I think the reason why everyone is freaking out is...

[Synfrag]

Agree completely. $13 isn't bad and for the people riding on the "It's the concept, not the amount" wagon, boycotting isn't going to do anything good if you want to help for the future. It's everyone's choice to stay or go. If you want cookie cutter MMO with a few new features there are numerous other games.

Warning! Comparisons and Opinion to follow

Personally after seeing many MMO launches and continuing to play some I have the most hope for FFXIV.

Aion's launch for example, the first 3 months were terrible (and payed for). There wasn't much content, server outages, server rollbacks, almost no items and now 2 years later they have added only a handful of endgame instances, a "new" graphics engine which is a joke and completely broken the game by quadrupling drop rates. Their "content" patches were at 6-8 month intervals if even that vs. our 1-3 month intervals. What is NC Soft's development plan? Add more costumes and cosmetic garbage! Yay!

WoW cannot be used as a comparison for development because their budget dwarfs FFXIV. Not to mention they don't have to pay writers, modelers, animators, lighting artists or texture designers because it either doesn't exist or any 12 year old can do it in google sketchup

SE on the other hand is not only overhauling it's entire world, adding content and fixing broken things over the next 11-13 months but at the end of that it's dropping in our laps a whole new redesigned game for no additional cost. The time and money going into this project deserves our paying support. 1.19 was great, golden no but still great and come 1.20 or 1.21 I truly think it will be at it's launch ready state.

So we will begin paying for a launch ready game when it is launch ready, then getting a new 2.0 version for free. How do people argue with that logic?