Hello,
I have had this topic in mind for a long while, and I briefly addressed it in my "all purposes" suggestion post, but I think this topic requires its own in depth post, as I'm of the opinion that the situation at hand is particularly katastrophic (typo intended).
The current running event has exacerbated an issue I have been noticing for a long while now, almost since the very first days of SK; This game does not understand what a "reward" is, and what a good "reward" is for the amount of risk, or investment people put in the game.
I have heard of tales where people just re-run the same missions on repeat for some items, including progression-important ones, and all for said items to be abysmally low in their drop rate. The current event shows this beautifully, as even tho the Kat drops are not necessary to progress, the gear they give access to is often spoken of as some of the best armor(s) in the game, but the road to reach just ONE of these armors is not shy of a punishment. Yes, I would call a lot of this so called "grind" a punishing game loop, as just how waiting is not a game mechanic, repeating the same course of action repeatedly ad nauseam is also not a game mechanic, it is madness. It's what people are pushed to do when the design behind these sequences is so punitive, so demanding in effort or investment, that people's best bet is to turn into machines.
The game stops being a game, the player just mindlessly repeats these strategies in hopes that they may get a minuscule chance to obtain, I repeat, sometimes progression important items! I am aware that a potential upcoming "balance patch" was mentioned earlier this year, and I really hope a lot of these abysmally low drop rates will be addressed, as they contribute to what I called "punitive game design" earlier.
All of the above applies to things as trivial as collecting crowns, given that a lot of items in the game go off for prices that can easily jump up to 50k, 100k, or even near the million crowns marks (knowing that the most rewarding mission known atm: King of Ashes; only rewards between 7.8k and 9.5k crowns per completion)
Another related thing in this game that can be considered punitive, is how the auction house practically operates like a black box, despite a LOT of the items being sold on it having been obtained through real world currency, and there being a limited supply of a considerable, and growing amount of these items.
When such cosmetics are being traded on a platform of this nature, the minimum requirement would be that things like outbidding, common/average per-item pricing, or logs of what has been sold recently wouldn't be either; hidden from players; or an easy to miss memo in a sea of other messages.
As it currently stands, for something like outbidding, the game will near-silently whisper to the player that the extra-rare, knowingly supply limited item they bid all the money they earned after playing for weeks was just snagged by someone else. In such a way that if you aren't manically stuck to your chat box as you play to wait an auction out, you would absolutely miss it until you come back in haven, and potentially realize you just lost an opportunity to get what you wanted.
Another way to obtain items for sure, since the auction house feels free to royally screw you half the time, is trading, however, since the game doesn't keep track of common recent prices for items, players have had to log these prices themselves. Which again, adds to the punitive game design to me, we shouldn't have to do accounting to make sure that the DAYS we spend collecting resources and in game money don't suddenly go poof when some shady trader comes out a bush to sell you things at 500% their common price.
I realize that all of the punitive aspects mentioned so far were probably never envisioned to be this serious at any time during the design phase, but nowadays, they are serious enough that people felt the need to develop quite insane strategies to farm some notoriously painful to obtain things, and that the economy was easy enough to screw people over, that entire leagues of loggers formed to log prices for cosmetics and non-cosmetics alike.
I could continue on and on, but these were my main two examples as of recent times. And the rest of the punitive aspects are often related to how much players need to juice some of the game's unassuming missions to obtain resources, or how they had to organize to avoid getting screwed upon by mechanics that could use some kind of overhaul.
A last honorable mention however; on the "lack of reward" part of this post is that "danger" missions, despite being MORE dangerous than "king of ashes", barely reward anything, if not prestige, the least useful "resource" in the entirely game, and a pitiful 3.6k to 4.5k crowns total. Which is abysmal in my humble opinion.
God I got anxiety just reading about the auction house sniping. It's why I've never bothered with the system.
Danger mission payout might have made sense when it was 2 floors and that meant it cost only 20 mist to run it (I believe the final reward floor was free?), but that hasn't been a relevant factor in about 10 years. It needs to scale for clear time, which is unfortunately a task that can only be done by someone who understands the game.