I played for a few months after ARR was released, and eventually quit.
Good:
* It's Final Fantasy. If you like FF, then the crap you wouldn't care about in other games, you will like because now it's Moogles and Chocobos. FF fanservice abounds.
* The story is good for an MMO. It's not going to blow you away, but it's better than all other MMO's I've played.
* The community is nice. The game forces you into parties to do things; you pretty much can't solo this game after a certain point. Which is good if you like playing with others, and bad if you don't. Lots of EoFFers play the game and it was nice to chat with people from time to time.
* The music is awesome.
* All the cool mounts and pets are fun. I liked flying around on a giant winged eye.
* The game's interface and controls are very good. It's not a hard game to play. You can customize the GUI to an absurd degree.
* It has fun FF classes, and your character could change classes at will, preventing you from needing to start new characters from scratch to experience something new. That was cool.
If I had to pick one reason to play, it'd be the community, and the charming atmosphere of the game.
Bad:
* $$$$$$$$$$$
* I came to FFXIV from Guild Wars 2, and I think FFXIV looks bad in comparison. Purely my taste. In particular, the character textures are crappy quality and options for customizing your character's appearance are very limited. All of my clothes looked like I was wearing a tarp or a muumuu or a court jester outfit. Higher-level gear didn't look much better. The texture they used for people's skin makes everyone look like they're made of plastic. From what I remember, race options are human, bigger human, human with cat ears, human with elf ears, and dwarf-human. The environment / landscapes were OK, but I saw screenshots where people were saying "Oooh look at the pretty landscapes!" and I was like... really? I never remember being impressed. It looks like a competent game from 2013, but just competent imho.
* Quests are dull and repetitive and pointless. Either fetch something, kill something, or escort someone somewhere. Hope you enjoy those three activities because it's your life now.
* Crafting is mind-numbing. At one point, I was seconds away from passing into a coma due to crafting.
* There's a silly amount of stuff on an artificial "Do this once per day!" timer. It felt like I was playing Farmville.
* Combat is not fun. And given how much of the game is combat, that's not a good thing. There are a couple very simple reasons, namely, global cooldown on your skills, and the inability to move while you activate most of your skills. Combat involves finding a nice place, standing there and hitting a button on a regular interval. Oh no, an AOE indicator appeared underneath you; move two steps to the left and repeat. And you probably just interrupted the spell you were casting, sucks to be you. Oh no, my health is low; stand there, heal / get healed by a healer and repeat. There's more to it than that, but not a lot more.
Again, coming from Guild Wars 2, maybe I was spoiled. In GW2 you can use most skills while walking. The highest damage ones will root you in place for a second, but you can use most of them while mobile. Some of the skills even move you around, make you bum-rush the enemy, launch you backward, teleport you to a place you choose. GW2 has no global cooldowns, only per-skill cooldowns. You also have a dodge move, which has a cooldown of its own. No one tanks anything, the enemies hit too hard; dodging is an integral part of the game. You have skills that do cool things like turn you to invincible fog for a few seconds so you can escape danger, or create clones of yourself, or summon a fireball-launching sword that other players in the game can pick up and use for a minute or two. Every character has a heal skill as well, and they all suck just enough so that you can't rely on them for survival. The result is very fast-paced and skill-intensive and twitchy and exciting. Every battle demands your attention.
Don't get me wrong, GW2 is still an MMO, so even that game's combat got boring for me after a while, but I was 100% bored of FFXIV's combat almost instantly. Almost my first memory of FFXIV was seeing my first enemy, running up it, and starting to circle-strafe it while casting a spell... and weirdly, my spell kept getting interrupted. Eventually I killed it, and then I searched for "Dodge" in the keybindings list, and it wasn't even there, and I was a sad puppy. At times, I was literally completing battles in FFXIV without looking at the screen, just listening to the sound of my skills going off and hitting a key on my keyboard at the appropriate time. This reminds me of other Final Fantasy battle systems, in the worst possible way.
* Levelling is very slow and painful because of all of the above. It's the grindiest of grinds, for little payoff.
* Tiiiiiiiiiiiiime sinnnnnnnnnnk. When I realized how much FFXIV was monopolizing my free time, I quit. MMOs are great if you want to pick one game and do nothing but play it. I realized I'd rather play a bunch of different games instead. There are so many of them to experience.
If I had to pick one reason not to play, other than the monthly cost, it'd be the immense time investment to accomplish anything, and the general boringness of getting there.
FFXIV is a fine game though, probably worth a try if you're looking for an MMO.
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