What I like about fighting games:
I'm a very competitive person.
Back in the day I used to play a lot of 'World of Warcraft'. I pretty much only played PVP. Battlegrounds and arenas. The little bit of PVE I did was doing quests to get to the max level and then start doing PVP. Or a couple of raids, so that I could get better equipment and perform better in PVP.
I played a lot of Counter-Strike. And I played a lot of Overwatch. Both multiplayer PVP games.
I'm not big into PVE. The problem with PVE is that you're playing against NPCs with certain patterns. Once you figure their pattern out, it becomes too easy to beat them. You just have to follow a certain set of rules and you win. In PVP that's not the case. To me it's fascinating to go up against players, who all play differently. Players, who fight back until their last bit of health is gone. And it's always fascinating to me to see new stuff, which I haven't seen before. You don't get that level of excitement from PVE games, where you just go through the motions. In PVP if you encounter someone, who is dramatically better than you, then you get destroyed and you have to hold that. You know that the opponent is simply better than you and all you can do to negate that is to git gud. It's not about learning a pattern at that point, or grinding better gear. It's about getting better and getting the better of your opponent.
Fighting games are the purest form of competition in my eyes. It's you VS the opponent. There is no team to help you out. And luckily, there is also no team to eventually hold you back. If you win, it's on you. If you lose, it's on you. If you like competition, then you're simply bound to love fighting games.
What got me into fighting games:
As I said, mostly the pure and direct form of competition fighting games provide.
The first fighting game I ever played was 'UMK3', if I remember correctly. I remember always picking Noob Saibot and just mashing buttons, until shadows came out of the character and ran at the opponent. I was super young and I had no idea what was going on, but it looked cool as hell.
The fight "fighting game" I actually played A LOT and competed against friends was 'Super Smash Bros' for the N64. If you want to call that a fighting game. I always picked Kirby and just went for it. I lost some matches and I won some matches. It was tons of fun. Funnily enough we would always play our favorite songs during the fights, which would get us hyped and pumped up and perform better. My song was always the iconic Mortal Kombat movie theme.
When I really "got" into fighting games was a good while after 'MK9' came out. And I write "got", because I didn't really play MK9, but rather just watched tournaments. Same with 'Ultimate Marvel VS Capcom 3'. I wanted to get into the game, because it featured Deadpool, Dante and Vergil - some of my favorite fictional characters. They would have been my team. But I never really did pick it up.
Then 'Injustice 1' was announced and I wanted to play it as well, but I really didn't. I prefered to watch tournaments. Same with MKX and Injustice 2.
So even after watching so many tournaments and getting a good grasp of the theory behind fighting games, I never really got into fighting games. I never development the muscle memory for them, or the fundamentals. So I still consider myself a complete beginner, after all this time.
Now with MK 11 coming out, I will ACTUALLY try to ACTIVELY get into fighting games. I'll put in the hours and the hard work to git gud at them. So I'm very much looking forward to it all.
TL-DR: I like competition and I've played almost all fighting games you can imagine. From Super Smash Bros, to Mortal Kombat, Dead or Alive, Tekken, Versus games, Soul Calibur, Injustice and others. But none of those I've played seriously to a point, where I would consider myself something more than a beginner. That is about to change with the upcoming MK 11. I'll play that game for sure and use that as a serious entry point into the genre.