@Joy:

I guess he really got the virus.

There are other illnesses in the world, no reason to jump straight into "Oda has Covid!!!!"

For me I expect OP to be a great big treasure chamber, coins, jewels, old armour and weapons, where all the Strawhats find something cool they like and Nami literally gets to swim in a pile of gold coins. A traditional Pirates treasure trove. Like that island in the first Pirates of the Caribbean

In the middle a humongous, different coloured Poneglyph that tells the true history.

Next to it, simple object of Joy Boys, like his version of a Strawhat, that is his actual treasure and the One Piece. Maybe Joy Boy is the eyepatch pirate and that's what he left behind

Roger's crew laughing, the guy being called "Joy Boy" and calling the place "Laugh Tale" killed the idea for me that OP is like a keystone for an Ancient Weapon or something big. I like the idea above that it's something that 99% of the people after One Piece would look at and think "I've wasted all this time hunting for garbage and this is what's left for me!!!" while Luffy and Roger just laugh cause it's the kind of thing they'd do. Luffy's the next coming of Joy Boy, if he was to leave a secret treasure chamber to survive a genocide I reckon he'd put his hat in it, not something else.

There's the question of why Shanks cried after talking to Roger but there's lots of reasons to cry. Happiness, sadness, just a release of emotion. Shanks is the guy who talked about how it's okay to cry after all. It looked like the famous scene of Luffy crying after Shanks gave up his arm for him, so maybe in a similar sort of way Roger gave up his health to get to Laugh Tale for Shanks. Maybe as a boy he thought One Piece could be something that would save Roger and he's gutted it couldn't. Maybe it's just relief that there was something on Laugh Tale after all. Maybe Shanks is Rocks son and he's crying for his father and the rest of the D's in some way.

@Robby:

How uch of a time commitment are we talking here?

It's a big one. FFXIV is basically four full length games- A Realm Reborn, and the expansions Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

The first three have all been streamlined to get through faster (ARR in particular recently getting a great deal of pointless fetch quests chopped) so I can't say for certain how long it would take now compared to at launch, but I think it would still be ~60 hours each game. Obviously will be a lot faster if you ignore all the side quests and just charge through the story with one class. There'd be eleven, I think, fighting classes open to you (there's a crafting system but you don't even need to touch that if you don't want to) in the free trial initially, and it's entirely possible to level them all.

Like was said above though, this is a great time to at least try it, because the free trial goes all the way to end of Heavensward. A Realm Reborn doesn't have a brilliant story, but it's charming in its own right, sort of typical traditional FF way (crystals, evil empire, summons, evil wizard bent of world destruction). Heavensward is outstanding though, and from the admittedly brief look of FFXVI it looks quite Heavensward inspired.

Carrot hasn’t done shit in the entirety of Wano lmfao. Ya’ll getting excited about her getting a non-speaking role and getting covered up by speechbubbles just cause the other Strawhats were there. She’s as much a Strawhat as Kinemon and Raizo are.

Nami's leadership seems mostly to be suggesting a nice sane sensible course of action that is totally ignored by Luffy.

Zoro's the first mate cause he's the second strongest and he's level headed for the most part. And because Oda keeps sticking it in and he's not doing that for no reason. That's all that's really needed in One Piece world for the position in a crew of pirates that are more like family.

And in the real world outside One Piece Jinbei would be the best for the role, but I don't think Oda would have him come in and take over from Zoro after twenty years

I don't understand how her being an official lookout can be an argument when she literally failed to do it when approaching Wano. Surely that's when Oda would show it off

Wasn't the idea meant to be that Carrot would be the super enthusiastic lookout Luffy and Ussop complained about pre-skip? She just didn't do the job here. Approaching one of the most anticipated islands in the series and the supposed lookout didn't do anything. Jinbei got to surf a tsunami to show his helm skills, why wouldn't Oda show something like that for Carrot if she was going to be lookout? Like her super sight picking out the waterfall in the distance to climb up or something

Is it Oda or the publisher who chooses who goes on the spine? I'm sure I remember seeing that Doflamingo never made it on a spine despite there being like seven Dressrosa volumes

Isn't that just the characters that did stuff in the volume? Pudding and Chiffon didn't do much more than help Sanji, and all Capone did was shoot Oven. And run him over, that was fun. Overshadowed by Sanji though.

Mihawk still has the title right now. When Brannew went over the Warlords before Dressrosa his description of Mihawk was world's strongest swordsman