I don't see a change in difficulty at all in any of the things the OP listed since the first day of Open Beta? Mad dragon has always been ridiculous to me due to all the adds.
They have given us 0.00% info, OP. I waited all day as well and there has been no real update all day long. It would have been nice to hear something at all, info wise.
Turn off on demand patching. What is happening is, you are in the game and the game is not fully patched and so what you are experiencing is happening. Then you should download the entire thing before you log in. Hoping that is the cause of your issue anyways.
Even if you get the patch, their servers are still down, so it doesn't really matter. Hopefully they go back up soon though. Their forum doesn't even seem to be handling the player population right now though.
I agree on that, have no clue why they are doing the maintenance now either. But heck, back when I played WoW they did maintenance during prime hours every week.
Guess they are really trying to fix something as after the maintenance is supposed to be over it is still ongoing. Guess I won't be playing till I get back from work.
Was wondering about the Queue myself, said 7590 then 36790 etc, with this tiny amount of server bandwidth and space, I don't know how many people they are going to impress today.
I would have much rather have paid 60.00 for the game and subsequent add-ons and pay a monthly subscription than have a F2P game. But that isn't my decision that is Cryptic's. I've never been a fan of F2P games as they oft times get extremely expensive in the end.