Communication around job design and changes

[Jeeqbit]

the dev team is never talking about the actual changes or job additions they plan to do.

If they are anything other than potency changes or anything major, they usually mention it in live letters or at fan fests and media tours.

They only and barely talk about them when everything is already ready and done, and do everything not to have to deal with feedback prior to it when it actually matters.

They actually clarified in one of the gamescom interviews that in the time between the lodestone post about the Viper changes, and the release of the Viper changes, they were prepared to make changes up until the last minute and were watching all the feedback to the post.

It was difficult to fully make it out since it was translated, but I think they intended to go further (such as to remove positionals and make it slower?) but they saw lot of players had already reached max level and were happy with it. I think even their own developers expressed concern about making it slower to play when the entire concept of it is about how fast it attacks.

repeating the exact same mistake by not asking feedback about the new model

While it's true they don't always ask for feedback, they don't necessarily need to... because people will definitely post it on the forums, where they ask it to be posted.

To give an example of where they listened to it, a lot of people said they wanted Astrologian's cards to have unique effects again. So now they do. They couldn't be the same as in Heavensward because a lot of the concepts we had then were removed (sharing MP, TP, etc).

Some jobs like AST, MNK, get literally reworked every expansion

MNK got reworked because tight "keep up" buffs and now permanent DoTs were removed from most jobs generally. With the job not having much sophistication to it at that point, I suppose they wanted to make all the different aspects work together like how SAM does.

they mention feedback that we don't even know where it comes from (certainly not from there, where we're told to give our feedback). It's truly mind-boggling.

It does seem strange. For example, they said they think more people wanted Kaiten removed than wanted it back, which seems astonishing. Maybe it is a vocal minority thing where it is somehow a minority that were in support of Kaiten, but I really didn't see anyone complain about Kaiten at all, ever.

If we actually had even summary presentations of what the dev battle team plans ahead of time to gauge the reaction of players, and got explanations of the thought process behind, perhaps more people could actually get on board with the process

I actually find most changes are in line with what raiders were predicting. For example, if they say "that job needs a buff", often that is what you see in an upcoming patch. When they said PLD was losing out due to having sustained damage instead of burst damage and losing its ranged advantage due to a larger hitbox, SE addressed that. It was just when they started throwing out "random" changes along with it like Kaiten that it started to cause friction.