Dear Sirs,

The situation with the 9Dragons game and the relevant servers has become intolerable. Call it what you will, free to play, chose to pay, or pay to play, the fact is that the game has become unplayable because of the natural disconnection rate.

Normally when a customer gets disconnected from your game, they just log back in and try to play again. Last night we got a rare chance to see how quickly customers actually get disconnected. Your login server failed, and failed hard. By all accounts, the login server was offline for over 5 hours. In those 5 hours the server load on all three game servers fell to a minimal level. Customers were experiencing the "natural disconnection rate", but couldn't log back in.

Let's have a look at a very good graphic of the servers load.



Large numbers of customers fell offline quite quickly. We can see that with the steep decline on the Bardo server, but the effect is visible on the US servers as well. Some players just have weaker internet connectivity and regularly get disconnected. Some players regularly run the dungeons and there is a much higher disconnect rate in that environment. I don't know why that is, but anyone doing the Floral Crown party quest can confirm the fact. The disconnection rate flattened out over time. We see that clearly on the US servers, but it is evident on Bardo as well. Some players have a more robust internet connection, so this is to be expected as well.

In the first 2 hours or so, over half of your customer base was disconnected from the game. You can't possibly describe that sort of customer service as "acceptable". No ISO certified quality control expert would ever find this to be acceptable. I can only describe this level of service as disgraceful. For Bardo players this was the peak playing time of the week. On a Saturday evening we would be normally have an experience points event and the Black vs White war. The vast majority of Bardo players were not even in the game for any of this.

This brings up the topic of compensation, because let's face it, many of us do in fact chose to pay for this game. We pay for a premium level of service, but don't actually receive a level of service that is any different from the freeloaders. We pay to use time-limited gaming items, but regularly are not able to use those items. We hope to be able play during those hours that we have available, such as a Saturday evening, but that doesn't happen either.

Despite all of this, the suggestion for compensation is a 3x experience points event at a time when we would normally have a 2x experience event anyway. This too is not acceptable. This too, is in fact disgraceful. In the real world compensation would come in the form of a monetary refund for those who are paying to play this game. You need to consider this option, if only to retain your paying customer base.

Quite frankly, it's time for you as an organization to either raise your game and bring in some quality control, or to admit that you are incapable of publishing this game.

- SpearDriver