Final nail in the coffin for FFXIV?

The only news I seem to be hearing lately about FFXIV seems to be bad news and I think this could actually be the final nail in the coffin for the game. It seems that Square Enix in their infinite undiscovery wisdom have decided to add a limiting feature on the game. After 8 hours your character will start to earn less experience which degrades over a further 7 hours. After this your character will stop earning experience completely. To make matters worse, this "feature" is on a weekly timer which means you effectively have 8 hours a week to play the game at full capacity.

Square Enix say this is to level the playing field for those of us who aren't free to play on a full time basis. I'm in this category and I still think this is a ridiculous thing to do. They think this is going to limit the hardcore players from playing too much, what's going to end up happening is after 15 hours of levelling a week, players are going to grind for materials/reputation/items instead.

I think they could only really get away with something like this in a free to play business model but the fact that Square Enix are expecting you to pay a monthly fee and then limit the time you can actually progress in the game sounds like robbery to me and it's looking less and less likely that I'll be subscribing past the free 30 days that come in the box.