Final Fantasy XI Online

The Good
The game design (rules, world, etc.) is the antithesis of everything I learned to hate about EverQuest:

• It's hard or impossible to "grief" other players.
• There are interesting and fun things to do even for relatively low-level characters - you aren't considered meaningless and valueless for your first 1000 hours of play.
• The character classes are balanced in natural-feeling ways, and the "subjob" system allows you to hybrid any two classes in a completely orthagonal way.
• Crafting skills are moderately profitable even early on. "Player driven economy" is not a catchphrase excuse for lack of balance in crafting results vs each other and vs monster drops. Profitability at low levels is not treated as a bug that must be expunged at all costs.
• There are enough monsters suitable for any given character level, spread around well enough within their areas, that "camping" is neither necessary nor possible.
• There are no \"Ubermonsters wandering each zone specifically to give you the "fun" of being squashed flat for no reason.
• The Auction House and Linkshell systems make /shouts uncommon and rarely abused, and the Auction House in particular means the player economy runs 24/7 without requiring buyer and seller to be logged on simultaneously.

The game is really designed around parties, although not as drastically as EQ - soloing is hard, but if you have the right classes even a 2-player party is viable. Given the ways every class can contribute equally but differently to a party, it's very easy to find a "pickup" party.

**The Bad**
But since parties are so integral to the game, the arbitrary way they made it impossible to start characters simultaneously on the same server with a group of friends is inexcusable. In order to choose a server, you must have a "world pass", a password for the specific server. World Passes must be purchased in-game on the desired server, for substantial amounts of game currency. They have a limited lifespan. So if you want to play with your friends, one of you must create a character, play long enough to amass the cost, and then distribute the World Pass string to the others. Then I suppose the first player could delete their original character or change jobs to start even with the others, but it's terribly artificial and clumsy.

Aside from the World Pass problem, the other major annoyance is that all the servers are in Japan. North American or European players will find the game response very patchy, as the "weather on the Internet" causes high variability in communications lags. While auto-running you will speed up and slow down, sometimes there is a delay of a second or two in responding to movement commands, etc. Actual warping is pretty rare, but in only 20 hours or so of play I've already had one case where my 2-player party was wiped out because warping caused us to target different monsters instead of the same one, and end up outnumbered instead of in a good but winning fight.

**The Bottom Line**
The first MMORPG that has caught my interest after I got burnt on EverQuest. A few others have been notable in trying to reduce the bad behavior that anonymous avatars seem to bring out in people, or have had an interesting game world, or otherwise gotten one thing right. But this is the first one I've felt there was a real chance I'd be playing for more than a month or two.