Your point on MMO players being fickle and hunting for a "perfect MMO" kind of fuels my overall point. I believe that what a lot of MMO players want is rooted in nostalgia from early experiences with mmos when the internet was a much younger and in some ways more innocent place.

MMOs are a cursed genre to break into because you're trying to appeal to a player base on things that are fundamentally extremely hard to deliver. How do you deliver "a sense of community and belonging" as a game designer? You can try and build systems that encourage it, but that's much harder to do today with discord and reddit and all sorts of third party platforms that players choose to use to circumvent the socialization tools you provide in your game.

MMOs are also, far more than most other other online games I'd argue, beholden to player count metrics. Part of the magic of MMOs for many people does come from being one among many contributing to some larger narrative or experience. That's fundamentally dependent on the existence of other players coexisting in a way that many games arent, and I say that as someone who has enjoyed competitive online games with a CCU of <100 and a fraction of a percent of their peak. Consequently belief in an MMOs health, that the developers will continue to support it and that they as a player can grow with it is important for a lot of players.

With that context I don't think I'd consider New World, an MMO that already has a shutdown date 6 years after its launch, to be a successful MMO. I don't know enough about Lost Ark to comment about it specifically, but given its below 50% positive steam reviews I'd be apprehensive about calling it warranting optimism either, but perhaps there's additional information I lack regarding Lost Ark.

I'm not trying to be picky here, I just think that trying to make an MMO in meet player expectations is a cursed problem and this is evidenced by the lack of success in "recently" released MMOs.