Be that as it may, one's still left to wonder how they were so badly prepared for the EA with the servers. That they might experience some problems on launch day, when it's difficult to predict just how many people will play, that's one thing. But for EA, they knew how many people they were going to get. I cannot believe SE wouldn't have numbers on the amount of pre-orders. How could they not prepare their servers for that amount of people? Didn't they test them to see if they could handle it? Isn't that what a beta is for, among other things? I can't understand it. How can a team that has shown such competence the past few months in developing ARR trip over the most basic, fundamental part of an MMO? And just before release at that!

Now they're saddled with frustrated pre-orderers who feel betrayed due to the problematic EA period, coupled with frustrated CE buyers who can't redeem their CE codes for their promised items, coupled with frustrated players who can't play on the server they want due to the player limit, etc. ... All because nobody at SE thought it was a good idea to give those pre-order numbers to the development team so they could get an estimation on the number of players they were going to get, so they could prepare their servers accordingly?!

I apologise if I sound like I'm whining, but it just baffles me how they could make such a glaring error, with Final Fantasy XIV of all games! :O_O: I mean, if there's any game in SE's line-up right now that can't afford even the tiniest bit of bad PR, it's FF XIV.