I read the reviews and had to try it myself because I knew it could not be that bad
The teleport system makes it very easy to travel from town to town so you do have to run around the the entire map. After a quest you have the option to return to camp (town) unlike wow where you had to run all the way back to town to turn in quest. Also you receive the reward as soon as you complete the quest.
Interface is not as bad as everyone thinks. It was not even hard at all for me to figure out what to do and how to equip equipment or abilities. I guess lazy Americans just wants everything to be explained in the game (yes i'm american too).
There is however one huge huge problem. The only problem I truly see is the computer running the game. I bought a new computer and built it myself. It has a ATI 5970, quad core 3.06, 4 gigbs of ram. If you dont have a strong computer its a pain to play. The graphics are amazing but only if you have an amazing computer. Yes you can play it with downgraded graphics but it does the game no justice. I dont care what anyone says, if you want to be a wow killer then your target market should not be high graphics gamers, it should be everyone. Wow doesnt have the best of graphics but almost any computer can play it. To me this is the only thing wow has over FF14.
Honestly you need to get the game and try it yourself. There talk about it being new so it has a lot of issues, but I can not find anything. If i was to change anything about FF14 it would be the crafting. Character should not be able to do every job, but just specialize in one or two. They need to focus more on PvE instead of half the game being crafting.