Its no more dishonest than your ISP saying you get "Up to" 10 Mbps speeds... It means you CAN get that good, but it doesn't tell you what you'll definitely or usually get. In that same vein the ad says "Up to 5 days early" which means you could get anywhere 1 minute to 5 days early. They made no promises to anyone on when they would actually be playing. People really need to learn to read the entire statement, not just the parts they like.

8/26 here, hoping but not banking on today

We're not actually doing them a favor, the servers will still have the same amount of people on them come the 20th. No, they wouldn't stagger people on ship day, but they would also have massive queues for every server, and the ones without queues would be collapsing. This may still happen come launch day. Someone much earlier in the thread said it best, if we didn't have people complaining about not getting in on the very first day, we've have the same amount of people complaining about their 4-6 hour queue to log into a server. I for one think this is an extremely efficient manner in which to introduce us into the game. I'd much rather have a relatively lag and crash free first play experience than be stuck in the starting screen with 3 or 4 thousand other people. Now mind you I'm rehashing what a lot of people have already said, so I'll step back and let the masses of unwarranted self importance roll through and show just why the silent majority stands back and laughs at the screaming minority. TL,DR : Whining doesn't accomplish anything, and this is hardly a "disaster"