To start off I want to point out that I enjoy this game a lot and I want to see it succeed because I don't ever intend on quitting. I've done nearly every quest, killed every NM, and been to every leve and node. I really love this game.

The problem i see however, is that most new players will find this game to be a convoluted mess, without any proper instructions on what to do, and lacking a functional database to look things up on. Here are some reasons why:

1. The world seems dead.
Anyone starting this game in Gridania or Limsa will experience what feels like a single player or -dead- game. Even with its last store expansion, FFXI had decently populated main areas, and once you hit level 10 you could head to the dunes which was almost -always- populated by at least 2 parties. In FFXIV there are almost no people in gridania or limsa and their surrounding areas. Further, the wards in the 2 cities are pretty well empty. I know i can never find -anything- in gridania, even for the guilds and jobs that are centered there. The degree of this centralization around Ul'Dah may differ across servers, but from what i've experienced and read, it seems to be the common occurrence.

2. The Quests in this game make this game seem inferior to other games.
So far i've completed 50 sidequests and believe i'm missing 3 or 4 from the small villages (yes the villages have sidequests).
None of these sidequests has had a useful reward. None have been useful for SP'ing, and you are able to kill the mobs without being on the quest. Most of the stories are pointless and don't contribute much to the game (ex. "i baked cookies, omg, give everyone in the city my cookies cuz i wanna make them popular" run to 5 ppl in the city and give them cookies and do /cheer... or something like that). There aren't any epically dramatic stories for the quests like FFXI had. And the quests are essentially useless gameplay wise (sp, gil, good items, etc). So what will a new player think of quests that are boring, repetitive, and essentially pointless? It seems to make the game feel more rushed and more cheap.

Now don't get me wrong, some of the quests are really cute or fun (goblin quest in limsa, 2 opo opo journal quests in grid), but the majority kind of fail. The even worse part, is that you get nearly identical quests in each city.

However, some of the guild quests (R20, 30, 36) are -amazing-. Like the botany quest, while kind of annoying, had a great storyline, great music, cute characters, good mini cutscenes, etc. On the other hand i found the mrd storyline to be fairly boring with confusing quests. So SE seems to be really hit-and-miss quest wise. Whereas in FFXI, they tended to be a lot more hit than miss.

3. Lack of direction
You start the game, solo to 20, have no idea if your supposed to party (which almost no one does), have no idea how to get a party because the party search system goes unused, have no idea if you're supposed to be only sp'ing on leves or how to get a low level leve party. FFXI had 1-10 near starter city, > Dunes > Qufim > Yuhtunga or other... etc. Like there was an established direction, you could get parties fairly easy, etc. When the game was first released, i wrote a guide for soloing 1-30. At the time you could choose from a bunch of mobs to fight and solo on. The guide got well over 30,000 views across the main forums and a lot of people seemed to be going to the multiple camps. However, with the SP system change none of the variance is viable any longer. If you're going to solo the only real choice you have now is Coblyns + behests. This is probably a huge factor as to why ul'dah became so popular. But the point is, this lack of variance in choice of what to do really makes the game seem inferior to other games. It also reduces any reason for exploration and new discoveries, making the game seem really bland.

4. Lack of Economy + Incentives.
I'm an economist so i'm really biased here. To me, an economy WITH INCENTIVES is essential to any MMO. This gives something for players to work towards, makes gil (or in game money) a desired good, and forces people to apply values to items in order to generate fairly constant short-term prices for all goods. This game currently lacks any incentives. In other words, there are no "really good" items for people to save up for or work towards. As a result, people often overpay for things, or undercharge for things. This has created a very unstable economy, prevented any trade in "rare" goods (since theres no incentive to go out and farm anything rare) and flooded the economy with gil.
Now imagine a new player joining the game. For all of us, we have had months to amass gil via leves (leading to most people averaging around 10mil or so). A new player would take months to reach this point. And since no one who has 10 mil has an incentive to craft low level gear and sell it for 5000-15000 or so (which would be affordable to a new player), low level characters lack a selection of equipment and gear. Now this really isn't a huge problem, but this game seems to have been designed around having all this choice in different gear and colours. And the economy has kind of erased that choice and the benefits of having so many different types of gear. In other words, new players will probably get frustrated fast and give up on the game. Now take it from an economist (and if there are economics majors out there i'm sure you will back me up on this), implementing a gil sink this late in the game is almost guaranteed to be ineffectual. This is because a lot of people who have already amassed gil and have taken a break will not partake in the gil sink and thus keep a certain amount of money around. Futher, there is no guarentee everyone will participate, and many intelligent people will realize that if they hold the money and others use it in the gil sink, they will have a huge advantage a year from now if prices do drop. In FFXI the only way SE seemed to pull money out of the economy was through mass-bans, and not in-game gil sinks. So balancing out the economy will be -very very very- difficult. And if anyone actually knows economics (like the actual models and math behind it) i would love to hear what your thoughts on it are.

So my overall point is this:
New players will be faced with a lot of useless and poorly implemented quests, a complicated and non-straight-forward leveling process, a fairly empty world, a problematic economy, at a huge disadvantage compared to current players, and with a lack of readily available info (ex. no quest lists or quest info in databases yet).
Most of these issues are -not- ones that will be fixed by future updates, but are inherent problems due to how the game has advanced.

As such, do you think that this game will face some serious problems in both attracting and maintaining a new player base, either in the near future or when it is released on PS3?