I was bored and tried playing FF14 about a year ago. You need to do the usual download a launcher to download the game, fine. It asks you to log in before it'll download, fine. It crashes ~10% of the way through downloading the game. Not great but you can make it by restarting the launcher and trying again. And again and again, about a dozen times. It does eventually finish though, and I did almost successfully make a character. Except after making my character you have to choose a server instance - and every single instance in the NA server I could find was "full". I don't know if it was actually full or erroring but I gave up at that point.
The buttonology is cryptic. Like you asked tasked enterprise java devs to write frontend in jquery.
At least that's how I remember it. Game might be fun, but I'll never know.
I played on my Playstation when I played a few years back, fortunately it was a seamless process! As parent comment said though, subscription process was almost user hostile for some reason.
So you didn’t even get to the final boss, purchasing a sub.
While I played it I always had this dirty feeling imagining what the backend code must look like. Sends chills down my spine.