I've been moaning all this time because I couldn`t get one, so it would be a shame not to use it.

Although I know I'll spend more time downloading, patching and waiting for the servers to revive than anything else. Such is life.

Edit: I downloaded the base setup file, it goes "downloading version update files, please wait" and it just stands there with no progress whatsoever. How typical, nothing less from SE :D

Edit: It even has music! Also, it's been two hours and it's stuck at the second version file.

heh, I'm still stuck on the first one. its seriously pissing me off.

some people say there is a way around it by using torrent download but, i cant seem to get the files to work somehow, so i gave up on that.

I'm not playing it now, since it won't work well on my laptop (choppy) but my fiance has been playing it. Since I was into the early beta testing, it was Limsa only, as the region, but now we've seen both Ul'dah and Gridania as well, I can say that Gridania is my favourite, followed by Ul'dah and then Limsa.

Gridania looks amazing both in the village and out of it. The story for it looks the best imo, and quite comical. Oh and MOOGLES! >w< So cute! I like the mysterious forest mood of it.

Ul'dah looks great in the city walls, quite Persian or Arab looking, with the market stands and such. I loved it's opening cutscene. The reason I don't like it as much is that outside of the walls, the landscape is quite boring. I'm not a fan of deserts/wastelands areas. I'd rather see nicer landscape when fghting and such... Spend my time elsewhere.

Limsa is the contrary of Ul'dah. I find it boring in the city walls and the story there isn't very appealing to me... Maybe it's because I've seen it so much that I'm tired of it! XD The landscape outside is nice though.

The "advantage" of playing the beta is that you can explore areas way before anyone else does. My fiance vantured way beyond Gridania, in fact to the region near Ishgard (?)... He was just running through avoiding to aggro ennemies. XD Cause it's a high level area. One normal hit is over 1500 damage so...

Anyway, the game's really beautiful. Once the PS3 version comes out, he's going to buy it and I might play the game sometimes on the PC, but for now, he's playing on it.

lol

i've been downing for over 40 hours now and currently am at 15.5%

It looks like it is speeding up to an average of 15 Kb/s... yay!

I can't re-download the stupid install because I got pissed off before with no beta key

SE released a patch that fixes the patcher from getting stuck. Lol.

I figured out the torrent thing. after downloading it i put the patch H2010.08.30.2000 in folder d96437e6. saves me a lot of time because it took about 2 hours to download it on utorrent, i suggest everyone do the same.

tips:

You'll find the torrent file in here;

C:>Users"your pc name">Documents>My Games>FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version>downloads>ffxiv-beta>d96437e6>metainfo>  H2010.08.30.2000  <-- torrent file. double click this if you're using utorrent.

after download is finished put it in here;

C:>Users"your pc name">Documents>My Games>FINAL FANTASY XIV Beta Version>downloads>ffxiv-beta>d96437e6>patch   <--- put patch H2010.08.30.2000 in there.

And then you're done. happy hunting

I stopped downloading at 20% and started looking for other ways to find the patches. Just downloaded a 4.7gig patch in 2 hours, hopefully this will do the trick...

Almost a week in open beta, this should have been easier...

used the torrent right? make sure you put the patch in the right folder. use the steps i listed above.

Got in a couple of times yesterday, now the lobby server is having issues. :/

Edit : Oh, there's an update. All world servers are down. :(