To the point where it is unplayable....

lol took me ages to get here but yeah I 2nd its currently unplayable

Same here.
Keeps facing slowness quite consistently on almost every click in the game.
I think the slowness started after set ended in Alliance server.

The evo bots do not appear to be running with the 1a reset change, so they should not be to blame there.

Qz made some configuration changes that we expect will help a lot with game performance.

Thank you

Enough memory for the database (32gb should be enough, should have more for the query cache)
Enough sockets for the webserver (was only really an issue on windows I think)
The right sql server settings for conflicts (you have to avoid the scenario where a longer running query can block an update which can block another longer running query).
And then some basic inteligence around sql queries

There aren't that many things required to do hundreds of requests a second
Although personally I'd push api query events to another box in a datacenter and serve them from there to move all that load off and only leave actual player activity. Then the API data could be entirely public and there wouldn't be any need for keys to get it at all. Could even go back to Mehul's system of text files.