Greetings Adventurers



This is the Black Desert Online team.





As many of you may be aware,

we’ve had an occurrence recently regarding unpacked files that had been disclosed publicly which may have whiffled up some of our loyalest supporters.





We have confirmed that the unpacked information contained undisclosed data but also discarded data that had not, have not, and will not make it into our game.

We want to take this time to sincerely apologize for muddling up confusion among our beloved players by failing to deliver accurate information.





Black Desert Online will improve on the unclarity regarding Accuracy, Evasion, Damage Reduction and keep away from ambiguous terms like ‘dramatically or slightly increased’ in the item descriptions to provide the specific details.





Please read on to the Developer’s Letter written by Jae-hee Kim, the Executive Producer of Black Desert Online below.

Greetings Adventurers,

This is Jae-hee Kim, the Executive Producer in charge of development of Black Desert Online.

I want to start off by apologizing for all the confusion the sudden unveiling of the hidden information has brought to our adventurers.

From now on, we will endeavor to communicate to our players as transparently as possible for all planned content, whilst providing

undisclosed and omitted information as soon as possible to avoid confusion.





Below you will find our action points that we think will go a long way to solve these issues.









1. Clarity in Accuracy, Damage Reduction and Evasion on the items used by players.





Players have often requested this and we are well underway on fully implementing the added information.

Since development has not been completed we cannot give an exact release date but we can assure you that Accuracy, Evasion and Damage Reduction numbers will be clearly communicated in item descriptions soon.

We will follow-up with constant updates to fill in the missing parts.

▲ Here is an image of new UI for item description and equipment. The new UI will be implemented soon.









2. Explanation on the Hidden Options.





In its early development stages, the concept for Kutum items was always under serious discussion as it would serve as a viable challenger to the Nouver items.

Without decreasing the value of Nouver items, Kutum items had to be attractive enough.

We had originally highlighted the DP of the Kutum items making it a Defense-focused counterpart to Nouver items but felt it would not be enough and concluded on implementing hidden bonus AP against monsters.

Hidden options in items first made it in to retain the basic performance while at the same time granting special characteristics to an item.

Only through playing the game would adventurers be able to find out what items were the right fit for them.

Kzarka Main Weapons will ring a bell to most players. Liverto and Kzarka weapons both have ‘Extra Damage to All Species’ hidden stats on them.

However, we felt that the gap was growing between those who were aware of such hidden statistics versus those who weren’t aware of them.

For that reason, we’ve decided to start development on revealing hidden statistics, after Accuracy, Evasion, and Damage Reduction are disclosed.

We apologize once again for not being more transparent in item descriptions.

We seek to display all the details in the item descriptions hereafter to aid you in your selection of the perfect gear most suitable for your character.





3. Removal of ambiguity in expressions and on item descriptions.





In the past, we’ve had situations with degraded performance in elixirs due to changes in calculations.

Since this process, we’ve settled on coining the term ‘slightly’ for any increase or decrease in item performance.

We have heard your feedback and will make changes accordingly to improve your gaming experience.

Uncertainty in item descriptions will be edited starting next update. Please do allow us some time for these to all be revised.









4. Increase of Item Drop Rate based on Node Levels.





Node Level system was first introduced as a way for adventurers to invest Energy and give a small update for the nodes they play the most in.

The higher the node level, the higher the drop rate. But we realized that the drop rate increase was rather minimal.

The original intention was to provide an aid for adventurers who had been putting a lot of work into their favorite nodes and give them a bonus for their hard work.

But most of our adventurers have been dissatisfied with the increase we have placed and we are currently considering improving the drop rates given by invested nodes.

We cannot give a big increase in the item drop rate, but we’ll definitely boost item drop rate for node levels so that your investments prove out to be more worthwhile.





5. Accurate announcement (via Patch Notes) of changes in Statistics and (drop) Rates.





If there will be any changes made to stats for classes, items, item drop rate, and/or enhancement rate, whether it be an increase or a decrease, we’ll make sure to make a public announcement on any changes.

This is a promise that we will keep with every one of you who enjoys Black Desert Online.

As we are adventurers before we are developers, we experience the same things as our players on a daily basis.

We fail our Enhancements maybe too many times and other days we might hit a streak for Enhancements that we’ve been praying for.

We feel what you feel, and we scrutinize the numbers again and again to find any errors to see if there were any bugs in calculations, rate differentials, and in updates.

We will do our best to making sure you won’t see random changes in stats. and probabilities.









6. Numerical Value Display for Damage and Character Statistics.





Black Desert Online adopted 3rd person view from the beginning of its production, and since our action-focused game would be controlled with

the mouse and the keyboard, we ultimately decided not to show damage numbers to stay true to the essence of the game.

If the damage numbers would be shown, we were afraid the focus of the game would be on the statistics shown on the screen instead of the core aspect of combat and action.

We believe numbers do not mean everything in the game and chose this method to minimize the by-effects that could arise from excessive ‘min-maxing’.

We do hope our players consider higher stats to not be the driving goal of playing Black Desert Online.

We truly hope each and every player will create and grow their own, unique character to find joy in battles along with everything else, and for that reason we do not plan on revealing damage numbers in Black Desert Online.

In addition, we can state surely that there are no random implementations of variable statistics depending on class with the last update equalizing the amount of increases in your character class’s HP, MP(EP), and Weight for leveling up.

Parts of the data in the unpacked files that were disclosed, for example, Stamina, Agility, Intelligence, and Wisdom, are not applicable and have long been discarded, even before the CBT.

PvP and PvE balance in classes are being constantly tuned through Awakening, JIN (to-be-called Absolute), Rabam (not available yet in NA/EU), and fine-tuning the (class) balance ís and will always be one of our utmost priorities.

Black Desert Online seeks easy-access for all players by developing and allowing all adventurers to have a blast with their characters, even if their characters may not deal the biggest damage or have the highest AP.

This is the underlying philosophy of Black Desert Online and we will continue to come up with ways for all adventurers to have fun in the game.

Lastly...

I hope that you will accept my apology for the confusion this occurrence has brought.

Since launch, Black Desert Online has had its ups and downs but we couldn’t have made it this far without the earnest support and suggestions of our players.

BDO will gear towards an improved future and faithfully tune in all of our adventurer’s opinions and comments.

Please feel free to share your thoughts so that we can remedy our shortcomings and remind ourselves that Black Desert Online can only be improved with everyone actively involved.

Sincerely,

Jae-hee Kim,

Executive Producer of Black Desert Online, Pearl Abyss.