What it essentially means that in some areas of the world (for example, here in New York City) you have retailers...mostly non-chain retailers who will likely sell copies of the game before the "street date" of September 9th. Most all retailers will get their stock of the game on the 5th, that being the 1st Friday of the month. Some will put it in stock and sell them on the 5th. The national chains like Gamestop, Best Buy and so on won't...but the local game retailers likely will...because they'll have a substantially smaller stock then the large chains. Whereas Gamestop will have a couple hundred copies, the local chains will have 60...at best. So they're going to try and make an immediate profit before the big chains suck all of the sales of the game for themselves on the 9th. Where that correlates to what Deej said is that even if those retailers who sell the game before the official release date, the servers will not be live until the official release of the game, 12:00am September 9th, 2014. As far as timezones, 12am over in Seattle is 3 hours behind 12am in NYC. As such, even though in New York the official release is 3 hours ahead of the release in Seattle, the servers will still go online at 12am September 9th, regardless of timezone. We here on the East coast will have a 3 hour headstart, but regardless...the server are live at midnight September 9th...no matter what timezone you're in.