So this is PvP now?

[Kaisinel]

Snip.

The aether cup consisted of 5 teams. There will always be a meta and the best jobs, that is the case for every game. Even with that fact, the team of DRK(there was a drk in the tournament)/AST/MNK/MCH were at the grand finals and the games between that team and the meta were extremely close. There would be even more deviations if there weren't literally 5 teams. Also, different data centers have different metas. For instance, Chaos' meta tank is WAR and have competitive BRDs, where as JP meta has BLM/SMN topping the charts. On the datacenter in which you and I are both part of, despite the meta, EVERY job has found its way into Top 100.

The balance before was actually good and many facets of the game had counters, even the meta comp had counters. If SE actually cared about PvP back then. And didn't attempt to balance once or twice a year, it'd have been in a better place. All in all, PvP was more balanced back then, than people tend to claim.