The Shrine

Well, there is no PvP in FF14, but one post described what it could be if there was PvP:

17:53:06: Sayphiroth enters active mode
17:53:11: Darkcloudz enters active mode
17:53:21 Sayphiroth launch a piece of rock to Darkcloudz, dealing 1 damage.
17:54:45 Darkcloudz try desesperatly to launch a hit on Sayphiroth, but Sayphiroth keeps moving away.
18:18:43 Sayphiroth launch a piece of rock to Darcloudz, for the 103th time! 805 moar to go!
18:34:05 Darkcloudz's axe seems lighter.
19:12:59 A squirells, pissed by Satsugaisuru's posts, get tired of you, and nutkicks both of you for 9999 damages.

And that's actually a pretty good description of the real game too, including the squirrels. It's more interesting to read about how the game is bad than how the game is good. They also made the green the 'even' con color which led me to get killed by the squirrel that I thought was going to be easy, though I think the squirrel would've been able to kill me even if I was 5 levels higher. I mean, games have messed around with con colors but green has always been 'really easy' in just about any MMORPG I know of. I assume it's because traffic lights go from green->yellow->red and does make a lot of sense.

This post sums up the game's problem pretty well: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments ... pressions/

One thing I think that bears repeating is that assuming people actually played this game, you can't even grind on mobs if you wanted to because they respawn slowly and there are like 30 of them in the equivalent of a typical newbie zone for a level 10 level range in any other MMORPG. I canceled my preorder and probably won't bother with the open beta. As a sidenote, it turns out the XP cap limit stuff on FF14 is a nonissue because it is almost physically impossible to play the game long enough to hit it before you go insane.

So, is this going to be a worse launch than Age of Conan, or Anarchy Online?

It can be worse because both games at least have an UI that responded to your commands. This is the first game I can think of where it is physically painful to do just interact with the UI. The gameplay issues aren't as big a problem as people say. There are games that have as bad or worse gameplay issues at launch and turned out to be okay. Sure the content is lacking and there are several retarded concepts at start but virtually every MMORPG has that. Most of the issues brought up in the links really wouldn't be an issue if the UI isn't physically painful to use. Like I said it turns out the '15 hours of XP per week' turns out to be a nonissue because it's hard to imagine anyone with the mental stamina to play this game for more than 15 hours a week because the UI will beat up whatever willpower you have, and that says a lot about this game.

Let's put it this way, if FF14 has WoW's UI (just the UI, no other gameplay element whatsoever), and maybe increase the spawn rate of mobs dynamically (hard to verify if spawn rate is going to be an issue since people are quitting left and right in the beta) it'd probably be an average MMORPG launch.