make this free to play already just the base game with no expansions maybe

As the title says, I'm going to start FFXI (i know, bad idea, but i don't care :D) I wanted to know if there are people that started out fresh too. If so we could prolly play together. Just let me know. Still downloading those freaking updates -.- 8 hours remain T^T...

I boot up[ steam that updates, run steam, the after a while FFXI starts uodating......now its suspended and it will not move beypound 95%. What to do?

A friend and myself bought this game many months ago when it was on sale. Today we finally got around to giving it a try. Well, so we thought.... The registration and login process is RIDICULOUSLY complex and drawn out. After registering for both PlayOnline and Square Enix, and handling lots of different usernames and passwords, I finally managed to login (20 minutes later) only to find out I couldn't play the game because of some rubbish abount ContentID's. ContentID? What is that? It's not mentioned any...

Anyone else having problems after last nights update?