Quote Originally Posted by aerolol View Post
But unless you are quite proficient on reading and typing in japanese, you really shouldn't play on JP servers.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with this statement. I play on a JP Legacy server (Selbina/Ridill was my server I started 1.0 on so I just stuck with it), and I have no trouble finding English speakers there (I'm in Australia and the JP data centre is closer to us than the US one). And even then, I've found I've had no trouble communicating with Japanese players on the server either - a lot of Japanese people can actually speak English after all.

And before you pass judgement not only were the 1.0 servers all located in Japan, FFXI has also only had a Japan-located data centre since it launched in 2002 with no problems. Really, there's little difference between the JP and NA data centres other than latency, so really it's more about trying to find the one with the most stable connection that should be dictating your choice.