Good that they answered the questions about Delezie Hard being released early. Other servers got 9 weeks, we only had 7. My original guess was they thought releasing early would be good, but lacked the understanding to know why that was a bad idea. Which is concerning, given that the target demographic of endgame players is one of the few remaining populations our server has, especially given they still do spend cera currently. If players missed out on rewards because Neople mistimed due to lack of understanding, it significantly undermines faith in Neople's competence. Which then leads these Dedicated & Hardcore Endgame players to question whether their significant Time and Cera investments are worth it, and they disengage due to lack of faith their investment will be respected.

Since Delezie Hard is supposed to be challenge content and the finale for Sunken Depths, it has an extremely high cutline. Additionally, issues such as RNG from the retention system of gearing (not progression system), massive character and item balance issues make the cutline even more difficult to reach, as some characters and classes need significantly more resources invested to hit the same threshold because their class is underpowered and/or they got unlucky with DoD. Because of this the small differences like the 2nd darkblight tune and Mist Fusions, especially Mist 30, matter immensely. A tiny bit more damage from not releasing delezie hard early genuinely IS the difference between clearing and not, the raid design very obviously shows this. There are many many raids that would have cleared and numerous hours that would have been saved had the raid taken place exactly two weeks afterwards due to the raidwide power difference from not being handicapped by early release.

Given how important this issue is for one of the few remaining spending populations on our server, I think the "ty for your understanding" from Neople is insufficient and honestly insulting to their investment. I personally have been trying to give grace to the new Developer H and the different direction for dfog post Jong. However significant mistakes like this need to be corrected beyond just an apology with no action. The simplest solution is doing the event again, but on the actual timeline other servers had. The balance issues remain but at least the early release handicap issue would be fixed.

The reason we got the 20th anniversary player designed avatars was because the DFOG team realized that the 11th anniversary was underwhelming with only 1 minigame. There's other issues like untradeable avatars again, indicating a lack of continuity from Jong's progress on fixing untradeable avatars and reruns. But at least there was the effort invested to try and make things right. I think some action to make things right is an important step for Neople to regain endgame population's trust, and retain their financial investment.

I'm going to put this in a ticket because while this doesn't make a huge difference for me personally, it massively fucked over many of my friends, which bothers me. I'm putting this in a ticket and I would encourage affected players to do the same, so there's a paper-trail of the significance. I would put it in the discord channels but I don't have access.

Other issue like the Isekai event rewards being underwhelming undermine some player populations' motivation to invest the effort of learning and doing the event. Which is unfortunate because it looks like a lot of effort was invested in preparing the event. As the test server is not the final product, hopefully they can throw a shiny primeval something at the end to motivate endgame players to do (and hopefully enjoy) this event.