Will any requested Kaiten feedback actually factor into future job updates?

[MellowMink]

I’m wondering if the continued silence implies a predetermined outcome regardless of any possible requested feedback, or at least has the appearance of it, because this is a lengthy situation that isn’t consistent with times where requested changes were quickly agreed with by developers, like with newer Black Mage nerfs for competitive content.

First of all, I don’t really buy the idea that people inherently need to wait a minimum of four entire months when an action is removed for it to potentially be added back, and I certainly don’t buy that people should have to wait a minimum of four entire months to see if such a reversion appearing on patch notes (or a live letter that happens shortly before a major patch release yet long after the last) is the earliest response that they’ll ever get as to whether their persistent criticism is even acknowledged; surely a very simple “We appreciate the feedback that we asked for and do plan to add this back; there are factors preventing an overnight change for reasons we’ll provide at the next live letter, but it will return” or a more unfortunate yet brutally honest “We already made the decision long ago to keep the change and are unable to consider any requested feedback asking for a reversion; it’s not solely because of button bloat, and we’ll provide business-related reasoning soon, but we’re breaking the news now so that we stop wasting the time of uncertain forum posters who we asked to share feedback” would work if they can not only provide an entire blog post for PvP Black Mage action feedback but also push out functional job updates (not just potency tweaks or action typo fixes) within weeks.

I’ve worked at jobs before where company-wide “surveys” were sometimes given out on pre-decided benefits or dramatic schedule changes that most employees weren’t happy with; everyone knew that the only reason those existed was to provide the illusion that they listened to major employee concerns, sometimes wording questions in such dishonest ways that they could be very selectively interpreted in a manner that was summarized to employees (without specifics) later as approval. It was blatantly obvious to many that no responses ever had a chance to stop planned changes (like worse health benefits) that were clearly already decided on long ago and done solely for company profits.

Getting back to Final Fantasy, the lack of any official response at this point makes me assume that they neither want nor plan to add Kaiten back, and at worst, asking for requested feedback that to this day hasn’t been met with any visible response (not even a forum reply from one developer) for months has the possible appearance of only being done for perpetuating the image that the team always (not only sometimes) listen to players when there’s a loud outcry, not to actually offer a realistic possibility of backpedaling; I sincerely hope the latter isn’t the intention, but it certainly can come across that way for situations with distrust between players and developers, such as with the Kaiten removal, the still-limited healer DPS variety, and more.