Here are another 2 episodes of Ken Choi discussing Aion. In this 2 parts he talks about the casual and hardcore game play in Aion and he mentions grinding and obtaining high level items.
And guys a small PS from Ayase:
He would like to remind you that Ken Choi is a Senior Game Designer, and he is not a PR guy just put there with a bunch of ready-made answers to promote game.
With these Episodes of Ken we wanted to give you straight and honest answers to some of the larger questions, directly from the dev team.