Out of curiosity, what is the advantage to have "official" confirmation?
Oh, I couldn't care less if the information is "official" or not, I just want
more information. Even if it changes before release or later.
Why not float
ideas past your beta testers and actually use us as a focus group for product testing instead of just bug-catchers?
Let's face it, once you've spent the time&money on developing a feature you're going to stick with it 99% of the time unless it's totally broken.
It's a huge waste of free crowd-sourced labor potential.
In case we give it, and it changed last minute (without even us knowing in advance), then what? are you gonna sue us?
That's absolutely ridiculous, especially on Beta.
"Subject to change without notice" covers everything.
As for Live servers and a calendar, like
@Enevhar Aldarion said, it's about player engagement.
Now:
"What's happening in Elvenar?"
-"Not much, The sea horse event for another couple of weeks, then an FA probably"
New:
"What's happening in Elvenar?"
-"Loads of stuff! The sea horse until Aug 8, then 5 days later an FA for 6 days which has a 50 KP, a carting library, and a mystery prize, then 2 days later a Craftsmans challenge, then a mystery event, then starting Sept 9 the fall event which seems to be bear-themed..."
Even though there's no actual difference, having a calendar of events feels like there's a lot more going on. You can even fluff it up by including the Spire (with artifacts hidden or revealed) and the tournament.
Think about real-life: when you have a beach vacation coming up it's fine for it to be a surprise sometimes, but really if you know a while in advance you can look forward to it for weeks and the anticipation is also good.
Life (and games) are just more interesting when you have more coming up. I love that tomorrow we're going to the Cactus Club for dinner, next weekend we're going to my BiL's birthday party, and in 2 months we're going to Thailand.
Sure, any or all of those plans could change, but who cares? It's already nice to think about.