They have their own private server, unfortunately as it's local to them, it doesn't respond the way the live servers do, on there they are in happy-happy land as everything responds instantaneously, not subject to the vagaries of having to traverse the interweb.
Sadly, as finally admitted to earlier in this post, the test server also does not respond in the same way as the live ones, which rather negates all our hard work testing out all this unity garbage, even if they did bother to read and comprehend our bug reports.
I would suggest they actually try playing the game on here as we do for a couple of months to experience the real world, the BB's of old were fans of the game and actually had player accounts on here even if they had little time to play for fun, they were able to experience the same conditions we do.
I would wager that if they did try to play on the live servers, we would have the client back in place inside of 2 weeks!
Unfortunately,wrong on both counts.
The servers were not responding to our browsers, either by typing in the address bar, trying to access via Ubi$oft Connect, nor even via cached pages stored locally or online.
Cheetah's "Service Status" screenshot above reflects what we were experiencing, the servers were not responding for a long period of time.
The loading time is worse, all that seems changed is the loading order, where it tries to load buildings first, then background.
It is also running up the computer fans heavily, worse than before the update, and trying to send explorers is increasing that load, leading to the game freezing and zone refreshing, I am having to logout in order to let the computer cool down, clearly a backward step.
And now experiencing an old "UPlay is unavailable" popup kicking me back out of server, another "blast from the past" that the update appears to have revived, like the irrelevant "collection challenge" quest item.