All you appologists and lying to yourself. No one is criticizing the game itself, it is absolutely wonderful, which makes the rest of the problems even more unbearable. How does someone or some group who can build something so great, then go to hell in a hand basket? The problemSSSSS are many, and have to do with just about every aspect OTHER than the game itself.

1. Purchase/Order/Registration Logistics - Their big problem here was they SHOULD of went with 6 codes on 6 websites to register one account, instead of 4. Really, who the hell came up with this horrendous system of numerous codes on numerous websites, all having to be entered by the user (yeah users don't make mistakes), then on top of that there is some weird region issue with these codes (why I have no idea, as anyone, anywhere.. cna play on any server... where the fuck is a seperation of regions other than your convoluted websites that we already pointed out were terrible ideas to begin with?)
2. Customer Service - Saturday Morning at 5:00am EST I was logging in, or trying to. At 5:15 I was able to get to the character select screen (already got a guy on Leviathan) and went into character creation to roll a name I wanted to reserve. By 5:20 I was done with creation and saw LEVIATHAN LOCKED... really? 20 minutes after launch? For an ALTERNATE CHARACTER? I'M ALREADY ON LEVIATHAN, I CAN'T PLAY BOTH TOONS AT ONCE, SO IT IS ILLOGICAL TO PREVENT CURRENT SUBSCRIBERS FROM MAKING ALT's ON THEIR SERVER! At 5:30am I went to the forums, and was amazed to see 23 customer service reps logged onto the forums (Shows them in a row on the bottom, and yes I counted), however they are apparently here simply to ban people who voice any opinion that they do not agree with (no not me, but I have viewed several posts that resulted in bans and suffice it to say freedom of speech apparently is alien to Japan), there were no announcements, no answers to problems, no consoling the thousands of people who paid for this game and could not play.... nothing. What we did get was a new Twitter account on Saturday Night.... FF_XIV_NA apparently wasn't good enough to tweet updates on, they made FFXIV_NEWS_NA. However, support tickets go unanswered, copy/paste responses are abundant on the announcements and forums and in all of beta 4 and early access and now release, apparently no one at square enix is smart enough to suggest a simple afk check to kick folks smart enough not to log out once they get in.
3. Networking Department/Designers... what ever you call yourselves.... You knew exactly how many copies of the game were sold, so you knew just how many folks would want to play (AS WELL AS THEIR COUNTRY.... remember useless region errors?) .... so I'm lost... did you not know how many people could play per server or did you get the math wrong? Beta 4 you knew exactly how many invites you sent out, knew exactly how many people registered their beta code.... again... did you not know how many people one server would hold? how many servers it would take to enable those invited to play? I know it is launch, but it seems to me every problem you have had was avoidable...

SO I am back to... HOW does a team design such a wonderful game (the really hard part) and then totally fuck up every aspect of it's release from selling it, registration logistics, support and simple computer networking common sense. And no, Aion was not NEARLY as bad, Queue at least let's you get in line, afk log out makes room for others. The only game that I can think of that had this much trouble with things NOT related to the software was EQ1, and those guys were breaking barriers and building the infrastructure for these games as they went.... and to be honest I never felt they were not doing their best. With SE it is obvious they just don't give a shit, they have not added any NA/EU servers even though they have almost all been locked and unable to support a full load, they have not put in a simply thing like logging off afk players, and they don't care enough to at least hire one guy to post original believable reports of how they are handling the issues, rather than copy paste broad excuses with no hope for improvement.

So yeah, the definition of a clusterfuck.