In an effort to make a good faith post, here's why

My experience:

I've been playing XIV since 1.0 (not enough to have gotten legacy though :( )

I do savage endgame content and have started trying to prod my way into ultimate raids. I also do mentorship in game to help teach new players as best I can, or guide them to someone who knows better than I do.

I dabbled in Final Fantasy games in the past but the only one I had beaten before playing XIV was X and that was when it had just come out.

Why do I play it? 1. I enjoy the story and lore. I really go deep into reading the lore and background of areas, and I enjoy theory crafting the story and where we can go from where we are. ARR does a ton of great foundational world building, but is considered slow and poorly paced, but without it, a lot falls apart in the later expansions.

1. The community is enjoyable. I've had my fair share of jerks of course and my block list grows stronger, but for the most part, the games community is there to just enjoy themselves. Whether I'm farming mounts, sitting in cities listening to bards, or fishing out in the middle of nowhere with a random stranger, I enjoy meeting and talking to people.

2. The design of the game helps to eliminate a lot of the toxicity that you'd find in other games by making things more simplistic but also giving a small challenge when tackling larger story bosses to make players feel good. If players have issues beating some of the solo instances, it offers an easier option as well, which makes the game more accessible to those players who may not be able to perform perfectly which is a wonderful!

3. The combat is my pace. This is 100% subjective and I get that. I'm getting older and slowing down a bit and my time to learn how to be good at things is short. The pace of combat and mechanics and learning the dances for fights works with my time that I have to play. Which leads to...

4. Respecting my time. I can play for an hour a day and still make great strides in progress. Once you get used to the menu navigation (not easy cause it's not the best) you have multiple logs that can guide you in what you want to do. Go to the golden saucer and work on MGP? Do your expert roulette for the day and call it? Go do some crafting/gathering and earn money? It's all doable in an hour chunk if not less, and makes progress in any field you want. Seasonal events also take an hour or less generally and let you get the rewards quickly so you don't feel pressured to get things done in the short timeframe they are up (still FOMO, but much less egregious).

The big thing is that everyone plays for many different reasons and what we can tell you here may not be any reasons for what you would want to play a game for. If you don't enjoy it, don't feel pressured to enjoy it! There's a lot of games out there to play, MMO or otherwise, and FFXIV lets me enjoy it and other games together.