I don't think that the great majority of modern gamers even bother checking the forums to be honest - and the amount of activity around here stands as proof for that.
Moreover, there's really no point in arguing against what I said as it was a personal in-game experience. You either consider or ignore it.
And speaking of proper announcements like in any other MMORPGs, the patcher still shows up the image for the Vein Spawn.
Literally the only thing that you could do to ensure coverage of such events and prevent confusion is update that image when the time comes. Usually, 1-2 days after an event ends, its specific picture shows up on the patcher - is that how it should work? I'm not asking you to spam the chat with lines of text that nobody reads anyway - just... update one image.
And leaving all of the above aside - any sort of questions or uncertainties about an event or an event that's currently running on the server could be solved by a pop-up window in the style of the Daily Rewards that displays upon logging on for the first time in a day - it would show both the event running that day, maybe even the one in the following day, and their respective starting hours.
If you plan to argue against this, I know a lot of players that have missed events due to lack of announcements or too little of them - and if that doesn't cut it, let's take a look at the overall participation numbers in Fishing Extravaganza and even Vein Spawn. - speaking of, the pop-up window could appear 5-10 minutes before the event as well, since most players here don't know what timezone the server is running on and/or mix up the time.
Anyhow, this was my rant, feel free to ignore it. Nevertheless, it talks player retention and engagement. You won't keep anyone engaged in an event if they are not given the time to get hyped about it.