It's my personal opinion on the matter, and one I'm hoping is shared by at least some out there. Long Rant. 

I'm just not sure what the management behind this game is thinking anymore. The corporate greed has permeated in the game's overall direction.

Playing this game these days gives me the distinct feeling I'm being told "You have freedom to choose your path"

while basically being shoved into the only progression path they've left viable to most players.  

It doesn't matter how you want to build your character in 2025 because there is only "one" right way, where everyone eventually ends up if they play long enough.

There's no encouragement for horizontal diversification of builds, or rewards for experimenting. There's "BiS" and everything else is an afterthought. 

Now this isn't a problem for endgame players currently, who the new Edania region caters to almost specifically. Perhaps BDO wanted to reward them, that's fine.

What about the midgame players, or new ones? 

It seems to me, they've made the catch-up for everyone else to reach endgame take an inordinate amount of time. 

I'm not just talking about the horrendous changes to Monster Zones, which has essentially increased the time a player needs to spend in that zone for an effective grind, for the same reward they were making in less that time earlier. Who exactly is this benefitting? 

It's certainly not for the benefit of higher geared players, their grind would've been faster since the'd spend less time/mob at their gear level.

It's also probably not for the benefit of lower geared players, with Marni Realms available at most spots, they could do their grind peacefully without competing with high geared players.

So whose this change really for? Think about that, who benefits by artifically increasing the time players spend on an activity for the same reward they had before.

Seems to me they knew these changes would push a large chunk of players to give up active grinding and switch to AFK-fishing, another activity which takes hours to be viable.

I'm sure the numbers look good on their performance report to their stakeholders, showing how many hours the average player stays logged in (even if they're AFK)

But it's not really because most players want to stay logged in, as much as that they "have" to. 

And anyone not ready to commit to this mentality of leaving BDO running on their devices 24x7 is already at a disadvantage.

At that point, are you even playing a game or just inflating your monthly electricity bill because that's the price of progress? 

Now the gearing system, I've played long enough to know the deal. The horrendous RNG system is part and parcel of the gambli-my bad, 'enhancing' experience.

But BDO has taken a devious turn here too, until a few years back players who didn't want the RNG mechanic to ruin hours of their progress could simply just buy whatever gear they wanted from the marketplace. 

Sure it would probably take them longer, but there was a sense of guaranteed progression and respect for the time you put into acquiring enough silver to get your gear.

Now? After the introduction of Kharazad accessories (BiS), and honestly even the Sovereign weapons and also Edania armors. 

You can't buy any of them. 

You might have enough silver to buy all those items, but the game forces you to enhance now. Why? (Lol, it's a rhetorical question but I'll answer it -_-)
Because if you just bought them from the marketplace, whose going to spend money buying/heating outfits for crons. 

They've even increased the max enhancement amount for certain items like Kharazad accessories, Sovereign weapons from PEN (V) to DEC (X), make no mistake...

Anything beyond HEX (VI) is an extremely difficult level for most F2P players to obtain. 
The number of cron stones required per attempt v/s the horrendous success rate per attempt all but neuters the attempts they can make after that point. 

And when you look at the attempts required for a successful "Pity" system activation beyond HEX (VI), you really get the feeling the game wants you to fail, it's almost hoping for it.

So how to avoid this, where is this "freedom" in this case, the freedom to NOT want to gamble away your time, silver and resources on laughably bad RNG success rates?
Does BDO's game direction believe not wanting to enhance in 2025 mean you're not allowed to progress?

I'm sure they'll keep doing it if allowed. More players enhancing (Failing enhancing to be apt) = More money being spent.
Of course they'll limit more items to be enhancing exclusive and not available for purchase on marketplace.

This is going to almost certainly normalize their already bad habit of not respecting an average players time.

Sure I get it, some people have no issues spending hours of their day grinding like it's a full-time job, and then paying the game money for doing it. 

But what about those F2P mid-game players who don't want to do that? They're basically in time-gated purgatory, locked in the same grind spots for months to see the next bracket of progression. Does their time have less value to the BDO management?

Now you could try a few popular PvP options to distract yourself from this grim reality, but really how far would you go?

