Dear Community what even holds you in this game

[Alexusss]

Honest Question not a Bait post.

I recently had to admit that the potential I saw in the game when I first started to play did not deliver in the later expansions of this game, Side Quests stayed as low effort as they started Dungeons are a linear corridor of pull all and kill it and any interesting Boss gimicks we had in the past were phased out of the game so that only DDR Remains.

The only thing that keeped me in the Game was the story making FF 14 for my basicly a Visual Novel interupted by medicore to bad gameplay.
So when Dawntrail drove the story against the wall my biggest draw to the game endet.

The other think I enjoyed was Jobidentity. I loved leveling them all learning the to play them all and then seeing them all getting more and more Braindead. Yoshida acknowledged the communeties worry about the Homoginazation and sayed it would be adressed... only for 7.2 to drop and proving... the Devs do not give a fuck about Jobs and see High end Raiding as the be all and end all of this game, and I coulden´t care less for it.

In the last view weeks I read a lot of Discords and Forum posts and... Many agree... DT was a shit show of story, Jobs dummer then ever and the majorety of the people I saw do not care for Extream, Savage and Ultimates and lament that jobs get cut down to fit this kind of content. Space Exploration is a shit show on an embaresing scale as it seems, which leaves me with this question to the community...

what even holds you in the game? Because my honest answer there is nothing left for me and I am really interested to hear what other people still see in this game.

Honestly nothing at this point. Bashing scripted enemies in raids for hours on end was never enjoyable for me in first place (in any video game), same goes for crafting/gathering - I just suffered through all of that to get specific emotes/glam items that couldn't be acquired through other means. The story was enjoyable for some time, but it got progressively worse (in my subjective opinion, which everyone is free to disagree with) with Endwalker and got really bad with Dawntrail, so I only keep up with it by watching streamers play through it (which thankfully doesn't require any monthly fees). Socializing with others (the real kind of socialization that doesn't involve bashing dumb enemies in raids) can still be nice, but I've seen a lot of them leave this game for various reasons (especially during last year or so) and socializing was made much, MUCH worse with artificial "congestion" where you can't even "visit" certain servers on certain datacenters until 3:00AM local time. And honestly many other games or "virtual worlds" like, for example, VRChat do socialization much, MUCH better in just about every aspect.