Considering how hard it is to get in, idling and staying logged in seems like the best course to take to make things easiest on ourselves. Remember, this is the second launch of the exact same game they messed up.
And they think free time is a good apology. People at my work would get fired for messing up this badly.
We should start a game, name it something cool and hype it up, then after everyone pays and at release, say all the servers are down and roll in the cash. THEN we can start developing the game, once everyone has given us the cash to do so.