I love the Stormblood expansion so far!

[Syfurion]

I can only assume the people bothered by this have never actually seen an MMO expansion launch, because this was honestly pretty smooth all-in-all. The trainwreck that was launch day for Warlords of Draenor comes to mind as one that went far, far worse. I'm enjoying myself, and I'm enjoying RDM far more than i expected to, given my general distaste for casters. I got no real serious issues to complain about.

[rabbitzero]

I can only assume the people bothered by this have never actually seen an MMO expansion launch,

I've been playing mmos since late 90s, and this is pretty bad, 1.0 bad. Locked out of actually doing the main appeal of this game, the story, by bad design. Crashes yesterday, even while trying to do class quests, and some to desktop. Hellgate: London was still the worst, with actual blue screens, but this is up there in bad ones. Especially since they have to had known this was going to happen, since it happened every main story expansion.

[Syfurion]

I've been playing mmos since late 90s, and this is pretty bad, 1.0 bad. Locked out of actually doing the main appeal of this game, the story, by bad design. Crashes yesterday, even while trying to do class quests, and some to desktop. Hellgate: London was still the worst, with actual blue screens, but this is up there in bad ones. Especially since they have to had known this was going to happen, since it happened every main story expansion.

Ah jeez, I'd completely removed HG:L from my memory, that was a thing.
I'm not saying that Squeenix is completely free from blame, more trying to say that 'Thing's can be so much worse than they are'. Being locked out of the MSQ is certainly a black spot on the release, and I won't try to deny that at all, but the game is at least working in general. They should've (and probably did) see this coming, but if the behemoth that is Blizzard can't figure it out, I don't hold out hope someone else really will.

[Nestama]

I can only assume the people bothered by this have never actually seen an MMO expansion launch, because this was honestly pretty smooth all-in-all. The trainwreck that was launch day for Warlords of Draenor comes to mind as one that went far, far worse. I'm enjoying myself, and I'm enjoying RDM far more than i expected to, given my general distaste for casters. I got no real serious issues to complain about.

SB's launch has been smooth, but I think most people stuck on the solo-instance quest would much prefer the issues HW had. HW's launch was spotty, but for those who could enter pretty much had little to no issues, while those who couldn't spent hours trying to get in. The very first solo instance did not have the same issues SB's first instance (and second, it seems) does. You got in, beat the two jerks and you were done. No bottleneck or 'lines,' as far as I can recall.

I definitely recall making it to the Dravanian Forelands within 24 hours. I'm still in The Fringes. Over 24 hours later. Because I can't enter this one instance (and I did decide to try and level up my RDM via dungeons. I got 90k'd, couldn't get back in and was booted out of the dungeon 10 minutes later).