Just curious

There's honestly a lot of reasons why we tend to keep things in extremely early development under wraps. A big one is that players tend to take "we're experimenting with something" as "it will be in the game in a couple months," no matter how many disclaimers or caveats we attach to it.

There's also plenty of situations where we just don't have enough nailed down yet to give players a clear idea of where things are heading. When we can't be clear, players tend to build up expectations about what they think the feature will be... and when it turns out to be something different, they're disappointed (even if the real feature is actually pretty cool). In most cases, we'd rather wait until we have something solid to share and avoid all of that confusion and heartache.

All that being said, we have a much more open development process today than we did when the game first launched. The PTR process starts earlier in the dev cycle, and is far more accessible. We have much more efficient means of gathering player feedback from the forums, fansites, social media, etc. Heck, we even have designers like Greg Street and Brian Holinka actively discussing changes with players on Twitter. We try to be as open as we can about what we can. :)