I'm kind of ok with this situation and I am not upset with Sony for the decision that they made. For a rational person, which I believe I am, it totally makes sense to me that they would deny my refund.
A short backstory here: I paid the $30 for early access to this game not knowing it was a beta. I felt as though this was a bit deceptive on the PS Store's side because nowhere did it indicate that the game was unfinished and in beta. You find this out after you have already paid for it and downloaded it.
The game is laggy AF most of the time and while I am not network expert, I believe it boils down to Grinding Gear Games (the creators) not realizing that the interest in paying for beta access was going to be as popular as it ended up being. There are nearly a million people playing the game at all times and since it is an always online game, they need to be able to cater to all of these people at once. Therefore, the game rubber-bands and lags like crazy. This make the experience not so great because battle is no fun when the game is stutter-stepping and auto-pausing anytime there is network issues - which is frequently.
So after really getting fed up with this I decided that I was going to attempt to obtain my first ever refund from Sony after years of being a PS-Plus member that never makes any problems for anyone.
I was already frustrated on and off but my anger reached an apex at this boss battle that happens at the end of Act 1. Sorry for spoilers. You would have been able to figure this out anyway. This boss has a LOT going on around him during the battle and because of this the lag spikes were just incredible and persistent. There are some very important moments in this battle where you must dodge with pinpoint accuracy to avoid heavy damage and well, with the game lagging and basically pausing a bunch of times this is very difficult/impossible to see coming and I was dying over and over and over again.
It was at that point that I thought to myself that video games are supposed to be a fun hobby, not something that infuriates me. So I headed over to Sony's website to seek a refund.
With my past experience with the Sony website, I was kind of surprised at how easy it was to get to the refund section and less than half an hour later I was chatting with a real human being on the same site. If you didn't hear about my experience getting locked out and having my account permanently suspended, you can read a few articles back. That took days and was a nightmare. This was extremely easy and kudos to you Sony for making it that way.
So talking to the human rep was actually a breeze, they ask a few questions and then you tell them that you want a refund for whatever. There is a criteria, one of which was whether or not you are a repeat offender as far as "returns" are concerned. Since I have never requested a refund ever, they actually said to me that they could refund the game for me, but this would be a one-time thing and that it wouldn't be offered to me again. This was because I had done some things that made me look - truthfully - as someone who just had buyer's remorse and there wasn't really a problem with the game. There ARE actually problems with the game but that didn't just start happening, it's been that way since the start.
The main disqualifying feature of my situation was that I have 17 hours logged playing the game and Sony's official policy is that refunds are automatic provided you have less than 2 hours of playtime logged. That seems fair enough to me, don't you think?
So I am a reasonable person and agreed with the representative that it really isn't fair for me to seek a refund and even though they were going to offer it to me anyway as a one-time deal, that it might be a better idea for me to save this for something later on. It's only $30 and I would imagine that Grinding Gear Games is working around the clock to resolve their server issue as soon as they can. I can only hope.
In the meantime I run around lower levels casually hoping for a rare drop or two and gaining easy XP. Nothing can really kill me on those lower levels and dying doesn't have any sort of long-standing consequences anyway.
So for anyone out there considering getting involved in early access I would say that right now is probably not a good time to do it. I would wait until they get the server issues sorted out and then maybe consider doing it. If you do buy early access, you are most likely going to experience lag because almost everyone in the world is at the moment.
I'm quite certain that GGG is extremely interested in correcting this problem before too many people bad-mouth them on the internet and apparently, tons of people are seeking refunds on all platforms. Not a great launch and normally they would be immune to criticism but since they are charging people to participate in the beta, criticism is allowed.
Don't get me wrong, this is a fantastic game and I believe it will eclipse even Diablo as an industry standard for ARPGs going forward. It just isn't properly ready yet. If you do buy the game and have horrible lag just remember to not play more than 2 hours and the refund process is basically effortless. Keep in mind that this is for the PS5 version of the game. I am not familiar with the process with PC or Xbox.