Nobody wins here as long as upward progression is too reliant on endless Cron Stone treadmill. I don't want to watch another cycle of veterans and swipers with stockpiles of hundreds of outfits completing their new items nearly immediately. The new players get gear diffed even harder, and the veterans go right back to having nothing to do and whining that nobody does pvp anymore and the game is "literally dead" cuz there's less minnows for them to fodderize. Everyone else logged off and went to play a better game bro. Something's gotta give. PA could have handled Sovereign weapons a lot better but they had to make the enhancement stones marketable. Time-gates aren't great either and have their issues, but they're better than what happened. And now the solution to the deboreka grind is to just add another item to dump cron stones into and further increase the gear disparity between veterans and new players? They've completely backed themselves into a corner by making the core of BDO's monetization centered around people that are either:

A) grinding this game like a bandsaw and would realistically never stop farming no matter how bad the systems are.

B) they're just whales swiping for outfits to cron upgrade attempts.

There is no path out of this situation for the game to make a recovery without a drastic change. I believe the overbearing influence cron stones have over the game needs to be scaled back dramatically. This can't continue. The belly ache posts about the miserable upward progression aren't new and they've always been ignored. This is where it leads us. People have to understand that. More NW patches or new pvp options won't save this game if there's nobody left to play it with you cuz they logged off and went to go play a game that doesn't jerk them around as much.

Base

Progression will remain "too easy" for some (the whales), and "out of reach" for others (everyone else), as long as it relies on cron stones. Instead have progress be based on gameplay activities, so that items retain value.