Yep. They “discounted” the BP grind. They didn’t lower the price of anything, they just made something more easily accessible to more people… the same way a discount works.
“When that slowed down” sounds interesting. I’m not gonna bother asking for a source, because we both know it’s speculation. Worse, it’s speculation that makes no sense, because if getting closer to the end of BP should have an effect, it would be to increase the sales of premium BP, not decrease them.
So again, it’s people like you and @3LiON speculating to make things look “shady” because you want to.
I’m sorry, does “can’t be arsed to” mean something I didn’t know? I thought it meant “couldn’t be bothered”, which I thought would mean “they didn’t care about it enough”.
If I don’t care enough to wash my dishes right after eating, maybe it’s because I organize my time differently, or maybe I’m lazy.
They did:
Why indeed, when they could’ve let things as they are and rake in more money from people who are worried about the time pressure? Why not let the dreaded “FOMO” do its work?
It probably would have, and don’t call me Shirley 
And that’s why this decision is so intriguing. @Taemien has his theory why. I have mine. But it’s all speculation.
Kinda. On the one hand, it’s a pain to see a game you enjoyed go to the dogs. On the other hand, you (hopefully) derived enjoyment from it for years.
That’s kinda what I’m trying to say here: if Funcom ever makes Conan Exiles F2P, I’ll be upset that they ruined the game, but I’ll have had my fun with it for years and I would feel silly asking for a refund. Now, here’s where it gets interesting: what about people who only bought it a couple of weeks before it went F2P? Well, the unfortunate answer is “sucks to be them”.
As far as the timer goes, I’ll be honest: Funcom has eroded most of the trust I’ve been willing to give them, but even I don’t think that was intentional.
The XP boost is not something they could have announced beforehand, because believe it or not, you can’t actually know how many people will engage with your bright new idea before releasing it.
They did say they were going to tweak things as they go, too. What they could have done is explicitly say “hey, if things move too slow, we’ll give you guys a boost”, but even that is a double-edged blade. How many times have we seen people take that kind of verbiage as some kind of iron-clad promise? Imagine if things hadn’t worked out like this and more people had the BP nearly finished by now. You would still get a whole bunch of people claiming how they “broke their promise to give a boost” and how that’s unethical, and shady, and whatnot.
So no, I don’t think they could have announced the boost right from the start.
Funny thing is, had the timer been there, it would probably have driven up the sales of premium BP, until they announced the XP boost. And if you think a couple of voices currently complaining about “FOMO” have a point, that’s nothing compared to the shіtstorm that we would have seen if the BP page had a timer.
I wish I was surprised, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say they eroded my trust. I love this game, but it’s being produced by a highly dysfunctional company.
I’m actually amazed at how good some of their design decisions end up being.