My mind is absolutely blown here. Trying to find out why I can't get into early access, and across all forums all I see are a bunch of whiny finger pointing "WE DESERVE IT MORE BECAUSE" posts.
Legacy players deserve to get into early access. They paid monthly for ***** in addition to paying for at least a digital code to access that *****, and the correct business response should have been to comp these players an extra month or two [scaling with how many months they paid, though it doesn't have to be a 1:1 ratio]
1.0 purchasers also deserve [gasp!] EARLY ACCESS! They paid for a digital code to access *****. A free week by way of compensation is pretty weak when you pay $40-80 dollars for a defective product. An extra 3 days of "early access" would have killed them?
[I'm not up for arguing on this. I classify 1.0 as defective because the developer apologized and completely revamped the original game]
In all honesty though, I'm not shocked by this. It's SE, one of the most arrogant software development companies in the known world! Instead of trying to figure out how they were going to market ARR and draw loyal fans back into the fold, they've completely blown off the fans in order to not dump any more money into this massive sink.
I'm guessing on that part, but even the launch screen implies that they are either way underutilizing servers at this time, or they do not have them [at least at the time of this writing, where it specifically warns about ques and wait times and potential inability to roll new characters]
Still though, you have to give SE credit for having a pair of big brass ones on this: "Oh, yea, we sold tons of copies of a game so bad it could have been programmed by LJN, but we're gonna go ahead and alienate those people that supported us early on in the quest for more money to try to recoup our losses"
And that's just fine with me. I'm not happy about not having early access, but whatever. MAYBE I'll get around to playing FFXIV . . . eventually. I was really REALLY excited to get to it today, but that's been fairly well extinguished by yet another tactical move by SE. It's not the first time. . it's not the tenth time. It's SE for [expletive deleted]'s sake!
And for the record, there's no need to pick this rant apart, and there's no need to drip venomous idiocy like "just buy the game again for early access". I'm not going to waste money re-buying something I've already paid for for 3 days of extra game time [Yes it is. FFXIV IS FFXIV, regardless of the subtitle].
Alright, I'm about done. The only reason I'm wasting my time even bothering to post is that I needed to get that off my chest. It's just kinda frustrating to watch a company completely bomb on what SHOULD be a no brainer common sense P.R. move to bring potential lost fans back to the fold. I wanna see SE succeed, but everytime all I end up doing is coming away saying to myself "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!" SE!!! THREE EXTRA DAYS OF PLAYTIME COULD NET YOU DOUBLE DIGIT FAN RETURNS. . . G'ahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! /facepalm. W/e SE. . whatever.