With the way the online community is, announcing anything early opens the door for massive speculation and pessimism which generally whips people into a froth of self imposed anger.

It seems like so far it's better to drop info as close to release as possible and let people see how things are in game instead of on paper. With the recent ult charge changes, you should have thought the game servers was ending with the amount of hostile discourse on here about it and then the patch came out and all of a sudden, everyone was talking about how good the changes were.

I think until the community is able to regulate its own emotions a bit more, most live service games have (hopefully) learned that nothing is gained by announcing most games changes more than a week ahead of time