The Black Desert Online forum got a brief post to let players know that there will be some “exciting Node and Conquest Wars” changes coming to the game starting July 22nd.
Players were warned that the modes were to be taken offline for a week so the backend code could be updated. The new version will change underlying gameplay mechanics, likely in a way to both address balance issues and increase engagement.
There’s no information about how the rules will be changing, only that they will be. However, developers have said that more details about upcoming changes will be revealed over the course of next week.
The original version of the current iteration of Node Wars and Conquests was launched in June 2016.
For the unaware, Node Wars is the baseline World PvP revolving around the resource nodes that dot the landscape in Black Desert Online. Guilds could vie for control over groups of these nodes to then collect taxes against their value and player engagement.
Conquest War, also known as the Seige War, is much bigger than a node war in scale. Node War fights for a single node, but Conquest War fights for the sovereignty of an entire game continent. This effectively gives the controlling guild over a continent entitlement to a massive tax windfall from all the production in that area.
The mechanics themselves are very interesting, in part because of the level of strategy that centers around building fortifications and offensive structures during the battle over a node/area, and in part because World PvP is always fun. Guilds command units and set defensive and offensive structures in a massive tug-of-war.
All that worked fine until earlier this year when the Korean team introduced some maligned changes to the game.
A new 1v1 duel mode was implemented that gave the victor a minor boost to their side, and that should have been fine, but it was just the beginning. The devs also implemented a hard cap on the number of players involved per side, but didn’t put caps on the kinds of items or gear they could bring, when combined with the bonuses for guild castles and a bunch of damage buffs to certain units, the update all but destroyed the preexisting meta-game for Siege.
This update caused chaos within the meta-game for the mode. It was already true that the rewards, meager as they were, often meant that only the biggest and most powerful guilds could partake in Conquest Wars, leaving the majority of other guilds to partake in Node Wars. This update exacerbated that power creep to an absurd degree. What this translates to is a situation where a guild that’s not dominant enough to partake in Conquest ends up dominating in Node Wars and pushing the smaller groups out entirely. In short, the top tier of guilds all gatekeep the high-end content away from most other players.
This is already a massive issue in the Korean version of BDO, and players are concerned that the same situation will occur in the international versions. This seems likely as there haven’t been any clarification about plans for this update.
Some players are arguing that these changes, combined with limits on Node ownership and capitalization, would actually be beneficial in breaking up the power monopoly that exists in the game currently, we’ll just have to wait and see how that turns out.
This update is causing a lot of contention in the community, so it will be interesting, if not dreadful, to where Black Desert Online lands after this change.
Check out the post, and the community’s reaction, by visiting the Black Desert Online forums.
