did you play the alpha? or open beta? i played the alpha, for about 1k hours up until open beta. the game was loved by those who played it, but the population was too small to be "monitored for months" and make a decision off of it. they caved to the carebears 100%. the game had player built towns, guarded and unguarded towns, FFA pvp and full loot death, criminal status, sounds familiar yeah?
then in the next half year approaching was was supposed to be launch originally, they added factions, made questing forced (used to be able to buy the azoth staff) removed player built towns, pvp toggle flag, alpha tested the cash shop, keep gear on death, etc..
nothing you said is fully accurate, they did monitor players, but you cant beta test with under 5k players and make huge decisions for launch with over a million people playing, especially when its marketed towards a specific audience for years and then in the months before launch rewrite the game from the ground up.
additionally, the game suffers so many issues any one would be enough to kill a game, just off the top of my head: dozens of gold exploits that never got wiped, you still cant swim, important parts of the game are client side only, for months if you played the game in windowed and shook the screen around it held iframes making you invincible in pvp (not joking,) large wars for territory they made instanced and locked at 50v50, they continue to add content that drops better weapons than can ever be crafted while also making crafting harder and harder to do.
new world lost 96% of its players after the first week for a reason, it was a groundbreaking failure, and should never be used as an example for anything positive. the reason its wildly successful compared to MO2 is because it has amazon's advertising budget and pull, not indie swedish game dev company