Why are MMO's still popular?

I got on board the MMO train pretty early on in the works. I didn't get in Everquest early but shortly thereafter when Anarchy Online came around. Despite the fact that the game was buggy and slow and also featured incredibly boring combat, the game was a massive success as far as I could tell and as far as I know it is still being played by a few very dedicated fans. After that I played a few others and the latest one I played was Guild Wars 2, which I still enjoy but there is a major problem with the overall gameplay that was true in basically every other MMO as well: The grind does and will always continue to exist.

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Despite the title of that above image I am not really trying to tell anyone what they can or should enjoy but I simply know from my own past that every MMO I get involved with ends up consuming a tremendous amount of my time and a lot of this in game time is spent simply grinding out the same activities over and over again in the hopes of gaining levels or the pursuit of more loot. The thing is, this cycle never actually completes: Once you get the new loot you are looking for the next loot, and the next and the next. It never ends.

I never played WoW but they are still by far the most subscribed MMO in existence and even started to unveil what I consider to be really tres stupide features such as the selfie.

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Again, i'm not going to tell people what they can or should enjoy but seriously? Selfies as an achievement in an MMO?

Compared to actual RPG's all of the MMO's that exist pale in comparison to a real RPG in both gameplay and story yet thousands upon thousands people line up to take part and continually buy expansions and for what? So they can play with other people, right. I will admit that this worked on me for a very long time as well but then some people take it so seriously that they rage quit or will be really toxic towards novice or less talented players who don't know how to do something exactly perfect.

I can recall several times in even friendlier MMO environs such as Guild Wars where you would be absolutely berated for joining a group and not being intimately familiar with dungeon layouts and the "expert" strategy. So why were these experts even bothering doing the same dungeon over and over and over? They were grinding for tokens that they would use to get STUFF. In most instances this new piece of armor or the accessory boosted theirs stats so minorly that it wouldn't even be noticed. Other times they would grind for a skin to make their character look slightly different, so different in fact that soon everyone else also has that skin.

Of course you an skip the grind by simply paying real world money for stuff and this "pay to win" mentality is only marginally better than grinding.

There are legendary weapons in GW2 as well as other games similar to it where you have to acquire an absolutely ridiculous amount of materials in order to make say, a sword or axe and after all of that work this legendary weapon is something like 3% better than a weapon that takes almost not time at all to make or simply buy in the market.

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That above axe or whatever it is looks cool sure, but it is so marginally better than a weapon that doesn't take a month to grind and collect the materials for that I don't see the point.

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In the end everyone who plays MMO's ends up coming to the same eventual conclusion: They quit playing after a number of years and reflect a bit on how much friggin time and money they have absolutely wasted in the past 2 or 3 years. I know that I have blown off school, friends, even relationships with girlfriends over MMO's and in the end it just seems so stupid when you combine this with the fact that all MMO's are totally inferior to "regular games" as far as gameplay, graphics, and for the most part, story is concerned. There is also no ending to it - it is designed to go on forever so you will keep spending money on it.

I have also met people that spend hundreds and in very rare cases thousands of dollars a month on upgrades and in-game currency and to me this is just insanity. Again, I'm not trying to tell people what to do with their lives / money but how on earth is any of this fun? You stand around somewhere waiting for an event to start so that you can be privy to the extremely unlikely event that you are going to get some good gear at the end of it and once you get that thing (most do not) you will simply do it again somewhere else over and over and over again so you can get another trinket that will boost your stats in such a meaninglessly minor way that you won't even notice the difference in combat.

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So if you MMO certainly you realize that much of what I am saying above is true and I guess I just don't get it (anymore) and in some ways I actually think it is quite unhealthy the amount of emphasis that people place on these worlds.

If you are an MMO player please understand I am not giving you a hard time: You do you. I on the other hand would much rather play the latest $40 game on PS4, have a much more enriching experience, have superior graphics and most likely story, and have exactly zero grinding and micro-transactions involved in my gaming experience.