Following the announcement of future releases in BDO, Pearl Abyss and Daum Kakao held a live Q&A session with the players that participated in the Oasis Festival. PA and Kakao shared their stories behind the game. There were times where things did not turn out as they expected, and there were also times where they had to decide to move forward. The topics we discussed were as broad as the game itself; the subjects ran all the way from the issue with overpopulated grind spots and persistent bugs to hidden stats and a more rewarding experience with life skill.

Having certain grind spots more popular than others tends to make the game boring. Are you planning to revitalize the spots that are dead at the moment, maybe by giving some chance to loot rare items?

We are also trying to come up with the necessary solutions for that. When the adventurers look for grind spots, they go to the popular ones because they are efficient. We are trying to disseminate the dense population of grind spots, and we will try to come up with solutions to make players visit different grind spots.

There are quite a lot of players grinding solo in Valencia, but the region was originally intended for party grinds. The Gryphons in the Kamasylvia region were designed to be very strong so that changes could be made to the playstyle. We will carry on with such measures in order to bring about changes.

Is PA ever going to reveal hidden stats like accuracy? The line is often too unclear, and the buffs sometimes do not work properly when they should.

It is true that some stats are not fully revealed, and we’ve had some discussions about that matter. We are, however, fixing bugs right away once we spot them. The same goes with the problem of buffs not being applied as they should.

We are also aware of the need to make an overhaul on buffs given by food and potions. Many players utilize buffs differently, and we are seeing some players play with one or two buffs while some others play with a wide variety of buffs working together. We once tried to iron out the buff system and make it more neat, but found that would only nerf the system in general. We didn’t want to solve the problem with a nerf, so we decided to further discuss the issue and see what we can do.

The reward for defeating a mutant troll is too small. Is this how it was meant to be?

Actually, mutant ogres and trolls are more like part of the game’s background. Players can interact, but they are still part of the background and we didn’t think anyone could kill them. We didn’t give them loot because we didn’t think anyone would kill them anyway. Then some adventurers fought together to hunt them down only to find that there is no reward. This made us wonder if we had to make these mutants even harder to kill and make them stay as part of the background, or if we should change these mutants to be part of the playable content. This led to the creation of new field bosses Quint and Muraka.

There are bugs that can directly affect PvP balance, the elephant mine and flame tower bugs for example. Are you planning to fix those?

We will fix the issue with the elephant mine right away in the following week. It is quite challenging to fix such issues because they are one of those undying problems an open world MMORPG faces due to server problems. We will also fix other things that the adventurers feel uncomfortable about.

Guru is the highest rank in life skill. Are you planning on raising the cap? Can we benefit more from increased life skill ranks?

It is true that there is not a whole lot of advantage in leveling up your life skills. We do want to make leveling up life skills a more rewarding experience, and we are thinking of adding more playable content to help with that - and example would be life skills only for artisan players and above. I don’t think we can add any life skill levels higher than guru at the moment, because there are not many players who have actually achieved that level.

Are you ever going to reveal the exact numbers behind the probability of successfully breeding your pets and horses?

As much as we are worried about the repercussions it might bring about, it’s hard for us to just simply decide whether we should reveal it or not. We will, however, make adjustments to the game so that more players may be satisfied with their experience.

T4 pets are acquired by chance, which often makes certain players invest more money than some successful others. Are there plans to make adjustments for this?

It’s true that some players have to spend more money to get the same outcome due to the random chance, and we do agree that the current system is not the best out there. We will not just sit and watch, but improve how the game operates and make things better.

Are there plans to control certain chats that are way too toxic?

We will talk it through and come up with stronger sanctions.

What are you going to do for players from overseas that play BDO KR through VPN?

We do plan to block them off, and we have in fact been taking necessary actions to ban VPN users. It is hard for us to detect VPN right away, and we will improve our game client so that it can detect VPN users on its own.