IGN Brazil Asked Yoshida about 2 min meta

[SeverianLyonesse]

1. Players are a terrible source of wisdom when it comes to "balancing". Every game that has ever listened to player feedback about how "unplayable" or "broken" things are and reached for total parity ended up severely diluting meaningful choices and agency in favor of homogenization. Devs should maintain healthy disregard for players' opinions on that front, and always seek to introduce non-equivalent solutions to balancing rather than cutting unique features or redistributing them to everyone else.

2. The only real problem with FFXIV, which is the same problem with GW2 and I imagine with a lot of games, are group-wide damage buffs. These are always going to be tyrannical no matter how you implement them. In GW2 because 100% buff uptime is possible, alacrity and quickness are now mandatory, forcing the game into the terrible decision of either designing dedicated boonslaves, or just allowing both buffs to be inconsequentially generated with a passive trait that does nothing to change up playstyle. In FFXIV, having limited buff windows just forces players to dump all their skills during someone else's golden hour, which in turn forces the designs and playstyles to all converge on this weird in-step DDR Rockettes routine. PARTY DAMAGE BUFFS RUIN INDIVIDUAL SKILL, REACTIVE GAMEPLAY, AND SPONTANEOUS CHOICE. If the devs would simply cut that very small category of skills, no class would be locked into a two-minute rotation and could be redesigned with new cadence and contours, the game would still have plenty of room for complexity and cooperation in other dimensions of combat, and players would be able to optimize DPS in their own ways without the feel-bad of needing to blind-sync with other people's buffs.