To say that the release of the new event and the issues it has caused have been "mishandled" would be an understatement.

The game servers have had major issues during 3 instances: 2 of which made the game unplayable and 1 which caused progress to be erased and even items to disappear when crafting, interacting with the Auction House or just obtaining items by playing levels.

The event itself was also quite undercooked, with major exploits being present on release, most caused by the developers not taking into account basic enemy mechanics such as Zombies resurrecting through a Grim Totem, and a good amount of players refusing to play together in this coop-focused game, instead opting to play with 4 knights simultaneously to effectively multiply their mysterious spike obtainment.

During these critical issues, the developers failed to notify their playerbase about these game-breaking problems, no apologies were given in any sort of way and whenever any update had any patch notes tied to it, the wording wasn't event correct (I understand Spiral Knights isn't the only game Grey Havens is managing right now, but there's quite a difference between a Knight and a Pirate, I fail to understand how these sort of mistakes happen so often).

It's gotten to the point players are more well informed about the state of the game when they are present in community-made Discord servers. Think about this: players are being notified about game-breaking, experience ruining issues much more reliably through unofficial means.

And while I can understand the argument that forums are not checked particularly often by players due to their outdated nature, and thus posting an announcement there is probably not a very effective way to communicate issues to players, Steam — which is definitely used more frequently by Spiral Knights players — has a feature dedicated to announcements tied to the game, which has been used to announce major updates recently and could have been used to notify players that the game was breaking apart and it was unwise to play it until the issues were resolved.

The in-game player mail also exists, which is yet another way to reach to a high amount of players and warn them about the major server issues, and nothing was to be seen there either.

Frustrating, this whole situation is just frustrating. If we can't even get notified when the game we want to play is utterly broken, as we say in Spain: "apaga y vámonos".