Back in 'Ugly July', the lag and downtime in the game was widely acclaimed as the worst since the Alpha testing 18 months ago.

Every single day, there was either downtime (planned, or unexpected) and unplayable lag on the servers.
Then, SI went and completely killed all the original gameworlds, which lead to everyone having to start again in brand new gameworlds with different people in the middle of August.

Since then, we've had 2 months of 90% uptime, and a super-fast game, with few bugs, too.

However, the past few days (especially today) have seen the return of sign-in issues, authentication errors, planned and unexpected downtime (about 3 times today...) and now, as I type:

Lag that is unbearable.

It seems to be a bad day in SI Towers,and it is such a shame.

Obviously it's only really been going for 2 days these 'problems. However, if this starts to happen as much as it did back in Ugly July (which I highly doubt) then, people will start to get angry again and start cancelling their subscriptions.

Also, SI launched yet another 2 new gameworlds 3 days ago. Meaning they've now launched 5 new gameworlds in the space of 4 weeks.

Gw21.22 and 23 were launched well, however these latest two were apparently appaling on launch night.

I really hope they can iron out these problems and make sure it doesn't escalate to how it did a few months ago.

--Mike

Do you realize that the two new GWs were called "stress test gameworlds" for a reason? They actually invited over 3000 users onto each and on launch night had an upwards of about 1500 signed on at once. These are numbers that are triple the amount expected on live release (only 1000 ppl per GW) and SI has purposely done this just to determine exactly where's the fine line between a smooth running game and heavy "lag".

It's probably good to do some research on why things are happening instead of making a rant with unfounded assumptions. In talking to the SI guys in the mod forum, they're actually quite happy with the recent developments and are 99% certain that the live GWs will be launched smoothly come end of this month.

Jordan has a point about the stress testing.

Also you'd have to hope that once the money rolls in and if and when the player base expands they will do the same with their servers.

I certainly didn't enjoy the lag-fest that as july but its part of the job as a beta tester. Seen alot worse on other games. My subscription is up in the air at the moment, if I can get some free time to get near the game for a decent period then I'll probably see how the game settles for the first couple of weeks and hear on feedback before paying for it.