every time someone says "a chip shortage, or they can't find more servers".

[basilbc]

But that's not true...they have, albeit slowly, upgraded their servers over the years, opened up new ones, new worlds, increased capacity. I've been with this game since ARR, I've been on the busiest server there is, I was there when you had to wait till 4 am to be able to just create your character before servers got upgraded, before new worlds were opened up.

I'm all for people being upset about not getting to play when they're paying a sub, I get it, but this random false rhetoric of "SE has always been dastardly greedy villains all along, they wanted this to happen, they didn't care, this is all their doing" is just so misguided from a logical perspective.

I've said it before I'll say it again; do you honestly think it's not in their most profitable interest to KEEP all those new extra subs they've gained? Do you not think they want to keep the hype and goodwill they've generated in the past 6 months? If you're willing to believe SE is so super greedy as to not upgrade to save money, you should be willing to believe they're so greedy they'll want to keep all the new people subbed for as long as possible, not letting them all unsub and go away due to not being able to play.

I 100% believe that SE, like many companies across a plethora of products, kept as close to the margins as they possibly could to maximize profit. It’s shortsighted, but also common practice and understandable if you’re crunching the numbers. And they could and did upgrade servers and add stuff as needed, but only just.

Now that an unprecedented collection of situations has happened, SE and a lot of other companies didn’t have the materials or time to fix this particular problem. In the slower moving world of production, the shortage caught everyone off guard, so there was no chance of little server upgrades or additions when it became clear that it might be needed for EW

So I’d argue that yes, SE’s big sin is being greedy like all other companies, which is why many of them got hit so hard by the timing of this shortage. But getting angry at the dev team won’t fix it, acting like it isn’t real won’t fix it, cause it isn’t fixable rn. It’s a real conundrum.