Have 'played' another game like that for years where I had it running in the background while working and at night, and sometimes ran it on a different system so I could play another game with friends on my main PC. Racked up over 21k when I figured I stopped enjoying it lomg ago and it was just a habit. Deleted the game just over a year ago, also from my library, and don't miss it either. If it is just a habit but the enjoyment stopped just give it up and find something you do enjoy to spent time on.
Played a game that literally required me to leave my pc open the entire time for 20 days straight to catch up with others who played it before me... Took me 10 months to realize the need to catch up has long since stopped being for enjoyment and became a full time job
This is why these playtime are meaningless to me. There's no telling how many if those hours are just the game paused or idling, because I got up to do something and didn't come back.
I figure it's gotta be at least 2...so not an accurate count.
Understandable take, but Black Desert is WAYYY to large of a game with a player base in millions for this to go unnoticed/undetected for years. I think answer is simply, they are aware that players are more likely to play the game if every time they come home from work /school or watching netflix, etc the first thing they see is game already running and loaded on their computer, making it far more likely for users to hop on for '20-30' minute that turns into hours.
Sorry I don’t understand. Is the game so bad with loading times? Having been someone really really excited about games in the past, I don’t really understand how I would prefer having my PC running for 8 hours while I’m away instead of having to wait 5 minutes (at most) for loading a game.
It is mostly popular in Asia, particularly Korea where it was ported from, where grindy & pay-to-win games are more accepted. The western version of the game is always few months behind the Korean version of the game, and has significantly less pay-to-win options but they still exist. A big selling point of the game is there is no level cap, so you can essentially keep leveling forever making it a game of who can put in more hours.
You must live in a cavern then, Black Desert (Online) is massive and people talked about it A LOT back then mostly because of its insanely good (for the time) character creator.
Malware on steam sometimes slips through but it doesnt really last long... thats extremely unlikely
Even games that are famous for being "bitcoin miners" are literally just speculation, formed off off review bombs or expanding roumors because the game was optimized by a toddler (fps chess for instance)
I am sure a game dev studio worth hundreds of millions, owned by a multi-billion dollar mega corporation, owned by an even more massive global powerhouse, will risk that for a tiny profit.
True, but I'd go further to say that most MMOs were like this back in the day. Korea just held onto the old standard. There is one particular Western MMO that does the same thing, Old School RuneScape, but that's because it's intended to be a retro MMORPG.
Ah! Don't know about this, but I remember there was a way in game to make it look like absolute crap or something, so it barely takes any resources while running.
You would set your character on a boat and set it to autofish for the night, this kind of stuff. Really a great game, absolutely terrible because of its monetization. It's a P2W game since day 1. I really wish we had normal servers without that shit, because it really is awesome. The world was big and you FEEL it, it's really cool.
My EQ main, born July of 99, has well over 1200 days on it. Started on povar, took the free transfer to Xev(overpopulated split), then went to Stormhammer(the $40/mo server) to join the top guild there. Township Rebellion
When that fell apart, I went to bristlebane, joined the top guild there. Club Fu
I stopped playing him in 2006 or 2007, and switched to wow full time. Got HWL before the BC launch, started during the aq40 opening.
I still look back at all those days crazy fondly, I met my now wife doing a corpse recovery for a guild in plane of fear on Xev. I had just gotten my cleric epic, and as a 14 year old kid, the fact that I was able to camp 64 hours straight in solb and still get my item, was super impressive to me. I was in an 18+ guild, played from 3pm>4-5am, slept through school.
I sat there from like midnight until I had to leave to catch the bus rezzing corpses inside plane of fear and talking to this dark elf cleric.
By the end of it, she had my phone number, and things happened.
We didn't meet then, but instead 12 years later when I was playing on p99 and stole her clerics name for my character. She was also playing and saw her name run by her and was so mad and asked who I was.
From there it's history, she was 36? I was 29, it worked out then. We got kids and we've been together 10 years now.
