and people will leave the game without events too - some of the new players in my guild were looking forward to this event. If everyone was on the same page I would agree with cancelling it. I was one of them who asked them not to introduce unity for the previous event because I played on the PTR and knew it wasn't ready. This event though I think enough changes were made for them to run it given the type of the event it is. I do think they need to send us some free buff cakes even 6 or so large ones to make up for the extra slowness required to do everything. If they don't, they will get a lot of people extremely frustrated with this event. Take the pressure off and people don't need to be in a hurry for everything and can still get everything done they want.
I agree they don't make $$$ off of the people just doing maintenance and I think that is why they have the event - that event they have a lot of items available for gem purchases.
Also, all these claims about how guilds are being destroyed and losing players make me laugh. I have been in a few guilds over the years and the most active guilds even when things are great during an event rarely have more than 75% of their players active. During non events these active guilds only 50% of their players are active. Someone claimed 6 months ago that they lost half of their guild because of mac/linux players not being able to play - then the guild master advertises on global chat a few days later, that they had so many people complete the guild quest - far more than was capable of happening if half their guild couldn't play.
The guild I am in some days only 2 people do the guild quest, some days 10 and we weren't really an active guild coming into this business. I do find a lot of people are spending more time chatting in global than they do in guild chat though for some odd reason - maybe those lights.