>>723611000
Original release was in korea only. It was moderately successful, updates were very slow as netmarble was making it, and this was when netmarble was in pretty deep shit. They also made Ghouls n Ghosts online around this era (which was an enormous cash sink that never broke 1000 players). So, it was doing okay but netmarble didn't have staff to work on it, it had VERY slow update cadence, normal KR mmos update once every 6 months (with major content, and smaller in between), DBO updated once a year.
DBO had time-restricted content like dragonball grinding. They only dropped from grinding mobs, on a saturday, from noon to like 6 pm. As you might imagine, this pissed off a lot of people, because they had to play it like a job if they needed to unlock their races powerup, or use it for something else like extra zenni or... whatever.
Tenkaichi tournaments were heavily ruled over by swordsmen in solos, and healers in group battles, nobody else could even compete, 100% winrate for swordsmen after month 1, never changed all the way to closure.
The content they DID add essentially equated to "here's a level cap update, and more shit to spend money on in the cash shop". Lots of costumes, lots of cosmetics, lots of paid enhancement items.
The enhancement system was pure AIDS. ~5% success rates at 8-9-10 which gave incredible stat bonuses (which, by the way, were a factor in tournaments). So, you paid money to protect your item from destruction-on-fail, or to boost success rate, or both.
Eventually it got so aggressively monetized that they forgot to update the game, there was an 8 month period with one chuseok (korean harvest festival) event, and nothing else besides the standard dbs and tenkaichi.
They pawned it off on hong kong, where tencent took over, and actually continued developing the game, for a couple years. Mostly QoL and retooling user experience early on. That version is what got nabbed for the basis of all current pservers.
