Depends on what precisely you mean by “teased,” but by my reckoning, Return of Rome was teased for over 6 months, although very badly. They revealed the cover art for the next DLC, that it was going to be called Return of Rome and would have AoE1 content in AoE2, but didn’t give a date or any other info. They promised to “share more details in the not too distant future, so stay tuned,” and then didn’t say anything substantial for 6 months, meanwhile suspending people for posting or talking about leaks. Skim any of the old megathreads about this, and you’ll see how annoyed everyone was with the lack of promised information. A couple weeks before release, we finally get a trailer that shows little more than the leaked stuff many of us had seen months ago. There was also a huge controversy about adding Romans generally, as well as initially being unable to play them in ranked, etc. All this hype and secrecy for an underwhelming product that, like V&V, still failed to satisfy much of its target audience.
As a reminder, most of the things that people are saying about V&V about it being a lazy cash grab, recycling of old assets/having people pay for something they thought should have been free, etc, were said as passionately and more often about RoR. Even the bit about people thinking they were misled/lied to because of the steam description, since there was no mention that the original campaigns were not ported or (IIRC) about whether crossplay was available. So many people went into it assuming it might have these features. Not saying any of this to justify V&V, but to provide perspective. Apart from 0 Assets and limited scope, V&V is far from DE’s first miss on a DLC.
People are understandably upset about V&V, but IMO nothing before or since even comes close to the communication failures of Return of Rome. Absolute disaster. V&V was communicated poorly, but at least within a compressed window. Better to wait a month and be disappointed and move on, than to wait the better part of a year and be disappointed. Here’s hoping they have something better around the corner.
They most always tease DLCs, DOI was teased and was well done, the last DLC that I was well and truly hyped for. Shows you what they can do when they care.