Don't think gameforge want to abandon this game, they still make a decent amount of money off of the playerbase here. But they've always been awful at communication. I'm personally still clueless how gameforge can not pressure runewaker to fix this shit after 1 year and be fine with them developing crappy new festival content that almost no one cares about.
i think ROM would still be a strong contender against other old style mmorpg games if they would fix and polish every flaw in this game.