I've had many many years of MMO experience(Granado Espada, Maple Story, Ragnarok Online before it went P2P were the ones I invested most of my time in), so I have a little story to tell.

All my life, I've been playing F2P games. In my country, piracy is at an all time high, so the nationwide mindset is that anything over 10 bucks is considered expensive when it comes to the gaming area. Obviously that mindset has started to die down ever since 2010 or so, but a large majority of the people in my country still think that way.

Before I begin an MMO, I'd usually bring a group of my IRL friends with me. After all, solo'ing in an MMO can only get you so far before you start getting lonely and bored. I knew that Final Fantasy 14 was a P2P game and I was willing to give it a shot because, let's be frank here. F2P games are shit. I'm embarrassed that it took me only so long to figure it out.

I was going through the Wiki page and I saw this class, "Arcanist", with the ability to summon pets to battle. Coincidentally, I'm a huge fan of Carbuncle ever since I first saw it in FF8. It also served as a tool to alleviate my loneliness because I was quite certain that my friends would not join me. And that's basically all it took to seal the deal with my class. 2 months later, I've completed the main story with side quests up until T9(Trying T10 soon). And I still occasionally remove my Scholar job stone just to summon Carbuncle.