This game is on a terrible state right now.

[Avoidy]

I don't know if you were being serious or sarcastic but honestly? The answer is right here in your post BluexBird. I don't understand why more people dont get that. Many MMORPG's today and MOST MMORPG's in the 2000's (and all of them before WoW) were sand box MMO's. The developers rarely did more than create a world, and give us characters to play with. The rest was up to players. And it was wonderful.

Final Fantasy XIV is IMO the best of both worlds. We have years of spoon fed story and side quests and currencies to farm if we choose. And the venues and emotes and clothes in the game are set up perfectly to encourage player generated content too.

Other players ARE content.

This approach was forced to change and evolve when online communication stopped being novel. I do remember that era of MMOs, where guildmates would log in just to talk to each other, but now people sign into discord for that.

For the people left behind, I don't think your perspective is realistic or a healthy approach for the game as a whole. If other players are the content, but those other players are quitting because they have nothing to do and don't want to spend 15 a month on nothing (as happens every expansion), then your content evaporates with them. For example, if you're like me and enjoy queuing up for orbonne to watch people die, then yeah, the people dying is your content, but if the queue never pops because there's nobody playing or bothering to run that stuff, then the content is gone. It's better for Square to at least lift a finger and offer some reason to log in and play, for people who can't get enjoyment from RP venues or whatever.