> I've met enough people who worked at EA to know they have competent engineers and managers -- they are not completely inept.

Nope, nope, nope. Nobody in their right mind will believe you that. If they fabricate such a game launch then they are complete morons. You simply can not claim that they are competent after that clusterfk.

Under "competent" I understand "Having sufficient skill, knowledge, ability, or qualifications." (definition from wiktionary). Their engineers clearly have neither the skill nor ability to fix the problems in timely manner. Nor did (or do) they have enough knowledge how the servers behave under such high load, otherwise they'd fix it before the launch. And if the problems were known, then the managers failed to delay the launch. A company which knowingly releases such a game is not run by competent people.