At this point, I think it's important to post a few things about crashes, bugs, and how we address them. We've had some rough stretches, and this last week was pretty bad for many people, so I think you, the players, deserve a little insight.
To start, we take crashes very seriously. The it's one of the two top priorities for the team. Any future work or adjustments are shelved when crashes are reported, because the faster we knock them out, the faster people can return to enjoying the game.
After this, you may wonder why we kept going forward with the recent game changes even though "everyone was crashing." First, not everyone was crashing. We tested the game internally, of course, for quite a while and didn't see a majority of what the players experienced when the patch was published. When we realized this, we first went about gathering information about what was going wrong and how to reproduce it. What we found is that some of the recent changes exposed several long-standing issues in the code.
In order to find them, we kept going through the crash logs to address and find the core issues causing the crash. It's true we could have reverted the code and gone back to the older patch, but this means we wouldn't have been able to see any data since we weren't reliably reproducing the issue (at first - we did later in the week). Some of the changes were both performance and security related. I'm not going to give detail about this, but we felt it was important to keep moving forward, and even if people were crashing we still had a large population of active players going in and having fun.
One thing that helps substantially in these situations is to get good information from the folks playing, and that means that in addition to reporting that you've had a crash, it would be helpful to include any information about basic system specs (so we can find a similar machine in the studio to test with), and anything you can remember about what you were doing in game before you experienced the issue.
It's the nature of early access to have some rocky points, but to be honest this last week was below our level of quality. We've corrected most of the issues so far, but we also know there are still some stability problems going forward. We continue to work on this (I've been reviewing logs all weekend, because it's my job to do that) and we continue to strive to get a more stable game each day. I can do nothing but apologize for the trouble, and thank you for sticking around and helping us solve the problems.