ffxiv has no story. its lore is a complete mess and the whole companies thing seems out of place.
SWTOR is just like a mmo KOTOR with a fun PVP thing and -REALLY- awesome group quests.
obviously not the same game but the point is FFXIVs group "instances" suck and get old fast whereas SWTOR can be done multiple times and not get old since how you respond results in diff outcomes. FFXIV has no "deep quests" whereas almost all of SWTOR is "deep quests". Etc.

Even if you dont like the story the point is in SWTOR its there, in ffxiv its not. I -loves- FFXI because it did a great job of telling a story but i really don't give a f*** about some random person in limsa wanting ppl to try her cupcakes so i can spend an hour of my life running in circles for her just to be rewarded with something i could have farmed at level one in 5 min.

And SE doesn't even bother to add in new content or story quests other than a few that can be completed in 3 hours after patch release.

What does XIV have to offer compared to other games?
gameplay is fail to the point where they are redesigning the game
story has -potential- to be epic but is so far pretty fail
quests are complete fail
leves are repetitive
getting to rank 50 takes -no- skill at all really
the "trade"/economy is a failure

I always hope that SE will be like "look we have new plans to fix all this" but they don't. they just say "we have 2.0" which is a completely vague statement.