Will people please stop bitching about the payments starting up, guess what? It's a game company and without money THERE IS NO GAME.

You've had 1 year free to play the game, and now SE has 2 choices:

1: Startup payments and fully develop FFXIV into FFXIV 2.0
2: Barely update FFXIV untill they run out of money or no longer wish to blow money away.

I am personally happy to pay because they have done a great job at turning things around so far, FFXIV was in development for about 6 years, yoshi and his team are redesigning the entire thing in 1.5 - 2 years.