Well, back in the times when AoM was still patched, I observed a pattern: ES always released one patch per quarter of the year (i.e. one patch in 3 months), regardless how urgent (or not urgent) that patch was needed. Nobody else appeared to be aware of that pattern, but it was apparent to me.
Shortly after releasing the TT expansion, a patch was released. And shortly after release of that patch, the Hades shade exploit became known, a bug that allowed a Hades player to create thousands of shades by walling up his own temple and then deleting the wall to unleash the shades at his opponent. So concerning its effect this bug was similar to today's Ajax spam, but required less knowledge about the game to pull off, and was abused a lot. So fixing it was obviously urgent, because every third Hades that you were playing rated against cheated (not like today where Ajax exists but is used like once in a year against you).
Having observed their patch pattern of the past, I knew that ES would not release another patch anytime soon, but many others were confident that ES would take care of this with priority. Now it was interesting to observe ES' policy, because I knew that they would not want to release a patch outside their stiff standard schedule, but of course they wanted to preserve the appearance that they were committed to good service to their customers. I was, however, speechless about the cheeky excuse that ES did use: With regard to the fact that it was early December (as far as I remember), they announced that their programmers now needed their well-deserved Christmas holidays and would care for the patch afterwards. Guess what: The crowd cheered. Yes, that would be justified, ES programmers had done such a good job on the TT expansion and would certainly deserve their holidays, blah blah was what you could hear on AoMH and elsewhere. And guess what else: Those "holidays" happened to last a full 3 months... only that in January and later, nobody talked about them again. Players were still anxiously waiting for the patch, but they had already forgotten the pathetic lie that ES had told them as an excuse why they were not going to make it with priority. And of course ES was not so foolish to mention the holiday thing themselves again.
The patch came when it would have come anyway. And ES emphasized how committed they were.
There are more examples, but the above is the most impressive one. A few months ago, there was a statement from ES_DeathShrimp on AOTS that ES has made "preliminary steps" that may lead to another patch. It was obvious that ES just felt that their reputation needed a boost, and they know that any statement they make, as useless or false as it may be, causes the crowd to kiss their feet, so they used their proven measure of stating a false promise to make the community like them again. What can I say: Looking at the reactions in the forum it worked well.
Another nice example are the continuous solemn assertions with how much determination ES is struggling ladder cheaters. ES always kept announcing that they would ban CD keys and that they recently had again banned some and stuff. Weird enough, accounts like "StoptehCheating" or "DrinkWhatIPee" (a famous cheater) ruled the world ladder on #1 position for many weeks, and ES did crap about it. However, what I did hear from witnesses is that an ES representative made himself important in the ESO chat, banning CD keys of anybody who contradicted him in any way. And I am not talking about abusive speech or forum spamming or something like that here. His behavior was very arrogant, and it sufficed to simply say something that he disliked in order to get your CD key banned permanently. Meanwhile, the cheaters continued to rule the ladder #1.
It was more than apparent that ES was not really interested in fixing the cheater problem. Investing lots of manpower to hunt down cheaters would have been the wrong approach anyway, as fixing the exploits in the game would have been the far easier job in comparison. But still ES did not grow tired of assuring how determinedly they were fighting cheaters and banning their CD keys.
Darkness is a state of mind
Valor is the contempt of Death and Pain. (Tacitus)
Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by hitting back. (Piet Hein)