The current state of this server and its issues.

Let me begin this thread by saying that this is not a personal attack towards anyone in particular, but rather my thoughts on the issues that exist and my view on how they are handled.

Since it is the most recent issue, I will use the recent horntail run as an example to explain my thoughts.
First off, the issues that happened today at horntail should not have happened to begin with. This content was advertised as working and available (test run and multiple threads made weeks in advance with gm responses and no mention which would lead us to believe that it would not be available.)
This lead to a large part of the higher levels of this server to put high amounts of time and effort into preparing for a common goal (killing HT).
Now, I understand that the server has a very small staff and that they are doing this because they want to make a good server and I also realize that you guys are working as hard as you can to achieve this, BUT letting us live under the delusion that this content was available and working without having done proper testing is simply not acceptable.
That being said, we get to the response. The fact that we had to wait a long time to actually get started due to these bugs is not even the biggest issue. The biggest issue is the response to what happens once we actually get started. The fact that two people gets disconnected almost instantly after HT spawns starts a chain reaction that leads to the death of other people and on top of that a few more disconnect. The response we get from this is that the original 2 people that disconnected gets warped back to a stage where they can effectively have no impact on the boss battle and are really just waiting to die, while the other effects that these dc's had are completely ignored and the rest of the team is refused to get warped back.

I understand that your time is valuable, but so is ours and as a player that have invested considerable amounts of time and effort into organizing this event and the fact is that not only was this part of the game not functioning properly, but the response to above mentioned issues was plainly disrespectful towards the large amount of players that spent large amounts of their time preparing for it.

I wanted to make this thread generally about the server and what I explained above is merely an example of what makes me feel like I have utterly wasted my time when playing on this server. If something is advertised as playable content, it needs to work properly and if it doesn't than the fault belongs entirely to the staff and owners of this server and they need to act accordingly to make up for their mistakes.
The example I used above goes further than just this isolated event though. What I have seen throughout my 4-5 months of playing is continuous disrespect towards the players in the form of inadequate responses to faults that were present due to lack of testing or directly related to changes made by the staff.

The way that I imagine that the server could be improved is that I feel like the staff needs to open up a bit and be more transparent about what is going on behind the scenes and allow the community to help in whatever way they can, because we really want to make this as good of a server as it can be.
Issues like the ones mentioned above could be avoided if the community was asked to help test things before they were released as fully working content when in fact it wasn't.

TL;DR
The server is releasing unfinished and buggy content which leads to players spending large amounts of time working towards goals which is inherently impossible to achieve due to existing issues which are not disclosed ahead of time and I feel that it is disrespectful towards said players.

 

I will reply to this part first. This situation should not exist to begin with. As far as the live server goes, either the content is working in a way that the staff is happy with, or it is not accessible.
If you are going to be making changes to the current system between the time that a run is publicly announced, and when it is executed then you either need to make those changes in a time frame that allows proper testing or simply state that the content is not ready.

I believe I may have explained the quoted part for here wrong and you have replied in response to that, but what I meant was not for you to publicly announce upcoming (potentially unique) content in a way that put you in a vulnerable position which allows competition to steal your ideas. What I was trying to address here was the idea of letting the community test content when it is in a position that you are ready to release it, to ensure that it is working as it should. Horntail was only used as an example to explain the main thoughts and ideas behind my thread which I feel that you have yet to properly address.