TL:DR The game is fun for the first 8-30 hours.

Would've made a community post about it but after some search I noticed that non-supportive opinions about the game will get blocked. I'll withhold any political comments on that behavior.

I've played about 1k hours on EU and NA. Starting in EU, since this is my timezone and I had friends to play with. Shortly after going through the seasonal content (a series of quests that condense your normal playthrough by giving you easier tasks and higher rewards in EXP and gear), most of us felt left of with no clear goal. So all of my friends quit whilst I tried to make some sense of how to progress further.

After having multiple vague answers from the in-game chat, and some lead from YouTube guides (Thank you BlueSquadron & Wakayashi), I've got some idea and started to upgrade my gear.

Eventually quit on EU to start over on NA with friends again, though the same problems arose from when I started initially on EU, where there was just no goal on how to progress after the seasonal quest series. Those problems were 2 years apart and seemed to not have changed.

I really would've liked to invest more time into the game, but it seems just so unrewarding, coupled with the danger of red player terrorists always lurking at a popular grindspot ready to kill you for 0 reward, essentially getting rid of the desire to even grind there.

The time I spent lifeskilling (farming, fishing, processing materials and crafting, trading goods) were by far more enjoyable than grinding.