Stranded off Home Realm

[Quuoooote]

This was posted on the 18th and it still included that world travel would be disabled then. The edit didn't change that bit of information or add it in. The edit only added in that people would need to return to their home worlds via the login menu. So people had over a week at least to make preparations if it mattered to be on their home world prior to servers going down.

That's true, but still doesn't change the fact that it's irresponsible to assume that every player will read and strictly heed a news article outside of the game. I'm also acutely aware of what the news post said pre-edit, which was "Aether/Primal/Crystal: Will be unavailable for travel." This does not imply in any way that the game will be unplayable if you choose to remain on another Data Center; only that travel from home to another DC will be impossible. The latter portion, "If your character logged out while visiting a World on these data centers, they will need to be returned to their Home World via the login menu", was included an hour before maintenance ended, at which point it'd be too late to do anything about. My personal preparations included logging out on Aether so that I could play there with my static members while DC travel is disabled for the first few weeks of content, and were based off of the information presented in the news post prior to maintenance. I was willing to endure lower login priority since that's what the news post said at the time — not that the game would become soft locked.

But even assuming the news post is sacred: If it says right now that players are supposed to return home to play the game, and the return home feature is clearly non-functional... What are players supposed to do? Again, the warning should have been in place to mitigate issues so that the outlier group would be smaller and cause less much congestion sorting themselves out. Having absolutely no resources or infrastructure in place to situate people in the wrong places is clearly on SE's hands.