A Broken Sword?

Is Sword of the New World dying with the staff covering things up to milk it for what it's worth? Or just the half-sane rumblings of melodramatic doomsayers? Many rumors have been circulating for some time, but most players simply dismissed them as such. But there are real, persistent problems with the game, and it is not a good sign that players are often left in the dark to speculate by themselves. There are lots of forum topics about this. I will just summarize the issues here. Personally, I'm having doubts and losing faith about the future of SNW now. It's a pity though.

Lack of Game Updates
After v2.9 was introduced, only one patch Update 4.5, which is mostly bug fixes, was added on 29 Oct 2008. That was 4 months ago. There has been no update ever since. SNW patched v2.9 about a week before SGE, but now SGE is already far into v3.0 and SNW still haven't release Claire or Bahamar Ancient Area yet, not to mention Reboldeaux Culverts. Heck, if I'm not wrong, even the bug for Calyce's veteran stance quest has not been fixed.

Mass Disconnections
There has been multiple mass disconnections every week. The emergency maintenance that happened soon after never seemed to really fix the problem for good, leaving the impression that they are doing little more than temporarily holding the problem back instead of really fixing it.

Market Crashes
Furthermore, when a mass disconnection happens, the market sometimes also crashes. All items placed with the Market Manager will be lost. Tickets must then be submitted before they restore the lost items after a couple of days. It is a nuisance. I have never experienced this when I was playing SGE from open beta to v2.4.

Lack of Website Updates
The SNW website has not been updated for a long time. The list of leading clans and top barons are months old. Since 29 Oct 2008, there are 5 articles in the news section: 1 about patch notes, 2 maintenance notices, 1 event notice, and 1 premium promotion notice. Compare this to other editions of GE, such as SGE, which have lots of articles on the website every month. The main website is where potential new players visit first. (Experienced players will just go straight to the forums.) A barely updated main site does not leave a very good impression. It is as if the staff don't really care anymore.

Lack of Communication With the Community
What exactly is happening to SNW? When (approximately) will the rest of v2.9 be released? Why are there so many disconnections? Does any player really know? It has been 4 months since the last patch, and all the players know about further patches is... an ambiguous "Soon". There is no road-map or progress update concerning game updates and server problems.

Lack of communication just leads to unnecessary speculations. If you have to keep your customers waiting, you should at least update them on the progress. Is it so hard to let the community know something like... "We're currently fixing a bug in Claire's quest. Low-level super-fights and Bahamar Ancient Area are working fine, and will released together with Claire. ETA: 3 weeks from now"?

Missing Gold
Today, players are complaining about gold (i.e. cash shop credits) missing from their accounts. So now players spend real money to top-up and risk having gold missing randomly? I'd just end this entry with a quote by Baltrus here:

WHERE has my gold disappeared and how? Has it gone random? I really will stop investing my cash for such a bugged, not maintained, unstable Game where company representatives don't even dare to tell their customers what's going on. FIX THIS GAME - ITS ABOUT TIME.