As PlayStation 3 owners eagerly turn on their systems to begin playing Metal Gear Solid: Online, they will be greeted with the unexpected. Konami has announced that they have been forced to delay the start of Metal Gear Solid: Online’s Beta, which was supposed to begin today. The beta, which has been plagued from the start with issues involving download freezes, patching errors, and printing mistakes, has been pushed back four days, from April 21 to April 25. The end date of the beta has been moved back accordingly as well, from May 5 to May 11.

The official reason given for the delay is overwhelming demand, an excuse that I find hard to believe. It isn’t an uncommon scapegoat; in fact, Microsoft used it to explain Xbox Live outages due to the Christmas rush and Nintendo pawned off their online follies on the sales of Super Smash Bros. This doesn’t make it excusable, and I believe that gamers should take turns wagging their fingers at Konami for not expecting the biggest PS3 title of 2008 to be popular.

The apology is below, and stay tuned to Gamervision for all of your beta anger, just as usual.

IMPORTANT NOTICE for all
METAL GEAR ONLINE PREMIERE BETA players

We would like to thank all players for their keen interest in taking part in the beta test.
However, we regret to inform you that due to extraordinary levels of traffic from all around the globe, we have been unable to run the service to the level we expected.
As a temporary measure, we will be deferring the European public beta test and start it once we stabilize our server.
We would like to apologize for all inconveniences as well as confusion caused.

We would like to add that due to the above reasons, we will be making the following changes to the schedule:
1) Start date: Planned for 04/25/2008 24:00(PDT). While the start is planned for the weekend, it may change due to unforseen circumstances.
3) Beta Test closure: This will now be on 05/11/2008 at 24:00(PDT) rather than 05/05/2008 at 24:00(PDT)

IMPORTANT: Please note that your voucher code will only be valid up until 05/05/2008, so please make sure to register them by then.

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