I can't believe I'm saying this, but I really do think I'm going to miss Play Online.
I'm not going to miss the extra steps that I had to go through every time I wanted to play the game. But what I will is the fact that my "friend" relationship was based around an underlying account that was associated with multiple characters, and allowed me to even be in touch with players on completely different Worlds.
I created two characters during Phase 3 and I noticed right away that the friend list I set up on my initial character did not transfer to my 2nd character. I can see how that might be a good thing for some players, particularly if they create an alt to "get away" from their main character's connections. But I want my friends to know I'm online even when I'm on an alt. But I guess I can live with that.
However, just in the last few days I learned that I have some old FFXI friends who are planning to play FFXIV, and they are going to be joining a World that some of their other friends had already picked out. Meanwhile, I'm already on a different World with a handful of other friends from FFXI. So I'm probably going to wind up making a character on two different worlds. I really wish that I didn't have to log into each one to find out which of my friends happen to be online in each World. And if I happen to decide that I want to kill some time playing on World A, I wish that my friends on World B could see that I'm indeed online on my other character rather than simply seeing that I'm offline.
Anyone else feel this way? Or am I missing some way to manage my online status and friend's list to overcome these issues?