I have been thinking a lot recently about 'end game' activities. Most people I talk with express the issue that grinding 'end game' items is TOO MUCH TIME.

- I both agree and disagree.

Agreements:
I do agree that grinding 'end game' gear isn't worth it.
- My primary reason for this is that it just takes too much REAL time. 

- My secondary reason for agreeing with this is that there's nothing the new gear leads to in terms of content. This basically comes down to an issue of variety. The earlier you are into BDO the more there is to experience, but also the issue that you're rushed through it. Oasis Gear should have been temporary. Instead it just skips you through the entire beginning of the game. Levels 1 to 56 are practically voided. So, while there's a vast amount of content leading up to that point you're never going to really experience it to any great extent the way those of us joining pre-release up to now did. This leads to a kind of awkward bottleneck where Tshira Ruins or Manes is basically opening content while everything prior to that is "questing zones". 

Disagreements:
- My primary reason for agreeing with players saying 'end game' gear isn't worth it is also the same reason I find myself disagreeing. Real life time.
There's a major issue in gaming everyone encounters eventually. If you ask the devs to "speed up access to..." whatever you are asking them to kill your game. A good game doesn't change much from how it originally released. It just improves on that initial concept by giving more of it.

Conclusions:
The issue, the joins these two things, is therefore "real time". 

If a player is doing 200 million a day to get to a PEN Blackstar or PEN Accessory by grinding it will take them nearly 70 weeks per item. You give out so many rewards lately it is a bit less than that, most likely, but 70 weeks is a good rough guess. Meanwhile, many other players will make the effort in less time for simply having the hours available to spend to get there. 

This lead me to thinking that perhaps you could make some Time to Value items. 
Players would be able to go around the world grinding anything for a chance to get one of these items. The more of them you collect the more of them you can mash together into some specific item worth a greater and greater quantity of silver. The higher your level and the better your gear score the greater quality (and therefore greater value) of item you will find to work with. 

If you do something like this you would free people up to play their alts without falling too far behind in progress with their main. You might even be able to 'link' two characters so that the higher gear scored characters causes the chance rare for these rare items to remain consistent even if the person is playing their alt. Additionally, players would be free to use lower end content again without nagging you constantly to make new content while you are working on other new content that furthers the game's overall future.

Finally, by doing this you wouldn't be 'speeding' people up to higher gear. You'd just be rewarding them fairly for the time they are devoting. 

I say all this because I logged in today to start grinding and though, "I'd really rather go spend time with my real life partner." So, I put the game on AFK grind and that's that. That's my progress for this evening. However, I lose a week's progress in-game for doing it. The way the game is currently this unwillingness to throw away my real life time to play a game also means I throw away my access to pvp guilds or maintain access to currently releasing content. It's easy to fall behind. 

This is specifically a problem for end-game. You've designed no content that rewards anything equal to the time you demand of us to devote. It simply isn't worth it to give away that much real life for a game. I realize there ought to be place for overachievers and out-of-sight accomplishments for those willing to go after such things. That's fine. Go ahead and have those things. Just the same, I'd like to get to place in the game again where there is a variety of choices THAT ARE REWARDING TOWARDS content I'm actually working on. Currently, there's nothing relevant to end-game to do while work on going towards further end game stuff.

I don't think answer lies iin any one piece of content. I think you need something we can get from all activities, but furthers just one - upping our gear score. 

Basically, you're set the bar so high for access to end-game now that there's no point going for it unless you want to give up real life to get there. That's the choice you've set the game to now. So, again, the issue isn't GETTING to end-game. That's not it. It's RETAINING our access to it even if we're interrupted by real life demands. You extend the issue to include what amounts to a content drought for early-end game, too. Again, there's nothing in the game that drops worth 1 billion silver and nothing out further than that at all besides Garmoth's Heart or Vell's Heart. So, there's literally nothing to 'go and do' that is relevant to the time required. No game. No gameplay. No content. 

Currently we're going to be getting Hadum Server's soon. You might mistake me for meaning that this is what I'm asking for. I am not. This does not address this issue. New places to grind for the same rewards as currently available or sped up rewards isn't going to work. The issue lies in relativity. If I play 6 hours tonight of dedicated grinding I might make 700 million. If I don't I make 100 million.

What we need, in the briefest way I can say it is this:
1. I log in and do activity X. 
2. Activity X gives me item Y.
3. Item way can be graded to be worth K amounts of Time-played, T.
4. From T divided by K gives me a new item. Item G.

