Yeah, the 3 opening towns (Bastok, Windurst, and San'Doria) are all pretty dead unless you're near the auction house or mog house entrance because most players generally stay in Jueno or one of the outland towns when they go to towns.  About the only time you're going to see large amounts of players in those three towns is during one of the holiday events or they're about to do a Dynamis run.

Once you get outside that opening area though, there are a lot of people (or were, haven't played in well over a year now).  Sadly there's just not a lot of a reason to go to those beginning areas once you get to level 20 or so.

And once you hit 20 and go for your first run to Jueno, now that's fun.  You have to run through a pretty high level (for your level at least) zone and it can get interesting depending on what direction you come from. 

Eh... I guess I'm more for instant gratification.  The combination of few people around with an interface that was painful to use (where is my freaking Esc options menu!?), and a few other things just made it unpleasant.  I have a good friend who loves the game (he's trying to get Beastmaster and Summoner atm).  I know it can be fun since he likes it.

I just never saw that stuff myself in the trial period.

The free trial was 2 months ago. Don't talk about things when you don't know all the details.

I've never played WoW though so I'll refrain from commenting on that.

I just know that FFXI was a boring and disappointing experience for me.

Yea, FFXI changed since those 2 months, a lot.

Only new thing I know of is level sync. Thats's about it though.

Yes, bashing me would not end well.

Also, FFXI is garbage.  The animations are stiff, the interface is poor, the community is practically non-existant, and the control setup is so different from most modern PC games that it's painfully obvious that SE was just making it up as they went along.  I did the free month trial and hated it.