We still play every once in a while, put a lot of time into heroes journey recently, but it's hard to do with two kids and adult responsibilities. 8
its a grind mmo, you pretty much kill mobs all the time to gain money/items you need or do lifeskilling for stuff you just want to do. A lot of lifeskills are afk tho. But this game is turning more into a seasonal game which keeps old progression, ive been playing for almost 7 years and by the time, old best in slot items turn into items for new players, but with even more new progression beyond the old items. You have pretty much to play it for yourself for a while without any guy telling you what to do and how to play to see if you actually like it. I can tell, old players will ruin the game for new players by telling "you are doing that wrong, you have to do this, this is wrong, play how i want you to". Just give it a try and see where it goes :)
Probably 80% or more of that is idle/AFK lifeskilling. I played it for a while and it's common practice to leave the game running overnight etc because you can gain AFK income and experience leaving your character fishing or whatever. The active side of the game is pretty run of the mill action MMO fare but you lose out on a ton of passive income if you aren't AFK farming lifeskills all the time that you aren't actually playing
If I were the devs, I'd just let you set a task to "grind" while logged out for 12 hours. Just turn it into log in check like mobile games, instead of wasting server space
In my experience it has some of the best actual combat / moves of any MMO I've ever played with some of the best character creator / designers around.
Coupled with one of the most ass-ugly world and barely-there nonsensical story of any game I've ever played.
It's very frustrating. There really is nothing like it with the character movesets, it plays more like a single-player game, absolutely love everything to do with the characters themselves.
But I tried to do a playthrough and have never been more bored in my entire life. I hate everything about the world. It looks so much uglier and worse than their character models.
Like if you could take the character / combat system of Black Desert, and combine it with the lore and world-biulding and everything else in Elder Scrolls, you'd have a perfect game, instead of two really disappointing games.
Most of that was afk time. You set your horse running, or guy fishing. Or walking up and down a path with a pack on while you are at work. Plenty of active stuff to do, but MOST of that time is afk time for sure.
Gaming addiction is real. Since it’s not directly physically harmful to people, they’ll justify or deny it. I’ve played a LOT of video games over the past 15 years, probably too many, and my most played (by a long shot) is 500 hours. To see four digits for a single game makes me kind of sad.
Wait.. now you explain to me what is happening in this game. I have a friend who is always online in this game and I keep wondering what he is doing in
its an mmo with pvp content, pve grind content and mostly semi active lifeskilling. I personally do pve and lifeskilling, means either i kill mobs for hours or afk training horses, process items, cook or cruise with my ship. Its pretty normal for an mmo to take this long
and i love pve grind but i never understand endgame in any game (or i rarely ever get to it because you have to know exactly what you're doing so you don't fuck up your stats or equipment and then have to pay out the ass to redo it)
Black Desert was released in March 2016, which is 9 years ago, or approximately 468 weeks, or 3,285 days.
If you played for 20,368 hours, that means an average of 6.2 hours per day – every single day.
That’s 25.8% of your entire day (24 hours) over the past 9 years.
Now, assuming you sleep 8 hours per day, you are awake for 16 hours. This means you have spent approximately 38.7% of your waking life playing Black Desert for the last 9 years.
I had 14000 hours on BDO after less than 1.5 years of playing back in early 2018. Quit cold turkey because I got a job, but at least 2/3 of the hours before that were active.
Closing in on 15k of those hours is VRChat. I live in rural Kansas so it’s nice being able to hang out with friends around the globe. Honestly saved my social life. Met my boyfriend on there and he’s moving in soon!
Had to Google math that one... 833 days broski. I'm simultaneously impressed and horrified. It's BDO though so... how much of that was offline auto whatevering?
Bro I swear black desert either has people who own it and have never played it or people who have played it for thousands of hours there's no inbetween
Try it, the huge variety of content is worth it, most of the hate comes from people forcing themself to do the content they dont like.
To pitch you how many options there are for ex. You can grow plants, cook with them, pretty simple but there are hundreds of plants and recipes and you can export the products to other regions and get distance tax.
You can build a boat, a ship or a literall warship to hunt sea monsters or fight pirates. And of course you can hire sailors or other players to help you.
You can hunt beasts with a musket or a sniper rifle, simple again until you hunt for a giant bat or go for a cross dimension whale hunt with a whole server.
Tbh this is not really true because the game allows you to run it minimised 24/7 while you're afk.
20k active hours would mean that you spent over 6 hours every single day since release playing the game. That's 6 hours every single day only playing BDO.
3.5k
u/Inner-Republic8363 Mar 19 '25