1. Item G is worth my gear factored against content access / grind time. 
   Once a day I can do this process to get credit for grind-time.
   
   This way even if I don't have time to play tonight I get credit for playing. 
   Additionally, by using this process I void all other income up to that amount from that activity. 
   - for example, if I choose to get that amount of money out of grinding I would have to wait the number of hours I selected to be rewarded (rewards being based on what my gear would let me grind) before I could get trash loot again AT ALL. So, if I choose to receive 6 hours worth of time played grinding I would recieve ZERO trash loot from all characters and all sources for 6 hours. 
   - I could still receive RNG loot like rings or whatever, but only because that can't be factored into the trash. 
   You could assume I'm grinding lazily and reward me the bare miminum from this process or make item X or step 1 be an RNG loot that we mash together into higher and high grades of item G which we can then spend as we want to, but that somewhat defeats the primary goal: getting credit for time-played that's actually relevant to our needs. 

There are a lot of ways to play with this to make it a functional idea that doesn't harm the game, but it would be nice to have some option for how to get credit for time-played like afking but for activities requiring us to actually be at keyboard without having to necessarily leave the computer on doing it. 

Thanks 

I just thought of a way to do this that might be not-gaming breaking.

1. Imagine that you get this item called a "time vessel".

2. You then take the "time vessel" with you someplay you can grind.

3. Activate the "time vessel" by Right-Clicking it and begin to grind. 

4. After 2 minutes of grinding your "time vessel" is now full. Whatever loot you collected in that time is how much loot the vessel will reward you when handed in. You can then take the vessel to some NPC who will record the loot value for the vessel. With this you receive another item. "Time Credit". With this you can, once a day, hand it in for time-played at that grind spot for 1 hour. However, this disallows you the ability to grind at that location at all for 2 hours. 

This forces players to at least play the game, but also try out different areas they can access each night for some real and true grinding. You could also put an upper limit on how many times we could use this per day with grind sessions of two hours or longer at one location giving us access to one additional "time vessel" per day for each 2 hours grinded. 

This way we can store these things up and not have to play every single day ten hours a day just to keep our gear up to date or make progress toward getting up to current content. 

They added Agris to address these issues.  Agris builds up over time, and when you consume Agris while grinding, you get more silver per mob.  This alleviates some of the time lost due to not wanting to grind, or can't grind, on a day.  Your issue, to me, yields some concerns.  One is for those that do have lots of time to play.  If the concern is it's too hard to keep up with those that have lots of time to play, then wouldn't this just widen the gap?

Your concern is that keeping up is too much of a time sink to devote that much real-life time for, and I get that.  The game demands a lot of time.  But IDK if I like this.  I am more in the camp of "you get what you earn", so if someone is unwilling to devote the time needed to attain end-game gear, then well, that's on you, not the game.  BDO was originally marketed as a "hardcore MMORPG", and even though it's waaaay more casual now, it still holds on to some aspect of this "hardcore" side by how long the grind is.  And I personally, like this......people are at the gear score they deserve for the large part.  Yes, whales exist, but I'd be tough to convice that the mojority of players are actual whales.  I think the majority of players are players, meaning they play the game, and may use P2W here and there when close to a goal or something, but mostly, I wouldn't consider "whale" territory IMO.  I digress.

Whether end-game gearing is "worth it" or not boils down to you.  We play a sand-box MMORPG, for a large part of the game.  SO players deem what they perceive as "worth it" or not.  If a player only wishes to lifeskill, then of course, combat gear grind is not worth it, but a fast ship?  Much more worth.  If a player wants to grind at Ash Forest comfortably, then combat gear grind would be worth it.  In a sand-boxy game, players get to decide their end-game, and this is pretty much how BDO is.

For me, getting better gear is very worth the time and effort needed to get it.  I aim to be better at PVP and better at killing monsters. So to, me, gearing is worth the time and effort.  But I do wish there was more things to do with this gear besides node wars, GvG, grinding, RBF and Arsha shenanigans.  Dungeons, more PVP modes, a Bounty System, or even a zone on the map dedicated to PVP, stuff like that.  So yeah, while there may not be a crap ton of content at end-game that different than mid-game, whether it's worth it or not boils down to what your values are.

PS - 200 million a day is nowhere near "end-game" levels of income generation, just thought I'd throw that in there.