I can’t speak for FFXIV, but if you want pvp in an MMO you might give guild wars 2 a try. It’s got 5v5 pvp matches where everyone is on an even playing field. It’s available in the free to play version, and you can go into it right after the tutorial if you want, don’t even have to do leveling.

There’s also a large scale pvp mode called world vs world where you have three teams of hundreds of players fighting over territory. That one uses non-equalized stats so it’s an end game thing, but it’s a lot of fun!

I left in February of 2021, but at the time it was competent but unexceptional. Rival Wings and Conquest(?) were the two big battle types, and I think overall Rival Wings was more interesting, while Conquest usually devolved to a round robin rotation of objectives or endless stalemates unless you had a competent caller directing your nation’s team. I didn’t like it at all, but Rival Wings was always dead outside of events. Rival Wings was like a “MOBA mode” plus vehicles, so a big thing was objective and resource management so you could push an organised vehicle fleet down one of the lanes. Engagements were also typically smaller than in Conquest.

5v5s were very unbalanced but fun for casual play due to job variety, although the high end was being griefed by some notorious hackers around November of last year (which is when I lost touch with the PVP community on Twitter).

In terms of activity levels, I could basically always get a Conquest match or a 5v5 match, but I basically finished my 5v5 achievements and then only ever played Rival Wings when there were enough players to start a match. They’ve recently introduced a reward track for all PVP, so maybe Rival Wings has finally seen its Revival Wings.

Daily quests, login rewards, any other mechanic that wants to dictate when I should play, all that ruined my relation with a lot of games. I actively try to ignore them nowadays. If my line of reasoning is I should play a little more because the reward is around the corner and will be gone tomorrow, I’ll let the most precious opportunity go to waste to protect my mental health.

You have a point, but I think WoW succeeds in spite of itself. They promise big things then deliver a fraction. It never lives up to the hype, IMO. I think it’s that there’s nothing better, and if there was, it’d have to be a LOT better because of sunk cost fallacy. 80% of the reason I play WoW is because I have always played WoW. I like my stuff and friends there.

Definitely not the oldest, FFXI and EQ are still alive and getting updates, and Anarchy Online is in maintenance mode because it’s presumably still turning a profit for Funcom.