It’s fair to say Defiance hasn’t had a smooth launch. It’s not the only game this year to suffer such a fate, true, but the team behind the game are being extremely upfront and pro-active about these mistakes. They’re working around the clock to offer the best game possible.
A major patch is being worked on to address client and server crashes, connection issues, lag, vanishing items and the chat system,
Confusingly, there are platform-specific issues which need to be addressed and the team are trying to identify these and fix.
A large update for the game will hit on April 15th, and another update 2 weeks after that.
It appears the priority is Xbox, but the dev team are also working on PC and PS3 just as extensively.