You are not supposed to 'forget' a promise that has been made because that promise actually has never been made. Perhaps there were vague statements that eventually something of that nature might occur plus, later on, two screenshots of the 'new system' being posted. This entire rumour 'i heard ngs comes next week' or stuff like that is made up by the attention-seeking gossiping part of the community. The devs could not have announced anything in the first place, but then wouldn't everybody be complaining about how there is zero will of the devs to improve anything?
Now you will argue that, if it wasn't certain when exactly a new system would come, the devs atleast shouldn't have removed the 1k hats this early. May I ask you if you ever thought through why those got removed at all? Do you think the devs were like 'were planning a new guild system in which we wont need the 1k hats anymore so lets already remove them now, oops now suddenly we realized this new system takes us much longer than we thought, sorry about that'? The 1k hats and the other towering reward hats were a MISTAKE and they corrected that mistake. Would you have wanted them to wait correcting a mistake instead of doing that instantly?
(The reason they were a mistake are obvious, I think I already talked about that in some previous threads: noob abuse, unfair distribution and more. We can talk about how guilds and towering should work in a separate thread.)
Now, your thesis is that by removing those rewards, the motivation and the fun are gone.
Perhaps at first, spontaneously, that is understandable. Something has been taken away so the situation must have gotten worse, that is the reflex of the brain. Thinking it through though, the 1k hat removal has improved things by alot because (trying to sum it up in one sentence, I wrote an essay about that topic on my website) since there are no material rewards anymore, players are forced to base their strength on a good spirit only instead of making random players hat promises so they quickly help out.
For classic 'towerers' who did those 1k trips for years, that might take some time to realize. The 1k hat removal has definitly improved the spirit of fighting. There are two reasons for towering being 'dead':
1) major pkers retiring because they feel scammed by the devs with that NGS issue, causing an avalanche of more retiring until we now have a bitter, ridiculous bunch of Graalians who feel like there is a conspiracy going on
2) (and the MUCH bigger issue) the increasing amount of treshold country players who swarmed over the server - talking about their unstable connections obviously. THAT is the real problem of Graal Classic.