aspiring new player,convince me to play! :p

[Niwashi]

what i recommend is give the game a try, the first month is completely free.

No, it's not free. Purchase of the game includes one month of access to it, and then after the month that you paid for that way, you can buy additional months through the Mog Station. But just because you're buying them through a different place doesn't make either free.

I do, however, agree with the advice to give it a try. If you're interested enough to come here asking the question, you're interested enough that it's worth giving a try, and that's the only way to really determine if you like it. I wasn't sure when I bought the game whether I'd stick around for long or not, but based on how much I like the single-player FF games, I decided there was enough likelihood of liking this game to be worth the initial purchase. I had enough fun playing that first month that I decided to renew my subscription. After five and a half months, I'm still here, still playing nearly every day, and still enjoying it.

Technically, there are no EU-specific servers; FFXIV divides it's servers between the JP servers (which are located in Tokyo) and the NA/EU servers (which I think are located in Montreal, Canada). However, the unofficial server website http://www.arrstatus.com/ lists Ragnarock (Legacy), Cerberus, Lich, Moogle, Odin, Phoenix, and Shiva as "Europe", so make of that what you will.

Even though both EU and NA servers are located together in Canada, they are designated separately. I think this is in order to make it easier for players to sort themselves onto servers with others in similar timezones (or at least that's one of its effects, whether it was the reason or not).

So if the concern over wanting Euopean servers has to do with ping times on your connection to them, there's no difference there between NA and EU servers, but if the concern is over being in the same timezones of other players, you can pick the appropriate server group for wherever you're at.

This has been on my mind since release,I love the FF games,liked the beta a lot but SOMETHING keeps holding me back...I don't know what.

Could be the server issues at launch or because none of my friends wants to play or because I don't have enough time for a sub game...

My guess is that if you liked it during beta, you'll still like it now.

Although the server issues at launch were pretty atrocious (and I'm sure we lost a lot of players who gave up on the game in that first couple weeks) they did get resolved and have not resurfaced. Now we don't seem to get any more server issues than what any MMO would. i.e. There are occasional lag issues, though those seem to affect some players more than others. (I myself have only had noticeable lag once in the last five months, and it only lasted a few moments.) There can also occasionally be an error when connecting, but that, too, is quite rare and (unless there's a real reason — like the servers being down for maintenance) can generally be resolved simply by trying to connect again.

As to whether you have enough time for a subscription based game, that's something only you can decide. This game can certainly eat up a lot of your time if you let it. If you have a lot of other interests and don't necessarily want one particular game to use enough of your time to be worth a monthly sub, you could perhaps get the game and subscribe somewhat sporadically. So buy it and spend your free time that next month playing, then let your sub expire and focus on other things for a month or two, then re-sub and play this for another month when you expect to have some more free time for it. Of course, whether that's a viable pattern for you or not depends on what else is using up your time.