I'm surprised they haven't made an announcement by now about a fix, and I'm a tad anxious about it myself. I'm playing on faith at the moment that they'll fix it in a satisfactory manner. If they don't, I'm just wasting my time. I'd rather they stall as long as they need to to come up with a good solution than rush in with fix that doesn't fix anything.

The question is, how close to the deadline is this going to be pushed?

The day of or the day before seems like pushing it to close. People need to take care of whatever procedures, and don't want a service interruption. Even a fix two weeks before, well... if you're anxious now, let's see how you're doing in two weeks when time is really running out.

If I were SE, I would do a few things:...

1) I'd make an official update announcement about what exactly they're going to do in the next update. Get people distracted, get them talking about the game itself.

2) Give the playerbase feedback--stay in touch. Even if it's just,"We're listening, please keep talking about it. We have a lot to do, and finding a workable solution will take some time. We are sorry that we can't anything specific just yet." Even if it's empty and doesn't provide anything new, keep talking. It makes it seem on a superficial level that we aren't kept in the dark when in fact we are.

3) Consider moving the date back by as much time as is necessary to get everything in order.

Making new threads about it though won't do much. There's probably... 2-4 dozen threads about the subject. Frankly till I saw this thread I thought it had been discussed, and everything had been said and re-said about it, and it the conversation had died down a little. In fact, someone really cool and smart declared a moratorium on new threads about this.