Their perspective of the word soon doesnt bother me, not like next week.

I said it somewhere else, I could see them going into alpha testing now, tweaking it, polishing off some of the things people have mentioned from Gamescom interviews, pic reveals and even the videos floating around online. Closed Beta will begin after that, with XIV players taking a priority on the que list for that and open beta later on. I would forsee CB lasting a month or two, get actual player feedback, continue tweaking, bug fixes, glitch works, etc and about the same time they're ready to start OB, shut the servers down and run OB while they transfer data, run stress tests with more participants than CB allowed and run it for as long as they need too until all the data is transferred completely, no major meltdown errors in the way and start distributing the actual ARR client software at that point. So really..I dont forsee a true shut down until Mid-Late October.