@Makarios has said multiple times that he doesn't like making big balance changes in between classlead cycles, in part because losing tools without being given a chance to defend them feels really bad. Despite this, Jesters were just hit with a huge nerf under the guise of a bug-fix when suicidemice were silently changed to ignore the platinum whistle. I can only guess that the reason this change was made was because the whistle was perceived as undermining the balance cost added to dropping mice, but I strongly disagree with that. The balance cost was introduced because Jesters were able to drop/order/Aeon all at once, completely removing the ability for the opponent to interact with the mouse at all - it was not added to make an already clunky class even clunkier, even though it accomplished that goal as well. The platinum whistle did not violate the spirit of this change because it still consumes balance. Instead of drop/order/Aeon, the platinum whistle was used along with the speed strip, allowing the opponent a ~3.4 second window to kill the mouse or to shield to avoid danger. The whistle was the perfect middle-ground of allowing mice to be used fluidly while still offering a significant window of interaction.

It may seem like a relatively minor thing, but having to spend 2s dropping the mouse is a huge deal and dramatically impacts the power of the class. Timed bombs can be used in lieu of mice in many applications, but they add a significant level of complexity on top of what is already the most complex and user-unfriendly class in the game, and the highly random and rigid nature of timers is completely unsuited to the lengthy and convoluted Puppetry setups that give opponents significant amounts of time to tumble or take other defensive measures, and need to be able to adapt on the fly to compensate.

Lastly, there's the simple fact that Jester was not in need of a nerf. As much as I love it, it's a dramatically under-utilized class precisely because it's so unfriendly to users. Nothing about the platinum whistle interaction was unfair, nothing in the numerous Announce posts about the whistle or about suicidemice suggests that the interaction was unintended or bugged at all, and it didn't go against the spirit of the suicidemice drop nerf. The one who submitted the bug report did it spitefully after losing to Aeon in multiple fights because he took zero steps to learn how to counter it, and I find it disturbing that such a malicious and detrimental complaint can affect the game seemingly without oversight. The only problem that I saw with the plat whistle interaction was that such important functionality shouldn't be gated behind a talisman, and I was planning on addressing it the very next classlead cycle. I have no presumptions that this is the proper time or place to make any such suggestions, so all that I ask is that this change be reverted until next classlead cycle, which is where it should have been brought up to begin with.