I have to say that this could be the worst start to any mmo experience I have ever had. I have played virtually every mmo since Ultima Online and have downloaded many of them. Never have I had downloads with estimated times of days/weeks. If it isn't important for Cryptic to put out a stable way to get the game to their paying customers, maybe it shouldn't be inmportant for those customers to be paying.

LOL Didn't know anyone was paying the monthly fee just yet. This is The Open Beta. This is where they work on server stability and other bugs.

Im unsure what start you mean here...

Nothing has started other than another phase of testing. open-beta is often used to stress the servers as much as possible. Which brings about problems such as download times, server instability etc.

For some reason people seem to believe that because they pre-order a game and it says 'we will also give you free access to open-beta' that they have actually paid for it. Bear in mind there are many pre-orders that do not offer the open-beta keys. Does that mean those people are being conned? No they are just not having the FREE offer that some others get...

And both people getting keys and those not getting keys pay exactly the same amount.

The only thing you have effectively paid for by pre-ordering is the 'head start' and any exclusives. Of course the actual game you have paid for too...

Other than that whining about being 'conned' and the like is futile and absolute uneducated.

Im also peeved that I couldn't get on to the game today because of majorly bad connection speeds but im not gonna start throwing accusations and most of all my dummy out of the pram. Ive actually decided to buy the game from Steam which will get me the open-beta in 2 hours estimated time. If you would like to do the same that is entirely up to you.

I am prone to disagree with the OP... this is a pretty regular BETA start... i am quite sure that the actual start in a few weeks will be as smooth as other Crypt games...

The thing is, Cryptic should have been able to see a lot of this ire coming down the pike; when you're putting up advertisements in places like Best Buy that say, "Preorder STO and get a code for the beta and a headstart before release day!" you're going to get a lot of people who aren't familiar with the beta process and are going in expecting the code the received as part of a preorder package to "just work." Cryptic made the decision to use this open beta as a way to gain preorders, boosting their initial sales numbers and getting confirmed sales earlier than they might have otherwise. That's part of the trade-off here; if you're going to take the route they have, you have to be prepared for the volume of people who are going to bite, and you need to make it very, very clear to customers just what an open beta is, what it's for and what they should (or shouldn't) expect from the process. The fact that Cryptic doesn't seem to have done much of any of that bothers me more than the fact that I'm probably looking at another two days of trying to get the beta client to download.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for Cryptic on this one, because they had to know that there were going to be a lot of people swamping this site when the open beta started, and I just don't buy that they couldn't have figured out that many of those people were going to come in expecting at least a reasonably problem-free downloading and gaming experience. It's Cryptic's job to set the appropriate expectations here, and the fact that they failed to do that is really a problem of their own making. If they didn't want to deal with people complaining about stuff that's normal in an open beta, they shouldn't have promoted this thing as widely as they did.

be thankful the ***** happening now, in theory (i.e. probly not) all the bugs/issues and general problems will be fixed for release (preferably head start)

Agreed, but I'm about as confident as you are that this is going to be sorted out by the time the official release rolls around. 2/2 isn't all that far away, and some of these problems seem pretty major.

No, you haven't.

Err I think he's talking about thier crappy way of downloading the Beta in the first place...

How many trek fans are there in the world? millions? billions?
When they all come to play same game what did you think was going to happen?