Soooo... I brought home a copy of the Horizons trial; had installation headaches, but eventually got through it.
Went to the website and registered for trial (ugh, turns out I have to use IE for any of that to work); waited a half hour or so for the patching; finally the game loads for the first time... I'm into the character selection area... spend AGES poking around all the options (I love character creation
)...
then BANG... "blah you've been disconnected blah"... Eh? So I check the website and find all the servers are down for maintenance LOL.
They don't have an estimated downtime, unfortunately.
But otherwise all went okay, and the registration went fine even though I'm not North American.