Why do long time players play the game so differently?

[IdowhatIwant]

I started playing this game recently, and I noticed that there is a massive difference in the way people who, like me, started playing after the wow death craze, and the people who have been playing since Heavensward, ARR or even have legacy accounts.

1. They don't seem to care about actively improving their gameplay: A few veteran players I know have been parsing and using ACT since 2015 (when it was first released for FFXIV), and they don't seem to have the same drive I and others like me have to continuously improve my rotation and gameplay and to become more skilled. Their job's kit changed drastically since the days they first raided, but they don't make an effort to learn the kit to its fullest, and sure as hell don't care about their parse. Some of them are parsing green and blue and they only do the savage tier to get BiS and be done with it, even though checking their old logs they had high purples and many of them oranges.

2. They don't seem to want to play the marketboard: many of them refuse to engage in marketboard selling and buying, which is undisputably the most efficient way to make money, and prefer to earn money using passive methods like levequests, FC submarines and doing their weekly challenge log/doman enclave donation/retainer 18h ventures. Some of them often times complain about lack of money as much as newer players like me do, but they don't seem to want to put in the effort to earn it.

3. They are more interested in doing outdated content than current seasonal content: they do their savage raids, but they spend a lot more time doing older savage and extremes unsynched, the deep dungeons, side content like ocean fishing and diadem gathering, mount collecting, minion collecting and other things that don't increase their ilevel or their parse number.

I don't get it, does something fundamentally change about your gameplay once you spend a long time playing this game? These veteran players don't seem to be obsessed with the same things I and other newer players are obsessed with.

1. As far as logs go I pull above average dps which should be sufficient for clearing content. So I am already better than over half the players playing my class which I can play all classes at this level at this point. You can pull purple or orange dps, but if you can not do mechanics you can not clear raids regardless. Sadly in this game a good 90% of pugs are not able to do mechanics or follow directions. I speak for myself here but I find most classes much less interesting then they were in previous states, so it
gives me very less drive to care about improving game play between that and the pug problem.

2. I already have enough gold to do what ever I want in the game. Playing the marketboard? I am the marketboard.

3. I have completed that content already, it may seem new and exciting to a new player but at this point it is nothing but a waste of time for me and in some cases a rehash of other content.

So to you, all of this stuff is new and exciting, to me it's PTSD of a grind already completed. You have to remember that almost every thing has a 6 month period before additional content is released to replace it. This is a pretty long time to be repeating content so many veterans clear it, get there mounts with in a month or less, and quit the game for a few months. Play it through an expansions patch cycle and you will see, it is actually a pretty terrible lazy and predictable patch cycle which demotivates a lot of veterans and new players IMO.