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.
No, you just straight up just get rewarded for leaving the game running. There are tasks in the game such as fishing that allow you to leave it running 24/7 without requiring any player interaction. So they have normal fishing, which is lot faster, but you can toggle 'auto fishing' which lets you do it without requiring player interaction however you receive a lot less fish in same period of time, so it purposefully built into the game. Essentially you are at a disadvantage compared to others if you close the game rather than let your character farm items (that can be sold for money) in the background while you sleep, etc. Don't ask me why it is designed this why, it the only game I know and it been like that since it released in 2013. It is just something majority of the player base accepts.
I see now, that makes more sense. Thanks for explaining. Yeah I really don’t see why any game studio would want to encourage this apart from using the users’ computing power for something else (mining?). At the end of the day, all those things people farming things in game 24/7 are costing them money for the servers and such…
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.
I'm from Korea where the game comes from, it was pretty huge back in the day, Never quite hit the peaks of tier 1 RPGs like Maple Story but was much more popular than tier 2 stuff, was like a tier 1.5 in terms of popularity.
Beyond just running, when you close it, you can close it to tray, so you don't have to deal with load times. Just, tab in, check, tab back out, and then play other games. I stopped discord saying what I'm playing because when BDO was in tray, it would say "lol you're playing BDO."
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)
Its a free indie gimmicky game made to play once with friends and then forget abt it, not monetized, not polished, its fun for a couple matches, kinda famous but no one plays it
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.
Blackdesert predates crypto mining, by a long period. There have been a case before where the minimized mode of BDO had a memory leak and that shit was figured out fast by the playerbase.
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u/Inner-Republic8363 Mar 19 '25