Forgive me if i'm being ignorant, but I haven't played in a while and I noticed A Realm Reborn has been gathering a bit of attention as of late

I did play version 1.0 and despite the horrible negative reviews it got, I thought it was a decent game and I knew it was going to be remade into A Realm Reborn eventually, however, when I learned I was about a month short of getting legacy status, I thought I would have to start over from scratch which was something I sorely did not want to do, so I decided it was probably time to move on to another game (which ended up being GW2)

Later, I got a letter saying that my characters could be transfered to new servers, which kind of made me consider getting ARR, so I transfered my characters over in case I ever wanted to get the game

Now, more recently, alot of my friends over in GW2 were talking about how excited they were for ARR, how they played the beta, and how awsome it was. This, along with the fact that I presumably get to keep my old characters pretty much solidified my decision to get FFXIV ARR and I ended up pre-ordering it

So, now, for those who did play the beta, I was wondering what's changed between version 1.0 and ARR?