I think what's happened this anniversary event is the culmination of years and years of frustration in the community with the lack of transparency, communication and enthusiasm between GH and the community. It's just another event in the timeline of an overarching problem.
I understand that you guys may find the community really hard to deal with at times with a lack of a community manager, I get that, but this continuous cycle of no actual communication about the direction of the game, combined with simply having the game auto-run on a cycle of monthly promotions and reused events really paints Gray Havens generally in the community's eyes as a company that doesn't really care about the players and only seeks to profit off of promotions.
This cycle really doesn't help when the most action that the community sees being taken by Gray Havens is against RMTers (who are a miniscule portion of active players) and scammers.
It's no secret that the game is plagued with bugs and issues. AMD graphics cards are very prone to visual bugs. Memory leakage leads to a lot of Apocrea being unplayable for many players. Snowballs, water balloons and other visual effects can make sitting in Haven impossible. I could go on and on, but you get my point.
When these issues persist for years and years and get reported tons and tons of times, while the same in-game events get rolled out with no changes, it is very frustrating for the community when the game they love this much is getting this treatment.
A lack of transparency has only furthered this frustration as well. The lack of any official communication platform aside from the forums has always plagued the community as well. The main issue with the forums is that it is treated like just an outlet for game announcements. Game masters almost never respond to threads for suggestions or bug fixes, making it feel like posting any thread here is like talking to a wall.
When all of the online communities are community ran, it really feels like Gray Havens is putting in the bare minimum. It also doesn't help that when Nyxed joined the Arcade Discord about a year ago, it was abundantly made clear that there were zero plans for any official communication platform aside from the forums. It's honestly infuriating when the most communication we get is during the annual flash sale interview conducted by Legobuild. An interview conducted by a third party within unofficial means, containing information that is never posted by game masters ingame or on the forums.
It also hurts to see Puzzle Pirates seemingly get more attention from the company than Spiral Knights. While I am unqualified to talk about Puzzle Pirates, it doesn't help to see an actual developer being hired for Puzzle Pirates back in November, while, once again zero announcements being made for Spiral Knights regarding the direction of the game.
One somewhat positive example of communication however is the time when feedback for the Vault update was being collected on the Arcade Discord. While it was cool to know that players thoughts and feelings on the Vault update were being collected, it was somewhat frustrating afterwards seeing no response or announcement from Gray Havens once the period ended. Something simple like "Thanks for the feedback everyone! We're going to be reviewing it now" would be very nice instead of the channel closing with no statements at all. For all we know, all of the feedback provided wasn't read by anyone was instead chucked into the trash can.
There seems to be a general trend that the community has definitely noticed. Gray Havens only seem to respond to us when there's large community outrage. Flashback to the last Auction House update, in which TLDR, all outbid notices were temporarily funnelled to your mail. While this update definitely had good intentions and was certainly worked on, it was released with zero feedback from the community. Almost nobody asked for it. The community was spurred into outrage, and as a result, the update was rolled back. It also doesn't help that more pressing issues at the time like Tier 4 Shadow Lair balancing were still in the game for much longer periods of time.
This was when Nyxed came back to the Arcade Discord server. This was one of the few genuine times we actually had a direct communication line with Gray Havens. It was good to hear something new instead of the usual "thanks, we passed this on" copy and paste response in the ticket system.
Fast forward in time to where we are today. Spurred again by outrage, pitchforks and fire, only then does Gray Havens actually respond to the community. While I believe Knightlauncher itself is ok, I understand why the UCP was DMCA'd, but it's not my expertise to take about that. It's beside my point. Prior to this, the community had about zero idea about Gray Haven's stance on mod usage. While videos of how to install Knightlauncher on YouTube were struck down, the community felt very uneasy as we were unsure what would happen next. Would players get banned for using the launcher? Does manually patching 64 bit java count as modding? A simple announcement would help alleviate this, but instead, we were left in the dark once again.
I find it appalling that an announcement made by some third party individual has been 10x more exciting than the actual in-game celebration event itself, an event celebrating A DECADE of the game being out.
This simple lack of any communication, transparency combined with a complete unwillingness to properly communicate with the community has resulted in the dumpster fire that's burning right now. While other game companies put out Reddit Threads, update videos, roadplans and other communication posts, Gray Havens hasn't put out anything close to them.
We love this game so much. For the past ten years, we've grinded, made friends, made amazing fanart, costumes, community events, created fond memories and guilds and much, much more. It's hard to put in words how much this game has done for so many people, and we genuinely care about it. We wouldn't be here if we didn't. We want others and friends to experience what we have experienced. But when the game is being treated this way and has been for years, its hard to ignore the problems.
Please Gray Havens, please communicate with us. It's clear the the old hands off approach backfires hard, and we only want the best for this game.
EDIT: grammar lol
I know you didn't say they should do it. However, you asked if GH was going to do it, which is why I said they shouldn't.