The servers are still pretty populated, but I would suggest you buy anything, ANYTHING other than FFXI, the entire game is one huge grind. You just sitting in the corner pulling one mob at a time, taking 5min to kill it, then waiting for the next pull. After level 10 that's the entire game, that, nothing else, just that. The enemy's change, the locations change, but you'll still be sitting there, pulling and killing one unit at a time, forever.
Hell, compared to FFXI Lineage2 is chock full of action and adventure! At least in lineage the spells didn't look like ass, you weren't guided through seperate areas by cliffs all over the place, you could actually go in the water and *gasp* you actually moved around when fighting (though I wouldn't suggest lineage 2 either, it's grind is almost as bad as FFXI's).