I used to be big into MMOs.

Everquest 1 & 2, Anarchy Online, Matrix Online, Star Wars: Galaxies, World of Warcraft, Aion, Archeage, LotRO, D&D Online, Rift, Wildstar, Tera, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online, EVE Online, Blade & Soul, Black Desert Online, Final Fantasy XIV, Phantasy Star Online 2 and many, many more (Mostly various Chinese/Korean games I don't recall the names of off hand)

I've always been drawn to the endless adventure of an MMO. A story that never ends as new content comes out to play through and keep progressing my character. Really, the "Multiplayer" was just something I put up with in order to get that "Live Service" continual gameplay.

These days, I have little interest in the current or upcoming MMO's. Thanks to the overall deterioration in gameplay that has faced the genre over the last decade.

Combat is often dumbed down to being tedious and mind-numbing.

Gameplay too often revolves around "Get to max level and spam Dungeons and Raids" with little to no alternatives besides some half-arsed PvP and maybe some irrelevant open world areas that aren't worth exploring.

While content gets shafted time and time again - Be it thanks to the fact that most MMO's have turned F2P with egregious monetization on everything due to declining playerbases, or simply greed from publishers that keep a team stifled and so unable to produce more than the minimum content.

It was a shift that happened around the time Activision acquired Blizzard. From then on, MMO's started to be more focused on the massive profits that WoW achieved during its peak, pushing more towards getting new players and siphoning them into "End game" as opposed to being actual RPG's where the persistent world was a thing to explore (Of course, Asian MMO's have always been mostly hub-based meaning there was no world. Only small "Dungeons" where quests take place).

Then of course there was dumbing down of what "End game" was so that even the most incompetent player can get through it, simplifying combat so a Drinking Bird could achieve optimal gameplay, taking content that was supposed to be for the Elite who were looking for a challenge and making it the bread and butter of gameplay.

All the while, the biggest asset for an MMO - The ability to provide activities for a variety of players - Keeps getting ignored. End game HAS to be Dungeons and Raids done with groups of people. Nothing else. No solo activities, nothing noteworthy for players who like to do crafting, no old-school Legacy Dungeons where ungrouped people can fight their way through and make ad-hoc teams, little to no quests or story updates... Only Dungeons and Raids.

Some games buck the trend. GW2 has Raids being a minor part of it and EVE is more of a spreadsheet simulator than a traditional MMO. BDO also had no instanced content back when I played it. But it's still not a ton of diversity and options for playstyles often with even shallower "End game" gameplay loops (I.e. GW2 and BDO are focused around just grinding overworld content)