That FFXI update record is why I have not given up hope on this game to be honest.

To know that they screwed up this bad before, and made a great mmo in the end that half a million ppl played for almost a decade.

To comment on the Cutural thing with JP vs Na players.

I think the issue between the JP and NAs is almost all a cultural thing. In general the NAs are more demanding, very short on patients, and extremely vocal on everything. On Xi with the partys a JP party would last for 3-5 hrs with almost no one leaving if they did they always got a replacement before they left, the JPs worked together and communicated with each other. In the NA partys people would just bail when they wanted out of the party and at least for awhile at the start they did what every they wanted to in partys... that is one of the reasons why JP players stopped partying with us alot, we where stupid, arrogant, stubborn noobs.

Even now on the forums you can see the difference between the mentality of the playerbases. I think JP players had 380 topics but they are probably about 10:1 in population of overall FFXIV players atm, NAs have around 1000 post... The thing is you will something like "I dislike how the targeting system is" on the JP forum with 300-400 responses of players giving thier opinions and how they want it fixed but on the NA forum you see 30 threads about the same thing with the same 100-300 ppl complaining on each of them with things like "yea this is why the game fails, this game sucks".

Using Google Translator I have not seen 1 troll in the JP forums, and there are at least 3-4 here who are very vocal in the NA forums. Just literally 2 different worlds, we all have the same complaints but approach them so differently.