I'm trying to understand the global logic and strategy behind this early access feature. I will preface this by saying I have early access and still don't understand why I am getting it.
There are three kinds of people in this system as far as I can describe. First, people who never bought the first game. SE is going after them, because yay new players. They can get early access if they pre-order the game. Makes sense. This happens all the time for people buying a game. Second, legacy players who bought the game and paid sub fees. SE is trying to keep them. To lose legacy members now would be a truly dropped ball. Early access makes sense for legacy members: you can't exclude them from any active game by any right.
But the third player base are people who bought the game and quit because it wasn't up to their standards. SE is going after them, because if they hadn't quit the game would have never shut down in the first place. SE is going after them because they already tried the game once and SE almost had them in their reach. And it is with this third demographic that I fail to see what SE was thinking when they did early access. They don't get early access.
Why are we having early access at all, is my question. It risks further alienating players who are the most likely to net new subscriptions to this game:
They will probably not net very many from group one by this early access thing.
They have the second group as paying subscribers of the game.
So why would they design the relaunch to look like it is excluding perhaps the most important sector of the game's potential players by doing early access at all?
The alternative is that everyone starts the re-launch at the same time. Where is the down side? Will new players complain if old players get to start with them? No. Will legacy players? I should hope not. These guys already own the game. This is early access to a game 2 years old! Nobody makes a re-subscriber wait a week to return to a game they already have an account on is what I'm getting at lol...
I don't think early access should happen :( On the bright side, the superior alternative would just be that everyone starts a week early. What's done is done, but I wish SE didn't set up the scenario where an owner of the retail version of the game sees others playing it, and not them, and uses it as an excuse to not try the game out again.
I can't justify the early access feature logically, even if I have it. To truly pick up as many players as possible, they shouldn't give people a single reason, legit or not, to not pick the game back up. That week where they own the game but can't play it is a potential reason.