In the Long awaited 3.4! I came across this comment by Tiamat posted on January 30th 2010

"The ONLY actual new area in the future at the moment is the premium/cash shop area Sacred Caebolan (AKA "Caeb AA"). Everything else from here until 4.5 are nothing but instanced raids. It's actually rather... worrying, really. It almost feels like either IMC just doesn't have the design/programming capability to make new areas anymore, or their servers don't have the capacity to handle actual new areas anymore."

This is true, Ustiur is a halfhearted attempt at a camp and nobody uses the area. It's a run through for anyone who does Raff raid and didn't have a warp directly set. I mean you don't even need to go through it to get to Skeleton Dungeon as obviously there are warp scrolls to take you directly there.

On that note, El Dorado is such a huge area and only a few NPCs, what a waste of space. Granted, this area is a 'Lost Civilization' type thing, but still, shouldn't there be more than just a few static NPCs hanging around? I'm not expecting a secretly thriving Metropolis but something more than what we currently have would be lovely.

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At the start of the week we had a LOT of Disconnections and eventually the game went down altogether. Raiden explained why in the Game servers are down! thread.

Raiden: February 1^st 2010:

“I am pretty sure most of you are wondering what is going on with the Hamster tonight. Even though this is an info that more of us should not be announcing, we figured the community should know about it.

We are under massive attack right now and all our services have been affected. It is not just Sword that has been affected. We have been trying to combat this attack since the past 6 hours and we have finally been able to reduce the impact on our systems. IT is now trying to bring the game online.

However, we do not have an ETA at this point. We are trying to bring the services back online as fast as humanly possible.”

He assured everyone about their account security a little later and gave us the reasoning behind these 'attacks'

“None of the account's security is compromised. Its only the logins that are affected at the moment. IT is working on Sword as a priority.

Yup. It's a bunch of morons who we have banned that have initiated the attack. We have already tracked them. One big legal hammer to go please.”

Makes you wonder doesn't it?

A lot of people I have spoken to who are all self declared I.T/Computer nerds have said it's ridiculous and just another fail excuse for them messing something up.

Personally, I have no idea but I am happy to now be in Bahamar SA with my Scout and actually leveling. I lost so much sleep over the last week due to the disconnections, it was simply irritating having to wake up every few hours in order to reset up, only to be disconnected an hour later again.

I had a bitch in this weeks Maintenance thread it's a pain in the ass when they wont return your paid for items to you.

Items lost:

• 3 AA passes
• 3 50% Experience Manuals
• 3 Drop Manuals

My scout is coming along fine now, she went from Expert level 7 81% to, so far on this SA pass, Expert level 8 and 41%