FFXI was not for the casual gamer if you intended on doing anything "end game"
Leveling parties were brutal, from level 15-75 you pretty much required 5 other people to play with. Consisting of a tank, healer, support, damage dealers. Some people found it really hard to put up with this, the communities died out quickly. Server sizes were about 3000-5000 people, depending on when you played.
Japanese and NA played on the same servers, and there was an "Auto translate" function which allowed you to get across the language barriers to function together in the game, this feature will be in FFXIV as well.
If you liked WoW, you probably won't like Final Fantasy online. If you hated how easy WoW was and how annoying little kids were, then final fantasy might be the game for you.
It's hard to say how much FFXIV has improved over FF11's flaws, I haven't read much of the alpha/beta testers reviews.
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