Why do MMORPG players clamor for terrible MMORPG's?

Tobold points to a Game By Night post asking whether we, as current and ex-WoW players, feel too "entitled"

When these players come to a game like Fallen Earth, they’re shocked by the rusticness of it. , last time I played, one player, couldn’t help lamenting the fact he couldn’t respec his character in region chat. Whether he was right or wrong to expect such a thing (and any FE fan will tell you he was wrong), it’s a prime example of how World of Warcraft has set a bar in player’s minds.

Hard to believe that playing a good game would make you less appreciative of a crappy game, but there you go. Gordon, while comparing the four-hours-because-of-forced-grouping play sessions of EQ with the one-hour-optional-groupings of WoW similarly asks if we've gotten soft about grouping :

are we just becoming more lazy now? Are we too satisfied with our soloing and quest grinding to even bother putting together a group? Or are thing just becoming more accessible and making our lives easier?

Back in my Final Fantasy XI days, the hardest thing in the game for me (and most other players) was finding a good group. You had to have a good group to level. So you'd log on to play, and first you'd have to run to the zone where you wanted to level, and then you'd start to look for a group in chat. It could take a while to find a group if you weren't a healer or tank, and often neither would join a group unless it was already full and ready to go. So after around 30 minutes, you'd actually start to play, and hope your group would last for a while so you didn't have to do the whole sitting-in-chat thing anymore. Eventually someone would leave after 40 minutes though, and you'd be stuck advertising for a replacement.

And the grouping wasn't that much fun either. You would have a "puller" that would run away from the group and try to find one single mob to bring back. If they accidentally pulled more than one, or got extra aggro, it was a guaranteed wipe unless your group managed to zone (literally run into the next zone). If you made it the mobs chasing you would head back to their original spawn point but attack any other parties on the way.

It was absolutely difficult to level in FFXI. But everything that was difficult was due to bad design :

• Traveling to your leveling zone was a huge chore that, at low levels, involved running there on foot. Time-consuming, but not fun, and those five or ten minutes came out of your playing time.
• Finding a group was an enormous chore, and again it was something that made the game "hard". You are sitting in chat, typing, not playing the game, and that's really the pinnacle of difficulty in the game.
• Potentially losing a group member also made the game difficult. Once again, a roll of the dice that made the game hard that had nothing to do with playing the game.
• If your puller got a respawn on the two-minute run back to your camp, you would probably wipe. Unless you are the puller you are not playing the game, and you can still be killed in the game.
• If another party zoned and a returning mob aggroed your group, you and your party would probably die. Very little you could do, in terms of playing the game, could save you from an unexpected pull.

So there's five things that all made FFXI very difficult to play. None of them, however, were because the game was testing your skill in playing the game. It's luck, more than anything else, and if you had an unlucky night you could, thanks to death penalties, end up at a lower level than when you started.

FFXI is a game people quit because they could not find groups that would take their class. For some reason we're supposed to long for this? Please let us harken back to the days of games that were hard because they wouldn't allow themselves to be played?

The worst example of "non-gameplay as difficult gameplay" were the rare spawns. People would sit at their computers for hours or days, waiting for a mob to spawn that they could fight. The game is to sit online but not play the game for like six hours, and then play for like three minutes. And then do it again.

Why are gamers so eager for this? If you are trying to make a modern game like this, who is your target audience? I guess it would be people who are patient and like a challenge, but don't really like playing games.