Black Desert Russia Pay-To-Play Server Nowhere To Be Found, IP Block Established

The saga of Black Desert Online's Russian release just took a massive turn for the worse today, as a post that showed up on the MMORPG subreddit explains that the Russian publishers of the game, GameNet, have been fairly tight-lipped about anything related to the previously promised pay-to-play server. According to this comment on a linked post, there are many threads—which the poster and this thread claim are quickly being removed by the moderation staff—with angry players who had invested in the 2500 Ruble Founder's Pack—about $40 according to Google's currency converter—only to find that it is now several days after the official launch of the free-to-play server and the server they had paid good money to access has not launched yet. Supposedly, the last statement they gave yesterday was essentially "We have no info about P2P server start, maybe it will start in a month or so."

Perhaps even more surprising, however, is the fact that they have established an IP block, despite previously saying that they would not. Only players in "Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Latvia Lithuania, Estonia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia" will be granted access to the Russian server from now on. This comes a mere day after news that the Korean server would be IP blocking, as well, and appears to be a move by Daum to keep players on their region's servers as they inch closer to North American and European release. With the alpha just around the corner, it would not be surprising, but perhaps a bit premature.