though I disagree to that everyone knew announcement thing, only those who checked before it scrolled down and saw it over the fat pinned legacy tab on the left would know.
And that's all that they were really targeting, those who were playing the game "currently". It wasn't a " Everyone is going to know advertisement. If the word got out then that's fine, but it was really targeting for current players. If everyone knew, then a lot of people would jump on it for the three months and wait for ARR, SE would lose out on 60 bucks a person a year. "If" there 200k population and they all did it that's $12,000,000 lost.

So, I don't believe it was targeted towards everyone, just the current fanbase that stuck through the game through thick and thin.