Quote Originally Posted by _C-a-e-r-i-t-h_ View Post
You forget that WoW had a failure of a launch too. I mean, servers were down constantly, there was always a line to get in, game was imbalanced, etc. It recovered. AoC failed on its own merits.

Taking a full MMO and making it F2P is basically giving up on it. The F2P model works for little things that nobody cared about to begin with like FlyFF, but you can't expect to cover your expenses on something the size of FFXIV just by selling mounts.

FFXIV will go subscription as soon as S-E is certain that people will pay the subscription fee. The only reason it's F2P now is because nobody in their right mind would pay to play it.
WoW recovered based on it's gameplay. Servers were unstable because they didn't expect such a huge demand or that the game would become that popular. People can forgive things like that if the game is fun to play. This game isn't.