How? How did you mess up this badly? You got so much of the game right and yet your lack of testing (how in the actual hell do you guys not have PTRs for this? Seriously!) and implementing major bug after bug you have all but killed your own game. Behind the scenes your team are a joke. It is very obvious that AGS is nothing more than a dumpster fire at this point.
At what point do you guys just throw your hands up, refund everyone and give a SINCERE apology to your fans and take the servers down like Square did with FFXIV and rebuild this shitstorm from the ground up?
I am smart enough to know this game is not working and also smart enough to admit that I am not smart enough to know the perfect solution. But you have completely squandered this opportunity. SOMEONE in your dev team knew this game was not ready. I am also sure that those people made it known and upper management said push it out anyway. Your whole team, from bottom to top lacks integrity.
In my mind you really have three options at this point.
1.) Leave the servers how they are, take this from NW 1.0.4 and it is now NW Early Access. The servers keep going how they are now with weekly patches to fix things and eventually you will be able to rerelease as the full game again.
2.) Wipe the servers and same thing as above.
3.) Wipe the servers. Open test servers. Take the game offline as Square did with FFXIV and release open beta indefinitely while you start rebuilding this game the way it deserves to be made.
Either way, you have pissed off your fanbase. Not good. All you can do it pray that they don’t completely turn on you.
But who are we kidding? Jeff Bezos will most likely make the decision to pull the plug and close the company because that is the kind of douche canoe he is.