There is a lot of misconception to this game. The devs want to slow down the end game and the players by nature want to race to the end game. If the devs continue this vicious cycle of feature creep this will lead to a near endless-loot-fallacy (a compensation for bloated systems that requires more and more gear to drop to meet the demands of all the extra add-on’s in an MMO).
Rewarding the players with more gear and higher tier equipment is a symptom of or damage control in MMOs. It distracts the players with new shiny things so they don’t focus on the more laboursom fixes that are required. The solution is going to have to be some tough love. Similar to what hello games did for no man’s sky and cd project red did for cyberpunk. Focus on what makes your game fun, not rewards, not weapon tweeks for the moment. But making some changes to your PVP games. change your current PVP to make use of fundamental multiplayer games like capture the flag, kick the can, annihilation death match, annihilation team death match. that would be the bare minimum if you guys want to primarily sustain your PVP focused MMO experience.
Make some positive changes to the PVE experience. Make use of the bot harvesters code and make them into adventuring NPCs when your population is low that roam and require help and sometimes offer assistance in the world. Make use of the world you built, you have NPCs littered around the world; now ask yourselves what do they want? More territory? More loot? Sacrificial victims? Build off of that. Even the sentient skeleton warriors could be possible quest givers if they are cursed to only wonder the halls of their ruins they might solicit a player to hunt down a tomb Raider that made off with their wears. The lost could be recruiting more colleagues by which I mean capture and torment their victims into despair. Saving these poor NPCs would be a better experience than your usual kill/collect 1-15 things and return to quest giver model.
Your a maritime privateer aka a pirate. Allow the player to be a pirate and enjoy all the notoriety that goes along with it, good or bad. if you regularly hold up npc’s for coin, bounty hunters might actually come after you, or if you save npc’s they might randomly reward you for your good deeds.