what makes an MMO fell dead

[Rilifane]

snip

Agreed on all of it.
I've been of the opinion that too much convenience and quality of life hurts a game for some time now. There comes a point where it's no longer a free improvement and instead you sacrifice something else for it, in this case immersion and the world feeling alive.
The amount of fast travel through the world but also into duties paired with the story deliberate isolating you from other players outside a few dungeons/ trials and making other players appear as supporting NPCs to you being the one true hero and the fact that everything is spoonfed just leads to people quickly poofing in and out of zones to do their 5min dailies or something and then stand around in one of the cities while poofing in and out of duties.
A large chunk of materials completely lose meaning once you hit max level on a crafter so people don't have a reason to go back into earlier zones to farm mats there. Once you left a zone after the story is finished there, your only reason to return are hunt trains if you do them and fates if you want to rank up for shared fates or the occasional treasure map.

And I think there's also another problem that affects immersion negatively: the significant lack of world "clutter".
Most zones feel dead and empty not just from a lack of players but also from a lack of things that you'd normally see in a living, breathing world. And if you wouldn't to that extend, it pays off to exaggerate that aspect.
What I mean are things like

• guards, travelling merchants and caravans travelling the roads with the merchants/ caravans maybe also having things for sale that you don't get at every 08/15 merchant in the city,
• a variety of small animals running around in and outside hubs,
• a variety of mobs in each area of a zone, preferably also with interactions (e.g. a predator chasing its food on legs around, a baby animal following/ chasing a critter around for a bit when said critter is within x yards, a male animal dropping food in front of his family and the others doing a kind of eating animation etc)
• NPCs having looping banter, interaction and routes they walk, e.g. an NPC walking up to another, telling them something and to follow them, the two NPCs walk to their new destination together, talk about something there, maybe "interact" with objects and then parting ways again or an animal trying to get into the kitchen and the cook chasing it out again
• objects to interact with, can be a simple gimmick that's just for fun like a lost scroll turning you into a frog (buff, can be clicked off), items that give you a small buff , books/ letters for lore bits, small animals you can pet and that emote back
• small hubs that don't only exist for the main story

Now, overworld clutter obviously wouldn't solve the problem but it's still a very important part of a world feeling alive and immersive and would, at the very least, make it less noticable if they couldn't manage to make some zones feel alive and have players engage in them and with each other.

I think they also limited themselves with their fear of giving people several avenues to get something or adding anything of value outside of dev-approved content (e.g. savage gear).
Zone events, world bosses/ strong rare mobs, open world treasures, open world minigames, world quests/ dailies, invasions... these could all be ways to get tomes, some gear, pets, currency for buying a variety of things or even just plain old gil.
The reward system feels very sterile in many ways. You can only have this thing from this specific content, that's the dev-approved way and we'll not stray from it. No, you can't have rewards for exploring, we want you to do THIS content because it's literally the only way to get something.