Bartering was really good silver, but of course, they haven't scaled it over time like they have with grinding. PA consistently does stuff to improve the amount of silver per hour you can get grinding while rarely doing anything to improve the amount of silver you make from other existing content. So, even if a lifeskill makes great silver for a while, it never lasts.

Regardless, I think that the core problem is that the PA has made it possible to buy your way out of most of the game's content. Instead of you having to go to the effort of gathering stuff yourself, or making stuff yourself, or questing to get stuff, you can almost always just grind for silver to buy it from the CM. And most of the stuff that you can't buy from the CM comes from rare drops that you get while grinding. So, the entire focus becomes grinding. And the fact that they often make the ways to get stuff without buying it overly complex and/or take quite a while just discourages people from doing any of that content. And to make matters worse, as you pointed out, the fact that you can't even make decent silver doing any of that content reduces the incentive for players to actually produce anything to sell to other players. If anything, the fact that some of this stuff can actually be bought from the CM in spite of the terrible profit shows that not all players are focused on silver per hour, but most players seem to be.

Personally, I love how the fact that carracks can't be bought forces anyone who actually wants a carrack to put in the effort. IMHO, far more of the game should be like that. But too many players just want to grind, grind, and grind some more instead of doing any of the rest of the content in the game. And they're the ones that PA keeps catering to. So, that's largely what shapes the game, and it naturally results in a lot of the content being pretty much ignored by most players.

I share your point of view.

 For me and guess many BDO players, even new one( i started in august) life skills are great, funny and something totally different, and better, than other MMOs.

When grinding gets so much more useful, even a life skilling lover cant understand why should improve gahrering, cook recipes, train horses, trade items, when it means loosing so much money against another activity

I like theoretical earnings with agris, scroll and free spot. But we don't live in perfect world so typical player earn much less.

Good luck with Forest Path Wagon but .... it's ultra pain and outdated content because we have .... mini elephant.

RNG but on the fifth attempt it was successful:

He is really fast, eating a carrot, sprints through the desert and and can be overloaded enormously without speed lose.

No gain should force a player to do what he dislikes when he has other means to get what he wants.

Many players are looking for a ridiculous kind of mandatory 100% efficiency, still a suboptimal but appreciated activity will often give better results in the long term.

What's the point in grinding ad nauseam if you finally get bored and leave the game? 

What's a myth, is people grinding 600 million an hour, it ain't happening maybe with double LS infinite agris but generally 300 an hour is highend and a more reasonable estimate over all

I've used 1500 ls's and my monster count is 4.9 million I know what's realistic, long haul

People like to exaggerate their income and I never understood why

Also to.people who say lifeskilling etc should be on similar income to grinding minster zones no, grinding is hard, expensive to get the gear and that is fundamentally what the game is about and shouldn't be compared to afk chopping Wood afk cooking or a couple of inputs, the fact the they have made grinding great again is brilliant imo

It is the affect of Fakegurus.  Fakegurus that been dominating online space especially on Twitch and Reddit.  They create this high standards, set a video of someone else grind, set it as a standard or fact.  If they try to replicate said value and they can't do it, they just fall back to well "someone did it, or here is the video of someone that did it".   Although the video might be an hour long and could been good streaks, or that video cut off to the point where the player in question just bought stuff with real money and show case their gear to get views.  

It is essentially an ego trip.  They just want to be part of that crowd that is "smart" or "successful".    

I still don't understand why lifeskilling has to compare with grinding when the AMOUNT of real money one spent to grind effectively in this game trumps lifeskilling by a huge margin.    Again lifeskilling has it's own perks, I just don't see the reason why Pearl Abyss has to make them equal to grinding.   Especially as a business.

Exaggerate, because they don´t count what they earn per minute, hour, etc., so basically they don´t know exactly what they get, so they exaggerate. Brings emotions and subjective opinions up, can be positive and also negative, but whatever...

And yeah grinding is monotonoeous, can be exhausting, since you feel pressured to target a estimated amount of silver per hour, but that also depends on the individual person, some others take that game serious, some others not. To adjust the old spots a little with more trash-silver-loot is i think nice, since it will also balance out a little the playerbase, that not everyone jumps around on the high-end spots, so that also weaker spots are interesting for people, and also give a chance for not so strong lifeskillers, to get a additional source of silver earn.

@ArchaicTriad

Nevertheless, i don´t see this topic right on saying there is a inflation. Inflation also means, that people cannot buy anything anymore, or their cash what they have in their hand is nothing worth anymore, even they earn money, for them a piece of bread would be more worth than a thousand dollar bill, for example, thats inflation.

It is not a real world capitalized market, the whole company -Pearl Abyss- can limit and make changes in an instant in the game, which you won´t see in the real world doing by the governments, except they are socialist governments and control the market, but than they don´t have such like similar inflation thing what happens automatically in the capitalism markets - unfortunately for them (socialist countries, at least what could be seen in the past), they have other problems of less or slow development, poverty, etc.

(Kindly correct me anyone, if any of my statements about inflation is wrong or only half-true, since i am definitely not an expert...)

You should rather make your topic as many other topic of yours, to increase the silver a little gained by lifeskilling, to balance it more again, the gains of silver in lifeskilling compared to grinding/farming/hunting mobs whatever you may call it.