am gonna break this up into 3 parts: new player problem, old player problems and old whale player problem.
New player issue
first thing, a new player coming into this game is literally getting accs and weapon from raven king which is 4 contents ago scarlet - nightfall- hive queen - raven king. the top gear people wanted back in the days. they also getting accs from doing side quest, i saw some support chest on my alt once idk where it came from but yea, they all useless and only gives your profile nothing but legendary colours in my opinion, so people are gonna work for the rest,bt is easy to get a party for, but you still have people out there getting kicked by people that are brain wash to think a certain way. you have people farming the bt accs by using moon refuge method which in my opinion a waste of time to farm bt accs there but what can they do, now this leads to my point .... regardless if the item is farmeable they are putting an extreme amount of time to farm the item to compensate for it being bASICALLY free. the earring and ring are way too valued at moon refuge , i dont see y it cant be 120 tokens also. i mean the starter items you get to actually carry them to something worth something , your spending a load of mats for example to lvl starter soul to 3 years ago soul you looking at 150 Elysian 600 sacred orb and 600 soul stone crytals. that ridiculous, this game is out way too long to still have people at that current lvl of gear,the game is suffocating its own player base by locking people into boxes , new players will always be getting trash in slot gear that equal to the gear of an alt.instead of making starting items easier to lvl to at least get them to first stage legendary soul . stage 6 raven. just some decent lvl to give them a boost and stop making starter items expensive to gear up then easier mid way then extremely expensive end gear not talking about end game gear but the hard to easy to super hard is just not good instead easy normal and super hard.they need to always provide a way ingame to up your soul similar to the lvling ones they had in past. some people benefit from it but then again other don't even experience it .
normal players and baby baby whales
problem here is when u get to some point in gear you will find your self in a pickle what to upgrade as everything requires the same amount of mats its not really that expensive to gear but it sure isnt worth upgrading as your not gonna benefit from anything until u done like 10 upgrades . they need to reduce the stages and balance the mats more.for example literally 6 upgrades of talisment is so useless. and even with cost reduction they did i still wouldnt even bother doing it , because your not getting any stats that can help you.until u do the monkey amount of upgrades.
whale problems
being whale now is probably boring , similar to when you achieve absolute power there just no challenge again, if your max gear you gonna be bored, as working for upgrades is probably the most fun you can have as a pve player considering everything is 1 shot fest easy mode and you can practically solo anything with max gear.raids with clans are fun too but ..... too much gear releasing in short period of time is the cause of this.....
other issues
unity stones are another thing too, its one of those broken things in this game that f2p mid whales will never get full use out of why...having all leg stones give u power equal to soul talisment buffs at almost max level and almost 100 ap alone .pet gems gives ap too
mid whales f2p will always be locked out by 200 ap by some real hardcore end game gear that they will never get or reach that level unless they blow up they credit cards or wait 3 years if the game stays that long.
arena is completely dead now, am seeing alot of bots in 1s and 3v3 is dead also...they finally achieve the goal of killing pvp arena. class balancing is dumb at this point the more new class this game has the more dumb balancing get.
what i can say to you is, don' stress your self on gearing and try to enjoy the game as much as possible.... i stopped leveling my pve gear and just sit at aransu 3 .... with mid tier accs and upgrade my gear for pvp cause thats where i enjoy the game.... the true soul of this game died a long time ago and to how i see it never coming back, even with unreal engine and better fps . can't build a house on sandy soil ... if they arent trying to fix some of these issues from now any excitement people will get out of unreal engine will be short lived .