The High-End content is still a lot of fun, despite that some people think otherwise. And all the people I meet in Party Finder who are doing it seem to think the same. To double down on that, sometimes I join little Discord servers with these parties and they are having a lot of fun in voice. So clearly that is a factor.

I enjoy hunting (spawning S ranks and conducting hunt trains). If you don't know what I mean by that, then just think of it as a rabbit hole that you can only understand if you've done it and enjoyed it at some point.

I enjoy collecting mounts. Achievements in contrast are very boring, but just going as far as the mount tends to work for me. Part of the fun is that you meet the same people doing what you are doing, and you come across them again and again. So it's a social fun for me.

I enjoy dungeons purely as a stress relief. Click button, instantly cure any sort of loneliness, relieve family stress on enemies, stress gone.

I still want to see future expansions and story, because I think longer term than just Dawntrail.

The moon crafting is honestly kinda boring, but it is a social environment and you are doing it together. And that's what makes it fun. Shout chat. The regular events, Red Alerts, help a lot with rallying people together every few hours to just chill in /shout while doing their thing. It's way better than Island Sanctuary which was so isolating that you may as well have been playing a boring single player game. I also feel that it will be more fun to see what planets we go to and build. The moon itself is just the starter lore for how we do it.

There are a lot of things that could be improved about the game. Mostly these are little things, but there are so many of them that they build up like lego to become a big issue in combination and when there are enough "little issues" they push people away. Obviously any game is going to have things that could be better, there just isn't a speedy and proactive effort to address QoL, but rather a few are hand picked to be fixed in each major patch.

Now if we do actually compare this to other MMORPGs, the others put me off in comparison. FFXIV is still just better. No matter what people say that WoW is doing, I will never like the aesthetic, the ugly goblins, the cartoon graphics, and how it overall presents a complicated feel when that's not what you want if you're attracting new players who need to be able to feel like they can digest everything. There are some others that are good, but either they feel more tedious or their aesthetic isn't as positive and doesn't make me feel happy. Word is their content is way less frequent than this game too, but I don't follow them enough anymore to know myself.

I also just like the community, and that is one of the reasons I started playing (whatever the current FF MMO was). Becuase it appeals to and attracts certain types of players over others.