Quote Originally Posted by Avirex View Post
i'm pretty sure they said that xi will go down when the 2.0 beta starts as they need the time to work on transfering our characters along with other aspects of getting 2.0 ready for launch.
This.

It's been implied servers will go down, and an unspecified amount of time later the beta servers will go up. they need to install the new engine etc. aand do some testing before alpha/beta servers go 'live' for outside testing.