Hello Adventurers!

If you haven’t heard, the Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship reached its Qualifier stage on Friday, April 23rd!

As the matches continue on to the Round of 8 on Saturday, May 1st, we hope you’ll tune in to the various livestreams by your fellow Black Desert Online Adventurers to catch the thrilling battles with us. 

Once all the matches of the Arena of Arsha Best-In-Class Championship come to an end, we plan to host a Class Adventurer Round Table where Adventurers representing each class will be invited to share their feedback with us as we previously announced in the [Arena of Arsha Best-In-Class Championship] notice.

What is ART?

ART (Adventurer Round Table) is a place where we can discuss content updates and balance changes with Adventurers, and explain our thoughts and direction.

The Class ART is our latest endeavor to involve Adventurers who have played their class for a long-time and possess greater in-depth knowledge by getting their feedback, such as what can be improved, in order to implement changes to the official service and help develop the game together.

As some of you may know, something similar was held last year with Korean Adventurers. We were able to garner many positive results thanks to the amazing feedback that we received from everyone who participated. And so, we want to do the same with our North American and European Adventurers in 2021.

Since Black Desert Online’s classes can almost be seen as another “self” for our Adventurers, we believe it is inevitable that Adventurers will hold a great deal of interest for not only their class’s appearance, unique features, and abilities/performance, but even the minute details such as outfits and more. Of course, we’ve also received a truly immense amount of feedback regarding topics such as balance through our official channels from our North American and European Adventurers.

So far, we’ve always tried to take this feedback into account when updating the game. This time, however, we want to make this more special by having more personalized conversations with our Adventurers through the ART and see what we can implement to the game within its scope. We hope you can picture this as something that’s not just about buffing or nerfing a particular class, but a chance to communicate and adjust classes together.

We understand some Adventurers may have been taken aback by the “100 days of playtime” required to participate in the Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship. Our intention with this requirement was to give Adventurers who played one character for a long time a better chance to participate since only the Adventurers who won were eligible to participate in ART. (In fact, the Arena of Arsha tournament in Korea had similar requirements to select representatives.)

Additionally, the upcoming ART will invite two representatives for each class and invitations will be determined by the results of the Arena of Arsha tournaments. Since we can’t only invite Adventurers with the best gear, we’ll invite one Adventurer for each class from the current Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship, which does not set limits on gear, and invite a second Adventurer that won their class’s brackets from the next Trial Character-only Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship that puts all participants with the same conditions.

We believe Black Desert Online’s first-ever NA & EU ART is not only an event that is important for the Black Desert team, but also incredibly important for our Adventurers who love Black Desert Online. That’s why we want to invite Adventurers who were selected based on their proven skills rather than some other criteria set by us.

■ How are ART participants selected?

- Winner of Each Class for the [Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship (Main Character)] (22 Total)

- Winner of Each Class for the [Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship (Trial Character)] (22 Total)

* More details about the [Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship (Trial Character)] will be announced at a later date.

■ How will ART be conducted?

The ART, which will be held after the [Arena of Arsha Best-in-Class Championship (Trial Character)] is completely finished, will be conducted as follows:

1. A survey about your class and its balance between other classes will be conducted by email.

2. After organizing the survey results, the Black Desert team will contact representative Adventurers by voice chat to get more detailed feedback.

3. The survey and collected feedback will be sent to the Black Desert dev team.

4. The collected suggestions and feedback will be implemented in an ART build of the game for participants to experience the changes and improvements directly.

5. Surveys will be conducted for about 2 weeks regarding your experiences on the ART build

6. Feedback about what needs to be changed and added from the 2-week long survey will be collected and sent to the Black Desert dev team.

7. Additional improvements and development of the latest version will be made using the 2-week survey.

* Note: The actual ART may differ depending on the circumstances.

With the upcoming ART, we, the Black Desert team, want to use this chance to closely listen to the feedback given to us by our representative Adventurers and take steps towards fixing problems and creating a better Black Desert Online together. We’ll also continue to try our best to communicate and share our thoughts with all our Adventurers -- as well as, do our best to listen to each and every one of your voices.

Lastly, we look forward to the day when the situation regarding COVID-19 has stabilized, so we can meet our Adventurers in-person rather than by voice chat. For now, we hope you’ll stay tuned for NA & EU’s very first Black Desert Online ART!