So it turned out to be as bad as I heard from other sources. I am not surprised.

These comparison are designed to be as objective and honest as possible.

Combat: BDO

BDO remains the uncontested model for high speed 3rd person combo based combat.  Diablo 4's is action based and relatively quick.  However, it lacks in the complexity and amount of viable skills per class.  Especially available at any given time.

Now for the reality check and the real problem.  Diablo 4 is completely supeior in every other aspect.

Equipment System: D4

Diablo 4 has a great equipment system with a variety of unique abilities to customize your gameplay.  Lets be honest though, nearly any system would automatically beat the atrocious cash shop model system of BDO.

Leveling Progression: D4

The progression in D4 moves at a very health and proper pace.  It's designed to be played through and eventually it might get thrashed by seasons, but for now it's completely superior.  Again, anything would beat BDO's botched and broken system today.  Flying through all the content like it doesn't matter as people immediately advance through quests or try to power level blast through everything.  A cash shop dominated system in which the primary focus is to blast your through your new class for financial reasons.

Player Interaction: D4

What an amazing experience it is to have players join in random events working together rewarding everyone.  It's a little bit different than the toxic environement of BDO DFS, spot taken.  And with an massive amount of players in the game I have yet to run into a single issue with any player or witness any issues.

Quests: D4

Not only is the story simply amazing, but even side quests are simply designed the right way.  In BDO most true quest lines just involve going from point A to B (AFK pathing) and then spamming R.  From time to time you kill a few mobs.  In D4 it's done organically.  You grind your way across the world, gaining experience items, and getting side tracked by tons of events along the way.  Quick dungeons, mob feasts, just done to perfection.  They don't consume a lot of time and happen very organically.

Grind Spots: D4

You can grind just about anywhere and just explore for weeks.  With so many over land areas, dungeons, objectives, events.  BDO of course is find a circle and that's that.  Spend an unlimited amount of time farming that circle.

Customization: D4

This is one of D4's strongest points.  With a variety of items, skill choices, and real customization that matters.  Whether you want mobility, dmg, tanking, or very unique perks to using skills the entire game is filled with it.  BDO just doesn't have much to offer.  All the attempts have fallen flat.  BDO has a small amount for accuracy or defense builds, but overall it's not even close. 

Content: D4

100% hands down D4 wins this.  BDO just quickly turns into spamming R, repeating dailies, and just never evolved into something much better.  It feels like the poors man version of everything in BDO.  The best thing they did for grinding was Elvia and minor changes to Elites, but it just doesn't cut it.  D4's design is just superior.  The events happen organically, you acquire materials through adventuring, not spamming hours of butchering.  D4 has a variety of small events, quick area clear, more involved dungeon objectives.

AFK Progression: D4

You don't need to ficticiously stay logged into D4 to inflate their numbers.  They have plenty of players and not trying to farm their own customer base in this manner.  I don't gain anything while logged out, and it's perfect!  The way games should be played.  You play them, you enjoy them, you progress at your own pace and enjoy it.

These comparison are designed to be as objective and honest as possible.

Combat: BDO

BDO remains the uncontested model for high speed 3rd person combo based combat.  Diablo 4's is action based and relatively quick.  However, it lacks in the complexity and amount of viable skills per class.  Especially available at any given time.

Now for the reality check and the real problem.  Diablo 4 is completely supeior in every other aspect.

Equipment System: D4

Diablo 4 has a great equipment system with a variety of unique abilities to customize your gameplay.  Lets be honest though, nearly any system would automatically beat the atrocious cash shop model system of BDO.

Leveling Progression: D4

The progression in D4 moves at a very health and proper pace.  It's designed to be played through and eventually it might get thrashed by seasons, but for now it's completely superior.  Again, anything would beat BDO's botched and broken system today.  Flying through all the content like it doesn't matter as people immediately advance through quests or try to power level blast through everything.  A cash shop dominated system in which the primary focus is to blast your through your new class for financial reasons.

Player Interaction: D4

What an amazing experience it is to have players join in random events working together rewarding everyone.  It's a little bit different than the toxic environement of BDO DFS, spot taken.  And with an massive amount of players in the game I have yet to run into a single issue with any player or witness any issues.

Quests: D4

Not only is the story simply amazing, but even side quests are simply designed the right way.  In BDO most true quest lines just involve going from point A to B (AFK pathing) and then spamming R.  From time to time you kill a few mobs.  In D4 it's done organically.  You grind your way across the world, gaining experience items, and getting side tracked by tons of events along the way.  Quick dungeons, mob feasts, just done to perfection.  They don't consume a lot of time and happen very organically.

Grind Spots: D4

You can grind just about anywhere and just explore for weeks.  With so many over land areas, dungeons, objectives, events.  BDO of course is find a circle and that's that.  Spend an unlimited amount of time farming that circle.

Customization: D4

This is one of D4's strongest points.  With a variety of items, skill choices, and real customization that matters.  Whether you want mobility, dmg, tanking, or very unique perks to using skills the entire game is filled with it.  BDO just doesn't have much to offer.  All the attempts have fallen flat.  BDO has a small amount for accuracy or defense builds, but overall it's not even close. 

Content: D4

100% hands down D4 wins this.  BDO just quickly turns into spamming R, repeating dailies, and just never evolved into something much better.  It feels like the poors man version of everything in BDO.  The best thing they did for grinding was Elvia and minor changes to Elites, but it just doesn't cut it.  D4's design is just superior.  The events happen organically, you acquire materials through adventuring, not spamming hours of butchering.  D4 has a variety of small events, quick area clear, more involved dungeon objectives.

AFK Progression: D4

You don't need to ficticiously stay logged into D4 to inflate their numbers.  They have plenty of players and not trying to farm their own customer base in this manner.  I don't gain anything while logged out, and it's perfect!  The way games should be played.  You play them, you enjoy them, you progress at your own pace and enjoy it.

D4 has 2.0 user score on metacritis, majority of ppl everywhere just hate on it now. Zero end game, horible itemization, there is no item hunt or anything which would have any drive, zero qol, you cant even play alts due to lack of storage. There is only one content and thats nightmare dungeons nothing else. I had 500 hours played pre season and I had fun, but they keep killing the game with bad patches, after one big bad patch the game went from 5.0 to 2.0 on metacritics, they lost me as well. Season 1 is just so bad, the theme is meh and there is nothing to do, its game for casuals and console players with zero depth. The story was pretty good tho compared to BDO childish main campaigns when you only autopath on hrose and pressing R with zero challenges on the way. 

BDO I play on and off from 2014, I have most fun doing new alts. 

The game extremely needs more grinding spots for middle 250 AP DP players, they adding content for 300+ AP which most of the new players would hardly ever reach. I am just doing season char I am so tired of sulfur mines and there is not much else to farm at 240 ap. The money per hour should be raised on many low to mid AP grind spots. 

I jumped on BDO as in sandbox game, I dont like the current meta of mandatory huge quest lines. the devs are trying to please the FF14 players with all those awful cutscenes everywhere but they should just stick what is important more grind spots and more new monsters to kill, the world is so huge so why is there so low amount of grindspots? I am not a bot kind of person doing circle on one spot for 30 hours. 

The game just needs solo dungeons with good rewards, just something else to break the long boring grinding