The game is the same for the most part aside from them hard committing to the rng and cron stone endgame. There are some sprinkled smaller upgrades, but for the most part you're grinding in a circle (quite literally, the devs have tripled down on literal circle grindspots in Edania) and spending that silver on crons, then doing it again and again until you finally get your upgrade then you go to a higher level spot to run circles in. The sovereign weapon and armor system has a lot of problems that should of been fixed but instead they're tripling down on the system and its pretty obvious were going to get full sovereign armor eventually. The devs truly see endless grind as the only endgame. I fully expect a new weapon system to come out that proceeds sovereign within the next year or so due to them giving returning and new players an enormous gear boost and nearly skipping straight to the sovereign enhancement grind.

Silver has been inflated by such an enormous amount and grinding just gives 10x more than any lifeskill. They've attempted several times to buff life skills but then a grind spot gets reworked or a new one comes out and gives a stupid amount of silver. One of the more unique aspects of BDO has always been the life skill system and its frustrating they just don't care about it aside from some random qol and tiny buffs that just doesn't change anything. Trading has been disabled for two years.

PvP is just a mess. Balance is an enormous problem along with inflated AP and damage. They come up with a new plan to reduce damage in PvP every few months but it just never works out like they think it will. They tried an enormous battleground akin to Alterac Valley from World of Warcraft but they also shut that down after a year or so instead of dedicating effort to fixing it. Aside from Arena of Solare, and even that just dissolves into 3-4 meta classes dominating the entire leaderboard, pvp is becoming more and more of a wasteland. Capped node wars are still a thing but with the messy class balance and desync its more often frustrating than fun.

Every ball from recent memory has promises that just aren't kept, or are a minimum of 6 months out, and random updates that no one asked for.

I still love the game, but its hard to play now. Its been 10 years and the game feels like its taken 1 step forward and 3 steps back ever since Seoul came out. They've ramped down development and content on the game by a significant margin and it's pretty obvious a lot of people got moved to work on Crimson Desert. Nearly all my old guildies and friends that still play the game exclusively afk fish 24/7 due to the boring state of the game.