I don't think that SE would trot out the Abyssea expansions and then this nice shiny forum only to shut the game down in a few months. People truly underestimate the finances of a pay-to-play game online. There are still pay-to-play games from the late 80s (old text based MUDs) that are still running today as pay-to-play. The costs of running a couple of servers and maintenance on those servers without expansions/development/updates is only a few hundred subscribers. As long as people pay, they will keep it running.

Personally, I think the game deserves a complete graphics overhaul like I think Ultima Online did a few years ago. Hopefully they'll finally ditch PS2 support (or just not do the graphics overhaul for the PS2) and really spruce up this game a bunch. It'd be nice.