Starting to look like a long downtime for 2.0

[Mijin]

Yoshida also has a unique challenge - unlike any other in the MMO genre – how to handle the switchover from the current version of FFXIV to A Realm Reborn. He explained to me that this won’t be a gradual process, but instead a pre-planned event will herald the start of over a month of downtime. “The current version that we have now, the players are still playing and learning about the story that we have now. But one day there’s going to be a big event. And during this event, the servers are going to go down.” That date has since been confirmed as November 11th, 2012.
“This is because all of the player data has to be prepared for the new Realm Reborn client, and that will take time. So that we have time to do this, we need to shut down the servers to begin the data transfer. We pretty much already know that with the number of characters that exist right now - hundreds of thousands of characters - to physically convert all that data with the hardware limits is going to take at least a month. So we can tell you right now that the servers will be down for at least a month.” This won’t be a quiet time for players, with plenty of beta testing still to be done before the servers come back up with the new game. Yoshida also announced a poll in his most recent producer letter, where he suggested leaving the servers running even though character progress wouldn’t be migrated over.

Source: http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=30484&storypage=1

As I've been expecting, the evidence is already starting to show that we're in for a long downtime. The last time Yoshida commented on this it was, "It will take longer than a few days, but it's something I hope wont take as long as a month [laughs]"

I predict there are going to be a lot more problems than expected in beta, they basically rebuilt the game in a little over a year... If they're going to take the time to implement all the changes before the release I think we'll be lucky to see the game before march.