I purchased the Mercenary pack about a week ago now. However, when I try to play the beta, it takes forever (a good 5-10 minutes, seriously) to move from one screen to the next as I proceed through character creation. Once I finally finish creating the character, the game moves to a loading screen (witht he rotating circle thing in the middle of screen and the planet in the background), where it stays for about 10 minutes before bringing me back to the character selection screen. If I try to select the character again, the exact same thing happens.

Because of this, I have been completely unable to try the beta or even join a server. I have tried deleting and reinstalling the game, rebuilding my PS3's database, deleting the old character and creating a new one, and have also had conversations with other beta testers in an attempt to at least identify what the problem is. I have a 320 GB Slim PS3 which I purchased last year, and I play plenty of online games on it without any problems. My internet connection runs at about 20 MB/sec and is a wired connection so I know it's not an issue with my network.

Basically the conclusion I have reached (and everyone I have talked to) is that there is some kind of problem with my account on CCP's servers which is preventing me from having access to the game itself. Is it possible that my EVE Online account could be messing things up? Is there some way CCP can reset my account and let me start from scratch?

So far I haven't found anybody else with this particular issue. I have eliminated pretty much every possible issue on my end, so at this point I am really hoping CCP can at least explain WHY it isn't working, so I can attempt to address the issue. Any advice is much appreciated.

This problem affects many people, there's a big post where they are gathering statistics to help with a fix. Check out this.