Any official reply to the inconvenience - the industry is watching

My main gripe about all of this the fact that tens of thousands of people were not being told the truth.

The activation process was not completing because of the hit on the servers.

This is completely understandable - completely understandable.

Why were so many people misled that their internect connection was at fault/that the application could not connect?

I saw posts of people who were sitting with no firewall or antivirus, etc for hours on end - thinking that this was the cause.

It can be argued that perhaps Vista users were being affected; however, there seem to be tens of thousands who were seeing the message because the servers were busy.

If we had been told the truth - ie servers are busy, please try again, then a lot of the grief would never have happened.

In my opinion, somebody made an executive decision that caused this to happen. Your customers should have been aware that it was purely a case that the servers were busy and all they needed to do was to retry. Yes, telling them the truth would mean they all sat their constantly retrying, but telling them that the application could not get an internet connection is absolutely deplorable. The application was coded to not report the truth.

Such a shame that such a popular game should have been spoilt in such a way.

I think there should be an official comment on why an executive decision was made to not report the servers being busy - considering the gaming media are, no doubt, going to ask the question and expect an answer.

An official statement will be published on Monday. However, in the meantime members of both SI and SEGA have made apologies here on the forums and have done what they can to keep people informed (whether or not people choose to read it - or even look for it).

I just hope the fact that the software was signed-off to not report the servers as busy is on the list.

This is going to be an important question that could have ramifications.

Most people would try turning off a firewall if the application claimed it couldn't access the internet.

Somewhat worrying and somebody made an executive decision on this.

SI can't make any executive decision about an error message coded into third party software not made by them - whatever mistakes they may have made you can't blame that on them.

For that matter, the authors of the third party software won't have made any kind of decision to mislead. For a start, error messages are not decided at a top level, it would be a programmer error, not a management error. Secondly, as you say, people would have been far happier to know the true cause of the problem, so it would be a bit like stealing a packet of sweets then admitting to armed robbery to cover it up.

It is a complete screw up, but there is no deliberate attempt to mislead.

As for official comment, that has been made on a number of threads, but a lot of people don't get to see it because people keep opening new threads to demand the same answer.

An official statement will be made on Monday. SI have apologised for the inconvenience caused and have been working around the clock to make sure as many people as possible were able to activate and run the software.