@ synaesthetic
I'd look into
The Secret World,
Tera Online, and
Perpetuum Online's current development phases. They inherently seem to be deviating from the normal cast of MMO's, specifically Tera Online in this case. Perpetuum has been taking a Eve like approach to those who are in the beta and tell me about it, Tera Online is similar in aspect to Demon Soul's for the PS3 and is generally given fairly positive criticism but there is still skepticism, The Secret World offers 3 factions and starts the game at end-game; it's done by Funcom if that rings a bell, and I'm not sure how it's latest developments are going but its success depends once again on meddling executives.
I haven't played FFXI, but from talking to players it seems that there have been new changes that is making FFXI pretty enjoyable; at the same time FFXIV seems to be deviating from similar original inane design philosophies, and the developers actually admitting
The Vision is greatly flawed has earned some meager respect from its anticipated player base.
Quote:
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Err, this seems more of a 'we screwed up, but we'll eventually fix it' kind of announcement. Ie, they have some simple fixes in, but most of the other stuff is still 'work in progress'.
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There's a few birdies that say otherwise, realistically chances are retail will be buggy in a few regards and aspects but will indefinitely run smoother. Remember, when some guy released a hardware mouse support they immediately patched their own (yet more crappy) version of it or rather set it at a different value rather than just having it enabled.
Regardless, FFXIV seems to have a positive outlook with the sole exception of Civ 5 coming out the same day (assuming FFXIV isn't pushed back, which it honestly should be to beta test its new changes).