The topic is "mmorpg? which one" :p, so it's relevant.
I don't really see a reason to make more than one character in FFXI :p, maybe an extra mule, and that leaves the monthly fee lower than that of WoW, Hsu. If you live in Europe, you can actually get one character of every race in FFXI before it costs more than WoW, because it costs more here than in the US. Unlike FFXI, where it costs the same both in the US and EU.

WoW has more options at character creation than FFXI, that I agree with, and it's a good thing that you can select servers freely. That doesn't really matter if you don't know any other players in the game though, and if you do, a world pass solves that. I'd still be able to choose freely though :(.
WoW didn't really appeal to me the 10 days I tried it. Dunno why, I've never really cared much about any of Blizzards games.