Quote Originally Posted by Red-thunder View Post
The community managers technically read the forums and relay the feedback. But it's like a game of telephone and who knows what the dev team actually hears.

Also, it's not a good thing that they read the JP forums. They cherrypick random 3 like posts on the JP forums as justification for their bizarre moves like gutting Viper days after release, while ignoring the tens of thousands of likes on the JP forums that disagree that Viper is "too busy".
Take it from an industry vet, this to me sounds more like some dev with some gravitas/authority (like a creative director, team lead or executive) decided that they found it too complicated or didn't like it and asked for it to be changed, and they just complied because they had to, then came up with random justifications to make up some back up claims.