As things currently stand, I can not obtain the gun before September.
This in itself would not be a problem. However, the problem is that the reason is completely on Spiral Knight's server side.

I have the time and will to farm enough spikes to get the gun and I know that I can technically also reach the required material goals before this month's end, but unnatural server problems make it literally unplayable right now.

And by that I mean the fact that I launched the game, went to Haven (which worked), then went to Moorcrof in the Ruby Gate, with my current goal being its Roarmulus Twins boss a few floors down the line.

So far everything worked normally.
But after I stepped onto the elevator in order to move from Moorcroft to the Jelly Clockwork level, the screen went just black after the elevator animation finished playing.

And that was 40 minutes ago!!!

I keep moving my mouse to prevent getting disconnected for inactivity, but so far I did not yet reach the loading screen. It is still the black screen that you have before the loading screen does do any loading.

This said, once the loading screen actually is reached, the actual loading is at normal speed as one would expect.

It was already bad yesterday, but today with over 40 minutes of black screen is just straight unplayable anymore.

And from chats with other players, I can tell that this is not a client-side issue that only I am experiencing.
In my last run yesterday, the whole group of random players had multiple minutes of black screen before the loading occured and we continue playing.

Amongst other issues like excessive rubberbanding, although that seemed to have settled down at one point (as a EU player on probabably EU server, since I opened that laggy run myself).

With all that, I also want to humbly ask Grey Havens to extend the event's duration.
I understand if you want to stick to their original shedule, but as things stand, players can not even play the amount of time they wish to play in this game.

Edit:
Afterwards I had a farming session with barely any lag while joining other players.
When I opened another run on my own, the blackscreen and rubberbanding instantly returned and I had to Alt+F4 the game.
After that I joined another player again and it was smooth again.

So I assume that the EU servers are currently causing issues.

It's the third day of the event and almost all people figured out "The Exploit" ...

Probably the reason why servers lagging and people crashing. So many players doing a VERY heavy on visual effects spike farming.

We need to wait for the mandatory server restarts.
I hope that the event won't be shut down because of this. Mandolin is basically farmable in ONE DAY.
All that the new content brought looks alright. New event that fits the lore and atmosphere of Spiral Knights very well.

Right now, people are exploiting the Danger Rooms with zombie respawn totems and bombie respawn pads to infinitely farm spikes. The resulting load from endlessly respawning monsters is choking the servers to death. Obviously, this needs to be handled as priority. Respawned enemies must not generate spikes.

Once this gets handled, I also wouldn't object to seeing the event extended for a week or so. Right now a lot of us are just outright missing out and can't make any progress at all.

A rocky situation, to be certain - but that's what patches are for. Looking forward to farming up my own mando once the game is playable again.

Agreed, I just tried to join Moorcroft Manor and couldn't even get to the elevator with how bad the rubberbanding was.

I would love to grind this event! A shame the game had other plans.

Switching servers hasn't alleviated the issue. This is ongoing with all servers.

We don't, there's been a semi-consistent degradation of service biweekly over the weekends. It usually gets fixed on Mondays.

Welp, turns out the server issues are partially back, meaning The Exploit can't be really blaimed for the problems anymore since They're Still Here.

Instead of extending the event, we could receive some kind of compensation for time lost. Obviously in the form of Mysterious Spikes. The event is only bearable thanks to Construct-only stratums. But we don't know if such "custom" gates will be a feature of the event in the long-run or not.

im commenting again and bringing more attention to this since now we are also having the servers eat peoples items or progression in general. this is very very bad, we need compensation in some way shape or form.