Quote Originally Posted by Kalgeth View Post
Since you took my post personally, I am guessing you identify as one of the aforementioned category of consumer. I will explain my point of view, which is all it will ever be nor will I claim it to be fact. We can sit here and type scenarios and examples that support our opinion. Early access is early access for a reason, if not why keep the official date for the 7th? Think logically about it, this period is to gauged how things are running, almost like an open beta, with the expectation to resolve any major impacting issues before the release date. This also plays into legal and service agreements. My opinion is that people demanding compensation for things that are not in the control of a company is laughable. Do you blame your cell phone company for allowing the spam calls we experience regarding your cars warranty? No. That same logic can be applied to this scenario, the number of people who want to play is not a controlled factor, can they prepare for it, of course. Will it still negatively affect consumers, yes. Do I have a solution, no does SE, perhaps they are working on it. However, demanding to notify the FTC and any other entity of this type is crazy.
Sure, these things happen. Of course they do but that doesn't mean companies should get a pass when they can't provide services or they mess up. Do you think they would give YOU a pass for a few days if you couldn't pay your subscription on time? If you called them up and said, "Hey, so my budget is off this month because of things beyond my control and it's early days where I'm going to test it out and look for issues, almost like an open beta, before I finalize it. Is it cool if I miss my payment by a few days while i work out the bugs?" You think that would fly? If you don't reel corporations in they'll try to get away with all sorts of shady practices. And that's why we have bodies like the FTC. They exist for a reason. It's to keep companies in line and protect consumer rights. If you don't see the value in that then I have some oil I'd like to sell you.

I used to work in telecom. And back then, we used to bill people a month in advance for local service. If they disconnected before their billing period ended, say 3 days before, we would credit them back those 3 days on their last bill because they didn't have service. Which, logically, makes sense. If this goes on for say 3 days, what's wrong with giving people back 3 days? What's so laughable about that? It seems to me to be the sensible thing to do.

I see where you're going with the spam caller comment but it's not an apples to apples comparison. SE can't predict the number of people that want to play at any given time, true. But they do know their capacity relative to their customer count and this is not their first time doing an expansion. Besides, as the provider of a service, the onus is on SE to make that service available to their subscriber base. Not on the subscriber base to to limit itself to what SE can accommodate.