[quote=@BrokenPromise]
I played ff 14, beat everything up to the end of Shadowbringers but my subscription ended before I could do any of the end of game content. 

I think the greatest flaw with MMOs is just how bare bones a lot of them are before you get further into the game. I don't think I've ever booted up an MMO and thought to myself "hellz yea! these early levels are so fun and challenging!" your most challenging content is always going to be found inside dungeons, or raids, or stuff like that. Massively multiplayer online games are, ya know, massively multiplayer for a reason. multiplayer is the appeal. Not playing an MMO with other people is like, really silly. It feels like the early levels are to learn controls and just find people to party with. From there, you can join a guild and have people help you find whatever you need for the annoying fetch quests. 

The story for FF 14 is good, but like everything else in the game, you need to work your way past the base game to enjoy all the cool content. A realm reborn is [i]painfully[/i] vanilla, then you get to Heavensward and stuff gets better quickly. Post stormblood and pre Shadowbringers was also interesting. 

Me though, I like playing scholar. it's a lot faster to que up.[/quote]
Yea, that's sort of the point. As someone who has played a lot of the free MMO's out there I can tell you that what set the good ones out from the bad ones was that the good ones weren't fun. Or rather they were just unfun enough. 

Basically a good MMO is fundamentally not a game you are supposed to have fun with but something that's meant to facilitate social interaction. It's the computer nerds equivalent to the old "go out and meet some friends" your parents always bug you about. So functionally what it needs to do is NOT provide you with riveting gameplay but instead give you an environment in which you can relax knowing you are surrounded by like minded people who share at least one big common interest so you can socialize with them.

It's exactly like going to a pub to get drinks or something. You aren't there for the drinks. You are there to go have fun with friends and meet new ones. Thus the content of both has to be just engaging enough to make you not want to leave the venue but also boring enough that you are not so subtly encouraged to find people to pass the time with as you do the boring padding stuff. 

And once you've found the people you want to spend time with it has to be designed so that it continually gives you new and boring but challenging tasks to do so as to keep giving you an excuse to keep hanging out. Sort of like a drinking game. It's not the worlds most intelligent form of entertainment but it keeps the party going.

Conversely if a MMO is too good of a game in its own right than people will just focus on playing it and not socialize.