Sieges Besieged by Persistent Lag and Connection Issues

For the better part of two months, it seems that the Black Desert Online siege wars community has been suffering quite a number of issues with server stability and performance during the game’s large-scale PVP events. An MMO YouTuber sent along the below story of his own account to recap the events and to shed light on a “Protest Event” that occurred this past weekend on the BDO servers. The BDO Siege Community presented Kakao with a list of proposed wants/hopes for the game, to which Kakao responded. It’s worth a read for all fans of BDO, so dive in. And thanks, anonymous tipster!

In the words of the tipster:

For the best part of a year now the Black Desert Online community have been very disappointed and vocal about the state of the servers especially in the game's main end game content known as node wars and castle sieges, many guilds have quit the game and stopped participating including one of the top NA guilds known as FML (disband link).

Kakao games have said for months that they're monitoring the servers and we should get more news "Soon" but we're still no closer to a solution after 1 year, players of the Black Desert community took it upon themselves to look into the server provider that Kakao games uses, it turns out they use a provider called "Leaseweb" one of the lowest rated providers out there, despite thousands of players expressing issues with leaseweb and the servers Kakao Games fail to acknowledge this and instead shift the blame to ISP's despite people from different regions, different ISP's all suffering from the same issue.

On February 18th 2018 the community came together to send a huge Survey to Pearl Abyss to give them actual data as to how they feel about certain aspects of the game, the Survey had over 7300 responses but as of 1 April 2018 the community has yet to receive any response or acknowledgement of this feedback from the developers despite it being delivered to both Kakao and PA directly - Link to the survey.

On the 24th February 2018 the Strongest guild on the EU server known as "Sovereign" was kicked out of their castle that they'd owned for 13 weeks by a 5 guild alliance IN ONLY 18 MINUTES, this was only possible due to the server not being able to handle 5 attacking guilds, the entire defending guild faced disconnects, abilities not registering, invisible enemies, potions not working, desync and extreme rubber banding to the point where the game was unplayable - video of the siege.

Despite numerous videos being sent to Kakao as well as multiple top upvoted reddit posts from EU players that participated no response or acknowledgement was given to the player-base, this siege caused a few top players from Sovereign to quit the game

March 10th 2018 - Another massive alliance on EU came to Valencia to kick the castle holders out, once again the same issues as two weeks prior, abilities not working, unplayable game until the castle holder went down and people left the area.

24th March 2018 - An 11 guild alliance came to Valencia Castle on NA server to take out the guild who'd been occupying it for the past 34 weeks, 10k viewers on twitch tuned in to watch this huge event unfold however was met with nothing but disappointment and log in screens as the server had crashed, eventually after only 40 minutes the strongest NA guild lost their castle without having the chance to defend, for the first time ever Kakao games acknowledged there was performance issues and gave every guild that attended the siege compensation.

After the NA guilds got acknowledgement from Kakao and compensation the EU guilds felt like they weren't being listened to and that it was unfair that they hadn't received any compensation despite going through the same (if not worse) thing multiple times in the past, they felt that the only reason Kakao acted this time was due to the bad PR of this unfolding in front of 10k twitch viewers.

31st March 2018 - 27 Guilds place a fort down in the Valencia region in what was the biggest siege in the history of Black Desert across all regions, over 1400 people attended on a single battlefield, fort the first time ever an announcement was made that players not participating in the siege would be kicked from the channel, what actually happened however was only a few non participants were kicked and they were able to rejoin right away, when the siege started 95% of players involved got disconnected from the game and for the next 90 minutes of siege the gameplay consisted of logging in, talking a few metres and getting disconnected instantly, some people reportedly disconnected over 50 times and others in the range of 25 times.

The lag was so bad the server couldn't load player names and family names, instead showing only the name of a players class instead, people were teleporting around, rubber banding, potions didn't work for 90 minutes, abilities didn't register, enemies were invisible, the game simply didn't work.

This was all done in a mass protest against Kakao games and their attitude towards transparency, the servers and only acknowledging that NA servers have issues but not EU.

Twitch Vods Of The Full Event:

TheLazyPeon: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/245089967

Lacari: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/245101825

Neeko2lo: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/244993416 - From 5:55

Things the BDO community want, responses by Kakao in Italics.

- New Server Host, not Leaseweb

This is being looked into, but at present I cannot confirm a switch.

- Sieges and Node wars to have their own separate channels 

Nodes and sieges are a very important aspects of Black Desert’s game design and in-game economy, we do not see them being moved onto separate channels.

- Non-participants to be kicked from node war/siege channels without being able to rejoin.

This is being looked into.

- Better optimization and removal of unnecessary data packets to reduce server load for node wars and sieges

This is partially fixed, see link above. Expect further improvements down the line.

- A limit to the amount of guilds that can place a fort on a region.

This might be a good idea and we have forwarded it to our developers for evaluation.

- A serious effort from the developers to improve the siege rule set as well as solutions to make this content run better

Is continuously being worked on and we have the best intentions to improve this part of the game.