I'm sure that the (maybe) 26 people who were able to get one of these codes feel some measure of recompense for the time lost. What about something for the rest of the subscriber base?

As someone who has finished the PVP grind to get BiS gear and am thus no longer personally invested in how it is done, I like option 2 a lot. It lets more people get into that side of the gear grind - which has so far only been available to PVPers - and gives them better selection in their upgrades rather than hoping what they need randomly drops. It also incentivizes people to participate in the group finder operation every day, regardless of what gear they have. Right now you might only try to run an op once or twice a week to try and get a specific piece off a boss you expect a random group to be able to reach. If each boss drops unassembled components, you're incentivized to participate in every operation you can.

I'm disappointed that it's taking until July for us to finally see some class balance changes. This is something that's been clamored for literally all year - to the point we just took it for granted they would happen with 5.2. When it was announced there would be no balance changes, the shocked response drove them to start looking at it... but 3 months to take any action? Seriously? What has the class balance team been doing all this time?

I would like to know what the class balance team has been doing all year that they're not going to have any changes for yet another 2 months. We've been complaining about how overpowered Commandos/Mercenaries are literally all year, and now it's another 8 weeks of dealing with them (assuming they get balanced correctly on that first pass)?

No one's complaining about regular maintenance. This was an unplanned outage that took the game down for most of the day beyond the scheduled one or two hour maintenance window. I'm not even particularly concerned if I get compensated, because I was able to log on at 6PM local time and have productive game time. But the Euro crowd for the most part didn't get to play at all - the servers went down for them before the end of the work day and didn't come back up until 11PM or later. They at the very least deserve a little extra sub time to make up for the lost day.

Hard to get a referral when you have to concede to a potential refer-ee that the game is buggy as hell and the company doesn't seem to care about its subscribers.

Yes. Not only is it money I'm paying for a service I'm not receiving (or at least that's the case for the Euro players - whether we East Coasters get to play today is still in the air), but it would be an indication from Bioware that they take this matter seriously, take their customers seriously, and have respect for their customers' time and loyalty.

I appreciate Keith's forthrightness in coming out and telling us what is going on. It's much greater transparency than we've gotten before and it's certainly something we deserve to know. I sincerely applaud him for giving us that much detail as to today's troubles That said, the gaming day in Europe is basically already over. It's past 5PM on the East Coast and this downtime is starting to eat into our gaming time. This is the third time in the past month where a patch did not go through as announced, the second time the patch caused problems (5.2 most infamously has the bug which prevents you from getting new companions), and today we literally cannot play at all. I have guildmembers who were slow to or didn't come back at least in part because of the initial delay to 5.2, and at least one who has held off until the companion bug is fixed. If/When he finds out he can't log in this evening it wouldn't surprise me if he gives up on the game entirely. These constant problems and disappointments are killing interest in this game, and the seeming lack of improvement with regards to them is frustrating and demoralizing for those of us who really want it to be good. At some point Bioware owes something more to its subscriber base than explanations and empty apologies. At the very least they can compensate us for a day of sub time, but what they should be doing is better. Better development, better QA, better.

I also have not received either companion. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to have done, but I don't seem to have any story missions left to do.

Which is part of the problem. We don't know because they didn't tell us; they never do. If it was a last-second thing they found, they could say so. But instead they failed in communicating to the players yet again. They don't have to give us any specifics or reveal sensitive information. They could have issued a statement like "Unfortunately, our final stage of testing prior to deployment has revealed a critical bug that we need to take the time to address. As a consequence, we need to delay the release of 5.2 until April 18th." That would have allayed a significant amount of anger and suspicion. If they wanted to further mitigate bad feelings, they could offer some form of compensation to subscribers. But they don't, and combined with the bad communication it makes us feel like they don't value us either as customers or people. Of course, the actual statement refers to addressing "some of the issues still pending", which implies that there was a bunch of stuff still wrong with the patch, and combined with the lack of live footage on Friday suggests strongly that they knew it wasn't ready well before hand. And if they knew it wasn't ready on Friday or earlier and still acted like a Tuesday update was a sure thing, then that's even worse.

No, we're upset that they had to delay it for quality reasons, and that they gave no indication they might have to until approximately 10 hours before the maintenance interval. They were still insisting on the April 11th date on the morning of the 10th. I don't think anybody is arguing that they should have deployed a buggy, unstable patch. What's upsetting is their failure to warn us it might have to be delayed for more QA (instead they insisted everything was fine until the last moment), the fact that this is the latest in a long line of failures and broken promises from the company, and the lack of consideration for players who arranged their schedules both in and out of game based on the repeated confident assertions that everything was fine. We all know that software development is hard, bugs crop up unexpectedly, and dates get missed. What isn't hard is communication with the userbase - and on that score they fail continually over and over and over. There was no live game footage in the livestream on Friday, and in hindsight it now seems obvious that was because they didn't feel confident showing it to us. If they knew it wasn't ready at that time, they could have warned us it might slip. Instead they continued to assert everything was hunky dory - deceiving the players. If they had told us the date might slip ahead of time, I would have been disappointed when it happened, but I wouldn't feel disrespected and lied to.

If I wanted a static game that never changed or updated, I would be happy with any of the hundreds of games which are not MMOs. But content updates are part of the package of an MMO, and as a subscriber I am entitled to them. I am paying for the ability to log in and play as a subscriber, and I am also paying for periodic and timely updates with some sort of reliability that those updates will come when we are told they will come, and that they will not be suddenly delayed within hours of their supposed launch with no warning, no clear justification, and no compensation. This is not the first time BIoware has pulled this stunt, and even one time is once too many.

Bioware does owe us something. They owe us what we're paying for. We're not getting it.

Assuming by "self-entitled children" you actually mean "paying customers" you are correct. I pay for this game, every month, and for my money I expect certain things, among them not having new content pulled out from under me 10 hours before it was set to go in. Bioware is not making this game out of the goodness of their hearts, for us ungrateful louts leeching off of their labors. They are providing a service in exchange for our money, and we subscribers at least deserve better consideration than what they are showing us.

The playerbase deserves a real apology and real signs of improvement from the development team, and subscribers deserve compensation for the shoddy way they're being treated. I know there are multiple people in my guild that we convinced to re-sub because of this patch, and I don't know if we're going to be able to retain them because of this. By this point, many people have locked in time off and otherwise made plans that they cannot change based on the assumption that when you guys gave us a date, you were going to follow through with it. If you had any idea that you were not going to be able to make the date, you had a responsibility to let us know that well ahead of time, rather than 10 hours before the maintenance interval. I've been a subscriber since launch, but I took a couple months off from playing the game at the end of the year because it had grown stale. The Command system, uprisings, and the promise of new Operations content had me excited to get back in. Now I feel like I've been played for a fool. We deserve better than this. We deserve much better. And if you're delaying the patch for another week, for the love of god put some class balancing in. Mercs/Commandos are far too difficult to kill.