I happen to know someone who is close enough with se to have gotten to do a 4 hour testing of alpha first look of ff14(she is in distribution with them) and she frapsed a lot of it and showed a couple of her closer friends. Due to nondisclosure coulndt really show it to more than a couple of close friends but it looks great gameplay seems smoother than 11 and a lot of the announced changes seem to be addressing almost every negative point in 11 while keeping its unique gameplay and feel from other mmos.
;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D
Very excited for beta since i have reactivated pc version of 11 and redeemed 13 code for the best chance at getting in first batch of beta 1.

Will be interesting to see how this affects wow's playerbase since ff11 got to around 1 million subs before mmos were very popular and wasnt released in nearly as many countries as wow and was much less polished since the industry lacked a lot of polish in mmos at the time.
My armature guess would be stabilizing around 2 mill in jap kor us and eur with at least 20-40 percent of those transferring from wow as their main mmo they play(not saying they cant play more than one.) If they fix the endgame content to be more fun(long respawns and botting on hnm's) i think it could do much better.

I really hope they learn from aion's mistakes of their disastrous launch and have systems in place to precent afkers from bogging servers and putting botting and gold sellers under some control. Also with the vast improvement of console custimazation and downloading capability i would like to see some ui custimazation available though hopefully more controlled than wows ridiculous amount of addons.

Also semi excited about the sw mmo but very cautiously optimistic due to having still not seen a sci fi mmo that i truly love(eve had great concept just never got into it)

Also intested to see how blizz reacts to its realese as this is the first legit mmo franchise to release another game during wow's reign.