Day 1 of Rift pre-launch. I managed to log in from work on my laptop as soon as the servers came up. However, being at work, I only logged in long enough to create my character and make sure I got the name I wanted.
Upon arriving home, I launched the game and chose to log in to Faeblight.

[update]

I should note that the 7 hours is not accurate. If you have 1000 people ahead of you, it could be around 4 hours.

Trion is launching new servers at a pretty good pace. I’m hoping they strike a nice balance between compensating for the launch population surge and keeping the game from feeling empty when the tide goes out at the end of the free month. I’m also think I have good reason to hope that such an exodus will be on a much smaller scale than what I’ve seen in other MMO launches.

Despite the population, the game seems to run very smoothly.  I saw a few people complaining about all the lag, but at most times I had around 100ms latency to a PST server from my EST desktop.  I encountered only one moment of lag, and it was a solid minute or so of everything running in place.  I was very surprised that it didn’t drop my connection.