has meaningful impact on the game is when there are queueing mechanisms involved. For example, if you introduced a new game mode to League of Legends, you would find that the queue times for other game modes would increase, because having less players makes it harder for matchmaking to match teams. Black Desert has nothing like that, except for RBF. But you certainly wouldn’t argue that other servers shouldn’t exist because of ‘think of the pvp players!!’ would you?

From the standpoint of the people running the game, you would love to have a high-rate server because it draws in another pool of players who are interested in a specific playstyle. Overall, this means that more players will be playing your game and more people will be donating to you.