I too have dial-up....and yes, I had to go through a 8 hour download on the first patch... But don't despair, FFXI is a basically lag free game unless you have over 25 or 30 ppl on screen... I live in New York and there's something screwd up with the phone lines so...no DSL. Also, I have a year contract with Dish Network so I can't get cable!!! About the servers, well you can't choose your server, it's random. But you can create your character, then when your on the page to link your character to a handle, hit escape then look to see what World your character is on. If you don't like it, delete that char and make an identical one. It usually doesn't take too long to find a specific World. I play on Fairy and most of the ppl there are pretty nice. I haven't encounterd any real mean people. Good luck and have fun!
^^
{edit: If you get disconnected from the internet while downloading the patch, you can start from the same place you left off when you got dissconnected.}
Edited, Tue Jan 20 22:02:14 2004 by AkaSenshiKenshin