I'm going to assume that nobody is going to be offended if I respond directly to some of the above posts without using [boxes of quotations [within boxes of quotations [within boxes of quotations]]].
Kalezian and company; I've been playing FFXI since NA release, and I'm still playing. They've had a server merge event, but regardless of this the game still turns a profit and has a strong enough player base to warrant a new director, instead of being allowed to stagnate. A person just starting would probably only see players levelling their support jobs or crafting, because the central towns, and the towns in the past are where most players are because the game's been out for a long time. I don't know if this is the case with WoW, but it wouldn't surprise me if the original starting towns were mostly vacant there as well. Taking this as a measure of how successful the game is backwards; if the game was doing POORLY it wouldn't have many expansion packs and the starting towns would be more populus becasue there'd be nowhere else for the player base to migrate to in-game. Mind blowing stuff for the average hater.
Disclaimer: I am assuming most people only play one p2p MMO at a time in the following statements, if this is not true for you in particular I apologize for stereotyping you, you giant neckbearded manchild, you. The greatest major difference as far as I can tell is that FFXI came out before WoW, so FFXI players had to leave FFXI for it, but FFXIV is coming out after WoW, which means WoW players will have to leave that for it. Japan, however, has never been portrayed as anything if not isolationist and ethnocentric (or maybe I should stop reading trash like Time magazine and The Globe aand Mail), so it wouldn't surprise me if they didn't even think about that for an instant, unless WoW is big in Japan.
SE could have learned from the release of FFXI; which had NA players quitting because of hostile JP players, and JP players quitting when the NA gaijins invaded their game and brought their RMTs and bots with them. The fact that the NA release meant that FFXI was done wading around in the shalow niche side of the pool and trying to swim with the big kids wasn't the NA's fault, and SE's system allowed for the easy abuse of RMTs is beside the point from the perspective of the average JP player. The goddamned dojins even had anti-NA propoganda in them (not that I'd ever read such filth). SE could have learned from the lukewarm release of WaR as well, which didn't have several features because the developers thought they were 'rubbish' such as dancing, and was poorly balanced bewteen the Alliance and Horde ... I mean Order and Chaos factions (yes I know GW existed first). WaR, however, was developed in Britian, not Glorious Nippon, and that takes me back to the previous point about isolationisim.
That the release of FFXI was staggered because of hardware issues (the NA PS2 HDD) rather than SE being foppish and incompotent (not the I'm not calling SE foppish and incompotent) doesn't change that it effected the game negatively, and it doesn't change the fact that they've allowed history to repeat itself. They do, however, have investors they need to satisfy, so they probably didn't believe that they had much choice.
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