It's better now. They've enabled hardware mouse which is the #1 thing that made me furious... trying to click on things with the mouse stutter-stopping around the screen... The quests are really cool, I think. Plenty of storyline and cut-scenes. Problem is, they put a lot of work into the quests, so there aren't enough to keep you occupied like there are with other games like WoW where they can copy/paste the same 'collect 10 frog butts' quest over and over. Not sure if this is good or bad.
The main gripes I have now are leveling and transportation. The levelling involves doing daily leve quests, but you only get like 4 every 8 hours and they stack up to 99. I currently have a full set of 99 because I don't do leves very often now that I'm max level, but when I was leveling, there was literally *nothing* to do once I finished my leves (at about 10 minutes each). 40 minutes of repetitious quests, then 7+ hours of grinding on monsters (not like that... ew).
Transportation's a pain also since you have to walk everywhere. You have to walk to get your leve quests (usually 4 max for a location), then run to the place to do them, then run back to get more. Then when you do quests, you have to run to town, then run out to where the quest is (usually a 5-10 minute run), then run back to turn it in. You can teleport, but it uses Anima to teleport. You can have 100 max and you get 1 point ever 4 hours. Problem is, just to teleport to town is 2 Anima, then 4 anima to teleport to an outpost. If you teleport to a town outside your current area, it's 3 anima, and 6 for an outpost.
(8, 16, 12, 24 hours recharge time). You start with 100 anima, but once it's out, you are stuck walking everywhere or waiting a day for it to recharge. :/
The running around gets better once you get a chocobo, but there's a *lot* of running around involved in getting it. For a while, you could just grind to 30 and get a free Goobbue mount, but they can't be acquired anymore.
Still, I enjoyed the hell out of FFXI. It was one of my favorite games precisely because of how punishing and memorable it was. Might as well check it out ocne it's released as FFXIV: A Realm Reborn. Currently, you can't make a new account or reactivate an old one since they're taking the servers down on Oct 31st to transfer the data over to the 2.0 servers. I think it'll still be playable, but the progress won't be saved after that point.