I think the reaction to Kim's post is a bit too much, that wasn't neither a bad joke nor some superiority sting, quite the opposite. I noticed a sensible improvement, I test it (lol) with browsing the HoF table. At last login it worked flawlessly, like some years ago. I hunted for like 40ish mins or so, one short run on zombie dogs at Nymph. There the lag was still visible, but much better than previously. What annoys me the most is that given the improvement, it means they are aware of the cause and are trying to correct it. Hence the silence is just not understandable anymore. I understand the idea of being reserved with certain aspects, but any feedback would be appreciated.
I honestly appreciate where you took the game, Kim, but communication is also very important. You guys did a good job opening up a bit on the mechanics of loot and it was a decent thing, not showing too much but showing enough to be revolutionary. Meaning, one has to consider the traditional retarded answer "no comment on core mechanics". By comparison, Charlie's posts and the Dev notes were like orgies. And I believe there is literally no player around unhappy with those.
That being said, the silence on this performance issue looks bad. There will always be people who will exaggerate. And you know, or you should know the product better than anyone. It has money and it has alot of emotions. PE community has always been a rather passionate one, for better or worse. But most of us are people who work IRL for our money. And if everyone would post nice and reserved would just not be this community, would be like some Excel-dedicated forum.
Working for our money means mainly two things: first that we are responsible with them (well, in a certain entropian manner lol, where is fine to lose 1k$ clicking on condition but at first server choke causing some 5$/week, if even, there's a river of tears everywhere) and second is that we're actual customers. We're not here on the forum of who knows what game which costed 7$ at Christmas sales and then devs have to take it on the forums for months. You know better than me what is an average deposit/month and you can see just as me what costs a coffee and a bagel in a coffe-shop.
Simply, once the Diablo event started, your communication behaviour looked awkward. There have been players there, many of them spent some decent ped. Some of them had some decent loots. Other lost their shirt. Shared is shared, we already know it. But the thing is, you can also test such lag all day on punies. Sure, is more useful to have many buffs and tiers of damage in play to see what influences what, but then you can't just ignore the money spent with that. And then extended. And extended again. If I wouldn't know better, I would have thought we're back in the old PE where the player had only the chance to "suck it up" and move on.
The "lag" itself (or choke or packet loss or filtering or memory management or what the heck it is) is extremely disruptive. You come home after a day of work, kiss nicely the wife and kids, want to play some, put some tens of $ in ammo or probes or whatnot, fart relaxed in your chair and bam in 20 mins you want to throw the computer on the window. I don't need that when I am tired from work, honestly, the game, due to the money specific has its own share of stress, there is no need for something extra, I hope that much is clear.
On top of that, you let the door wide open to all kind of shit conspiracy posts. I believe honestly neither of you went insane to really want to push the game down the drain. But beta-testing on money AND not having any kind of feedback just feels like sand in teeth.
And the thing is, if we aford to put some money in, by very basic logic it means that not the profit is the thing we're after. Is the challenge to try to beat the system and the experience itself. This lag thing affects one and ruins the other.
With apologies for the wall of text, please consider these things and open up a bit on this issue. Worst case scenario you will write something like "it was our mistake to do this technically or to take this decision of workflow or to buy this equipment or this software". In which case you will be roasted nicely but shortly, we all do shit sometimes at our workplaces, is normal. Best case will be who knows, some bigger ISP communication or whatnot, something where you can't influence much.
But say something, because it looks bad, it looks like not caring, and that is a very unpleasant vibe to paying customers.
