Am I being realistic?

[MJFERN]

Even those that pre-ordered a physical copy were issued links to download the client for the EA. My mother, brother, and I all ordered physical and were issued links to download the client, on PC and PS3, and all were playing at one time this weekend. As I said before it makes no sense to call it "early" access if you redeem after launch date.

no one said anything about redeeming it late, just about having the same 'early access' time as everyone else.

and apparently the clarification from SE says that the extended EA time is simply to allow those who preordered a few extra days of time in server without their subscription time ticking away.

[Sav]

I'm not totally sure about what software people are having sent to them, since everyone who received early access was given a code and link to a download client.

They'll still need a license code to allow them to continue playing the game after official release. That'll be in the box being shipped to them.

(considering there are supposedly people who pre-ordered, received their codes, and then cancelled their pre-orders)

[Brises]

Some people pre-ordered the game who did not participate in the beta.

[Balzaque]

this is not an excuse, they are not a small indie company with close to none knowledge about mmos and server network, this is not their first mmo and really, how many mmos are out there right now? for me at least it is completely ridiculous for a company this big to just make such a huge mistake in estimating how much resources they need to give a descent experience to the players. issues like game bugs and other things are expected in launch but this kind of bad call is really ridiculous, so they never had a plan in case their game became a huge success on week 01?

the only thing i can think of to justify what happened this weekend is that they really though outside of japan it wouldnt be that big of a game and just ignored their own sales numbers or they had a really limited budget to allocate to NA/EU resources. even if some of this problems could be traced back to some software bugs it is clear that most (if not all) of those problems were related to their infrastructure just not being enough. and to be honest it still isnt, or else they wouldnt be regulating this hard on how many players could log at the same time. i believe the last time i had to fight a game this hard to be able to connect and play for a little bit was back in 2000.

at least i got to play for a while on saturday since i only got caught in this mess after finishing my lvl 15 class quest so i could play a little bit with another class =P

[MJFERN]

It's not unrealistic to look at a launch and say "Even if they didn't expect this many players for EA, they had to have expected them for full launch, so why can't the servers handle it." If they can't handle EA traffic, we're going to be mightily disappointed at full launch. (And yes, I know quite well how servers and traffic and peak times are handled I work in an environment where we deal with internet traffic every day, retailers call it peak planning. Even though you don't EXPECT peak every day, you have to be prepared for it).

Like I've seen many others posting, I've pretty much given up the hope that I'm going to really get to enjoy EA. I'd like to be able to enjoy the game beyond that, but right now, I have been kicked out of queues where I have been given a number 14 times. The other hundred plus attempts at getting in game have resulted in the simple '1017' error.

Shoddy. Very shoddy.