Is this even serious?
Stuff is still easy to get, you only need to try various methods to do it. For sure world is ending because you can no longer get thousands of HQ resources when you are offline and not playing.
Got a base, first ba set and solar scorcher within the first hour. During next two hours leveled alternately two chars up, learned 5 professions, pked players and had a lot of fun. Something must be wrong with your game style and not with changes ^^
This. Maybe something is wrong with you, not the game.
And yeah, I started playing also, levelled my char to 24 lvl, got some basic stuff, even though I haven't played the game for 1.5 years and I didn't even know much (surprise!) about how to get stuff/exp char easily.