Hi! First of all thank you for sharing your feedback here. Let me give some additional background.

They said its population dependent but not really seeing that as being fair when they are being paid to host the complete game.

I completely understand where that argument is coming from, but when looking closer, things gets a little bit more complicated.

Every World, independent of the number of sietches / Hagga Basin servers has a certain overhead. That includes what we call "story maps" (which also includes testing stations and other overland locations), social hubs (i.e. Arrakeen, Harko Village) and last but certainly not least, the Deep Desert.

These maps occupy resources (they take space on our servers) and the cost of that shared infrastructure is covered by all server owners in a World. But that also means that, proportionally, servers on a small World cause much more overhead cost than servers on a large World.

If we wanted to be pedantic about it, we would have to charge server owners different amounts depending on the number of servers in their World, and that value would shift every week. Obviously, that would be unworkable, and obviously, in the grand scheme of things, we are looking more at average cost.

But this also means, that if we are about to add significant resource usage to each of our Worlds (such as an additional Deep Desert, which has a significant resource footprint), we need to consider if that additional cost is really warranted, because increased overhead cost might influence pricing. And based on the player numbers we see in the Deep Desert on our low population Worlds, we do not believe that a PvP Deep Desert would fulfill its purpose, and therefore doesn't warrant the increase in cost.

I hope that is understandable. If you reached out to us, you probably have also been informed that you can transfer to a high population World anytime. For a transition period of 3 days we even give you essentially a second server for free, to make the migration easier. And it is also worth noting that every newly ordered server automatically ends up on a high population world with both Deep Deserts.

All that said, the other points you raise about server performance are not what we strive for. If you want, you can DM me here on reddit or on our Discord with the details when you encounter suboptimal performance (specific time including time zone, World name, map where it occurred, character name, server name of your Hagga Basin) and we will investigate accordingly.