Not a failure?
  • Grindy
  • Copy-pasted terrain
  • Game lacked/lacks many normal features of many MMOs
  • Monthly fee removed, because they know they would lose a lot of subscribers
  • Entire development team fired
  • Average metacritic review on this game is something horrible, average 49/100 on 28 major critics

Okay, write it again. Not a failure? This is a huge failure in today's market. You can try and say it's not a failure in a different perspective (post above eg.), because I honestly know people are having fun with this game, that doesn't mean it's not fail.

For the record I played a ton of FFXI, and I wasn't hoping for a FFXI 2.0, was hoping for something different. We just got crap instead.