I'm of the mind that it's an utter shambles, not only have I paid for the time I'm supposed to be playing (by the fact I've shelled out for a pre-order when I have a copy of the beta 4 software which would allow me to have just paid the subs instead come Tuesday) but S-E themselves cannot communicate anything! The issues might not be as bad if we knew what the hell was going on within a few minutes (or gods forgive, in advance) but not single squeak to give us an idea of what's going on. Then you've got the rate limiting, fine but let us know via the loadstone or something which worlds are being limited due to issues so we know to come back later instead of getting nonsense error messages and having to try and figure it out ourselves.

Finally the producers have said the following as of a short while a go (nearly 2 days after this all started):

[EU] Character Creation Limitation (Aug. 25)

[EU] Character Creation Limitation (Aug. 25)

Hello, this is FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Producer and Director, Yoshida.

The maximum expected population limit is nearing for each World, and unless the current World simultaneous connection amount decreases, we are unable to open release the limitation.

In case we do release the limitation, there is a high chance that the corresponding World will crash or cause issues, and we are thinking that it will be difficult for us to release it for a while. We please ask you to consider playing in a World that has a low limitation.

We are sorry for any inconvenience that this may cause and ask to continue with your cooperation.
This just makes me worry as they SOLD OUT the collectors editions on Amazon, so the math wasn't hard to do to figure out they might get in this situation, and then come live it's going to get about 100x worse. As someone's said previously dropping in temp servers (hell Amazon cloud it?) isn't expensive compared to reputation at this point.

Also why did no-one limit the amount of characters that could be created on any one world if they knew there might be capacity limits instead of allowing them to be over subscribed?

Seriously, shambles!