The worst of the server crashes should be fixed. Not guaranteeing all of them are fixed yet.

Skill increases for weapons and defense are temporarily greatly accelerated. This is expected to last a few days. In the last push they were not advancing as fast as they were supposed to, but they did not matter as much. The result is people are having a hard time fighting because their skills are behind where we would expect them to be. At least this is how it was explained to me :)