Been playing FFXIV for a month and a half now (the length of it's existence). It's good; A lot of the the problems that plagued FFXI are gone. For instance, making money is a lot easier due to a steady supply of Levequests (quests that are available every 36 hours), the crafting system is much less painful to level, and gathering materials isn't as much of a pain as it was in FFXI, by far.
There are some problems, though. For one, the Market Wards (the place where you can bazaar things) just isn't cutting it. Even with a recent update that has categorized the wards, people still will sell random crap that is anything BUT what you need, and there's no way to search for the items you need yet. They either need to add a bazaar item search OR add the AH sooner than they had planned.
Another thing is storage capacity. Because certain gear only benefits certain classes, you find yourself carrying tons of gear, plus the materials needed to craft/repair said gear. As a result, your inventory and your stole unit of storage (your retainer, which is like a portable Mog house) get filled pretty quickly. They either need to add more storage, or add mailboxes so we can create mules (as of right now, there's no mailboxes; all trades have to be done face-to-face).
Lastly, travel is a bit of a pain right now. The airships and the Chocobos have not been released yet, so you have to hoof it to get anywhere. Because certain mobs only exist in certain places (and thus, certain crystals used for crafting only drop off certain mobs), you find yourself walking between the 3 cities constantly. Plus, delivering the crafting goods from the crafting quests can be perilous, due to having to enter high-level areas of the zone where monsters can easily one-shot you.
Other than that, for an MMO in its infancy, it's actually really good. The storyline is solid, the gameplay is fairly fluid (there's a little input lag, but that can be expected until they get the servers more established), and all melee and mage classes seem to be fairly balanced.
So far, so good, I say.
