While most of what you say is true, it’s also painfully obvious that it takes these devs forever and a day to even do simple, basic changes to the code.
It’s also painfully obvious that the code for the game is a complete shambles, as they keep introducing bugs with every little thing they try to do, and often end up resorting to stupid brute force fixes to problems. (Slayer 2nd melee defaulting to blacksmith weapon just being the latest most obvious example of a brute force fix to a problem they just can’t code a fix for.)
QA must also be at an absolute minimum as balance changes seem to basically not be thought through and tested at all before they’re put in, patches regularly break super-obvious things or entire classes and is never caught by QA.
And of course, the game was a complete and total mess on release, with a truly staggering number of bugs, systems that weren’t even implemented on live (and the devs never bothered to test on live, they just tested patches on internal builds…this is such a big NO NO that it can’t be overstated what a blunder that was), talents not working/only working on host that they are still not done fixing, missing artwork for a host of red weapons, the keep and more, the maps were just full of transparent walls and full of places to fall through geometry.
The missing artwork isn’t a bug by the way, or they would have fixed it by now. They simply shipped the game without them, just one more sign that they launched a completely unfinished game with an incredibly messy and unstable code-base.
They have fixed a lot of things after release, getting the game a bit closer to release-state, but it’s still not exactly a finished product, and I haven’t been impressed with the patch output so far.
They also seem to have this wierd obsession with screwing their customers over, for no obvious reason. It’s not like the insane RNG in the game is making them money. But still they have thought processes that go like this:
The players HATE all the RNG and want bounty boards to work towards specific weapons/cosmetics.
Oh, I know what we’ll do, we’ll instead give them what no one asked for, and give them a couple more one in a million RNG changes a week!
A lot of players feel miffed about the massively buggy unfinished state of the game, the fact that it took 3 months to implement cosmetics and everyone wasted all their grinding and have to grind for 1500 more hours to get the cosmetics! Some of them are asking for chests as a goodwill measure to restore faith in us!
Oh, I know what we’ll do, we’ll call the very NOTION of creating goodwill by giving away free, no-cost-to-us chests as CRAZY. Oh and say that it isn’t the end of the world, because nothing says we care more than that.