It is time...

[Seif]

Test server to prevent this sort of fiasco?

Honestly I would be fine waiting for them to fix this stuff until they get it working but now they've essentially broken a huge part of the game and just decided to test it on the entire paying playerbase.

When i can't do any of the group content in a MMO there is a problem.

[Tupsi]

Test server to prevent this sort of fiasco?

They have one internally, a few actually. Only reason people want a public test server is to try and do content ahead of the actual patch time and to try and get "head starts" on gathering crafting items on the live server.

A test server won't prevent this because test servers tend to be limited in nature and a bit closer to what the dev's build is like. The best part about what you said though, they didn't patch in "lag" or anything...they changed the duty finder infrastructure..again, which is the issue - They put TOO MUCH RELIANCE on duty finder and not enough on 'open world' or "world based" content.

[Clavaat]

They put TOO MUCH RELIANCE on duty finder and not enough on 'open world' or "world based" content.

Aw I had agreed with you until you went there. We would be having the same issues if the we had more "open world" content, except it would be with everything outside of instances. Until the servers become more reliable/powerful in general, both instance and world servers, adding more of anything would not help the issue.

[Lithera]

Test server to prevent this sort of fiasco?

Honestly I would be fine waiting for them to fix this stuff until they get it working but now they've essentially broken a huge part of the game and just decided to test it on the entire paying playerbase.

When i can't do any of the group content in a MMO there is a problem.

The best they can do internally on the dev server is simulate the load. There's no way to know ahead of time EXACTLY how the system is going to react under full player load.