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all the others are knee jerk reactions to our recent and hopefully temporary problems.
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If only that were true....
'Recent' problems like the server unreliability and appaling connection speeds for some Europa players have been going on for weeks now - a company really concerned about their customers would have acted by now, yet we are still 'hoping' they will do something. The mess of the 7th anniversary release did not apparently teach EA Europe anything, since they made no plans at all for SE to be released here, and are only starting to pay attention to their EA US colleagues, and us, very recently... and there is no promise they will get their act together and sort out a proper release now.
But... those are just the recent ones - EA Europe support for UO has been awful for a long time now - to quote Sunsword, he was aware of the distribution problems 'since AoS' - and that wasn't exactly yesterday! Check the EA UK website shop - or maybe don't bother, since it has now been 'temporarily unavailable' for at least three YEARS to my knowledge, others claim longer. Intermittent hardware problems have always plagued Europa, I don't think it's true that the previous board 'motto' about expecting lag and conn problems lasted for so many years without a large element of truth.
Much as I want the situation to get better, I've been told by OSI and EA things will be sorted out many, many times in the past without result. I now will only believe it AFTER I see the changes, not before... but it all comes down to whether you're cynical, as I and some other posters are, or optimistic as some folks seem to be.