Open world PvP isn't really that common anymore.
RBF is a playground for endgame players. You'll be instantly gearchecked even at midgame+ gear.
AoS is still viable thanks to it's equalized gear, and I'm frankly surprised there aren't more modes like this, I'd imagine more lower/midgear players would love it. (Heck. maybe that's why PA doesn't make more like it)

There's a few other things I personally don't like.

Their desire to keep Dekhia Lantern spots in desert regions locked for P2W players who can afford the maids. It's a very nice "Lmao" to any F2P player who stumbles there.

Their removal of character slot expansions from loyalty shop, not like majority of F2P players needed extra energy & failstack saving utilities >_>

But again, perhaps these are 'inconveniences' more than actual deterrents. 

But make no mistake, there are deterrents, quite a few in fact designed intentionally to force players to fall in line with PA's "right way to progress"

Whether it be promoting AFK activities, inflating time it takes to be effective in active grind, forcing players to enhance instead of buying gear, etc.

It's stemmed from a poor game direction, or perhaps just same old corporate greed, who knows? But I think it's getting bad. 

If you're having fun, good for you. To everyone who shares my concern, perhaps you'll have some solutions. 

The core problem is that PA has made progression even harder, when it was too hard already. For example, all the people who were tired of how treasure grind was taking hundreds of hours now find it is taking twice as long, because of the AP caps, with paint doing little to balance things.

They only care about squeezing maximum short term cash out of players.  

My solution?  I quit.  Haven't spent money on pearls since last october.  I won't ever again.  PA is dead to me.

It is already to late.

quitting is the only solution, 

personally i only 24/7 fish (well  I do pit gladios and jordine)

I didn't spend any money on PA since they released the p2w rod ( and ill do it again).

Im fine being a numba on their excel, don't expect to get too much money from me tho.

It's not the first game though which tried to re-invent themself beause they thought they can attract more audience and get bigger and bigger and failed. And if you think they didn't fail, you just have to look at the operating revenue over the last two years. The only way this works, because they changed it to Cron Game Online to milk the P2W-players. 

Oversimplification took this the wrong way.

I don't mind, if people don't want to have a challenge, but as a consequence, you cant access then everything. I could go into details here, but then this would turn out into a several page document and I am not that invested anymore to do that. I am just pointing out, every time they took some  indepth of gamemechanic out of the game it was a mistake. That applies to everything (cancel on classes, niche pve gear, niche market oppertunities, niche enhancement profit, niche gear, niche pvp tricks etc.).

Choices out of the game, people get forced in 1 demensional directions and it's turns out bad. Who only warned about that? I wonder.

In the end, it comes down to the same conclusion. They wanted to make the game bigger and bigger, get more audience, therefore they simplified the game too much, and since they could not attract a lot, they stucked to milk the rest.

Out of curiosity I've re-checked how much more crons I'd need to max out weapons and accessories.
~3.4 mil crons for weapons (on average, got all 3 on PEN), which is over 10 Trillion silver

~0.7 mil crons to finish accessories (on average), which is over 2 Trillion silver

That is 12 Trillion silver, which would translate to few thousand hours of grind. It doesn't even include new Edana armor (I'm almost at TRI slumbering, lol). Sure, I might get lucky and one tap some pieces, but I've also seen enough maxed pity to know better.

This is soul-crushing. If there was actually good group/guild content, entertaining PvE and exciting PvP then maybe. But in current state?
Best I can do is afk fishing. 

I think the last time people did the math on progression and, at the time, came up with 1000s of hours, PA started adjusting silver income and enhancement implementation. That knocked the time requirement down by a factor of ten or so. Then they started in on the gear loop again. Will that sort of adjustment happen again, or does the current state of affairs reflect their regret over the previous adjustment? 

Progression is indeed excessively slow and grindy. After reaching a certain point it also has limited meaning, unless you enjoy uncapped pvp or grinding Edania spots. Progression needs to be made more realistic, and also more relevant throughout the game. The reason for progression taking so long is that PA raises the cost of the next progression step drastically compared to the previous one, while only improving income a modest amount as you move from a lower level to higher level spot. Even if you gain 1 billion extra silver per hour from moving from one spot to another, that has limited importance so long as the next meaningful gear upgrade costs hundreds of billions or 1 trillion on average.