GrimDarkDarrel
Member
Post on the BDO subreddit
Pearl Abyss (The Korean developer) announced in September that they would be taking over the publishing of the game in Russia from Gamenet. Just a few days ago (I don't have a link) PA announced that they were unable to secure the rights to any of the data from the Russian realm. This includes characters, purchase history, gear, stash items, even the localization, everything has been wiped as of October 11th, 2018.
Gamenet, the Russian publisher (what Kakao is to US/EU), published a response (english translation someone on reddit posted) to the PA announcement, essentially saying that they provided a path to data migration and that PA ignored it and that they were surprised by the sudden announcement. I have my doubts but more on that later.
Interesting factoid: Pearl Abyss recently bought CCP Games and Eve Online for $425 million.
Here is what it looked like when the servers shut down
What makes this worse for some players is that the Russian version of BDO was far more riddled with pay2win microtransactions than North America. Until recently anyways. There were quite a few full PEN (meaning, absolutely perfect gear) whales in that realm. To give that context, I've been following BDO for a while and playing in the NA realm for over a year and I don't believe there was a single full PEN player in the entire world who did it without paying. The way gear upgrading in that game works, you roll a slot machine to upgrade, with the chances of success getting smaller for every level and above a certain level, failures will cause your gear to lose levels. Even with the p2w stuff added in NA a couple months ago, I'm still not aware of any full PEN players. It's not just a matter of being willing to pay, you also have to be rich. This is in a PVP game.
Which brings me back to my comment about my doubts about Gamenet. No one in the english speaking playerbase has the facts, but I don't believe either company at all in this situation. Did PA make a colossal blunder when they signed their original contract with Gamenet? Did Gamenet find a loophole and try to extort way too much from PA? Does PA simply not care about keeping Russian player's data when they obviously intend to restart the realm as a fully p2w game under their own umbrella? No one paying attention expects anything else from them at this point.
At the very least we know from a leaked message that PA as long as two months ago did not intend to transfer over Russian data or buy the localization. I've seen a few posts suggesting the reason is because they are unable to comply with Russian data protection laws requiring certain standards be followed in handling the user data. I could believe that's a factor but I don't buy at all the idea that a company with that much money isn't able to resolve that situation for the sake of their users
If it sounds like I have an axe to grind against Pearl Abyss and Kakao, I kind of do. Their communication with the North American player base has always been terrible for as long as I've played. Cheaters run rampant, they broke their promises about keeping p2w out of the NA version, and well known problems are generally just left to fester giving an overall impression of apathy while they continue to ramp up the microtransactions where competitive PVP is the endgame. For my part, all I do now is fish. When new content drops I'll walk around in it for a while to look at the pretty scenery, but I'm long past the point of dropping money in the shop, and will actively avoid anything either of these companies is involved with in the future.
Pearl Abyss (The Korean developer) announced in September that they would be taking over the publishing of the game in Russia from Gamenet. Just a few days ago (I don't have a link) PA announced that they were unable to secure the rights to any of the data from the Russian realm. This includes characters, purchase history, gear, stash items, even the localization, everything has been wiped as of October 11th, 2018.
Gamenet, the Russian publisher (what Kakao is to US/EU), published a response (english translation someone on reddit posted) to the PA announcement, essentially saying that they provided a path to data migration and that PA ignored it and that they were surprised by the sudden announcement. I have my doubts but more on that later.
Interesting factoid: Pearl Abyss recently bought CCP Games and Eve Online for $425 million.
Here is what it looked like when the servers shut down
What makes this worse for some players is that the Russian version of BDO was far more riddled with pay2win microtransactions than North America. Until recently anyways. There were quite a few full PEN (meaning, absolutely perfect gear) whales in that realm. To give that context, I've been following BDO for a while and playing in the NA realm for over a year and I don't believe there was a single full PEN player in the entire world who did it without paying. The way gear upgrading in that game works, you roll a slot machine to upgrade, with the chances of success getting smaller for every level and above a certain level, failures will cause your gear to lose levels. Even with the p2w stuff added in NA a couple months ago, I'm still not aware of any full PEN players. It's not just a matter of being willing to pay, you also have to be rich. This is in a PVP game.
Which brings me back to my comment about my doubts about Gamenet. No one in the english speaking playerbase has the facts, but I don't believe either company at all in this situation. Did PA make a colossal blunder when they signed their original contract with Gamenet? Did Gamenet find a loophole and try to extort way too much from PA? Does PA simply not care about keeping Russian player's data when they obviously intend to restart the realm as a fully p2w game under their own umbrella? No one paying attention expects anything else from them at this point.
At the very least we know from a leaked message that PA as long as two months ago did not intend to transfer over Russian data or buy the localization. I've seen a few posts suggesting the reason is because they are unable to comply with Russian data protection laws requiring certain standards be followed in handling the user data. I could believe that's a factor but I don't buy at all the idea that a company with that much money isn't able to resolve that situation for the sake of their users
If it sounds like I have an axe to grind against Pearl Abyss and Kakao, I kind of do. Their communication with the North American player base has always been terrible for as long as I've played. Cheaters run rampant, they broke their promises about keeping p2w out of the NA version, and well known problems are generally just left to fester giving an overall impression of apathy while they continue to ramp up the microtransactions where competitive PVP is the endgame. For my part, all I do now is fish. When new content drops I'll walk around in it for a while to look at the pretty scenery, but I'm long past the point of dropping money in the shop, and will actively avoid anything either of these companies is involved with in the future.
Last edited: