Dear SE, Stop Treating Us Like We Are A Single Community

[Xirean]

See, the real issue here isn't that 2 min meta is bad persay, we just have two running theories since Yoshida and the Dev team are as transparent as Wood. It's either hard to express the unique personality of each job within 2 minutes, or the Battle content designers are still 3 guys and their interns so they're struggle bussing it as per usual.

I was under the impression the 2 minute meta made it easier for them to balance. What exactly is the issue with the 2 minute meta aside from people finding it "boring"?

[strawberrycake]

I was under the impression the 2 minute meta made it easier for them to balance. What exactly is the issue with the 2 minute meta aside from people finding it "boring"?

Well what I said, at least from people I've talked to, is what I mentions, It's too hemogeneous, the lack roles feeling different enough, having more personality, and some have assumed, it's possibly due to there being no *room* within the 2 min to allow jobs to feel more unique.

[yoshinoharu]

See, the real issue here isn't that 2 min meta is bad persay, we just have two running theories since Yoshida and the Dev team are as transparent as Wood. It's either hard to express the unique personality of each job within 2 minutes, or the Battle content designers are still 3 guys and their interns so they're struggle bussing it as per usual.

Honestly the problem runs much deeper than that because it's a math problem that causes severe imbalance because of multipliers to damage. The 2 minute meta does mean that job identity is lost, but it's because with the 2 minute meta, you CAN'T have job identity and still have every job be viable.

With the older buff system, buffs only ever fully aligned on the opener and the 6 minute window. Outside of that, every player was always playing into something. Multipliers were dispersed throughout the duration of the fight.

With the 2 minute system, you are pumping all your hardest hitting things into what is often around a 16x multiplier. Any tiny discrepancies get amplified to a ridiculous degree. Think about the difference between 50 and 100 potency with a 16x multiplier. A gap that starts as 50 potency is now suddenly 800 potency. So any job that has very slight potency adjustments can suddenly be several orders of magnitude stronger than a job within the same role. That's before even talking about crit which is it's own ridiculous issue since you're stacking another multiplier on top of that already ridiculous multiplier.

This happens literally every 2 minutes, so instead of having two very strong burst windows in a fight, you have 4 or 5, and as the frequency increases the more important it is to not make any mistakes. Once you make a mistake and misalign yourself, you don't have any other windows to play into like it was with the multi-burst-window meta. So you then have to design encounters based on players making a moderate amount of mistakes which vastly changes the experience that players have with each fight based on how well everyone can maintain their rotation.

With this one change they've made it infinitely harder to maintain job balance, annihilated the possibility of job identity, greatly exacerbated punishments for death or rotational errors, caused crit variance to become a much more prevalent issue, and also made the game a million times easier for people that want a challenge and a million times harder for mechanically dis-inclined players. All of this just to make pressing a series of buttons easier for people that don't want to learn the most efficient order to push said buttons in.

So it's worse than just increasing the difficulty of designing jobs with personality.

[Aravell]

Well what I said, at least from people I've talked to, is what I mentions, It's too hemogeneous, the lack roles feeling different enough, having more personality, and some have assumed, it's possibly due to there being no *room* within the 2 min to allow jobs to feel more unique.

It's not just an assumption or a possibility that there's no room to make jobs unique. Look at PLD, easily the most unique tank at the start of EW, forced to be reworked because it wasn't meshing with burst windows.

[strawberrycake]

Genuinely everything wrong with 2 Min Meta

One of the few times my Dyslexia kicks me in the ass. But this is why my last raid group had issues, It was made from a few vet raiders, myself and some friends, and the rest baby raiders. And reminding them to align buffs was a constant, and they felt bad for mising them, we weren't hardcore, we didn't give them shit for it, but they felt that they messed up with not aligning it, and that's another part of the conversation a lot of people here don't have. The 2 min meta, and how harsh it is makes a lot of potential new raiders feel bad, they can feel when something isn;t right and when they identify what it is and it's them not gripping the system well enough, it's gonna kill morale.

I've spent the entirety of tier 2 getting them to not kick themselves in the ass when they were trying to learn a new mech and things weren't perfect. This is why I also say for every *tryhard* people whine, it's due to the game encouraging it more then it ever did before.

[Hycinthus]

I also don't think Yoshi-p should be throwing this back to the players.

You guys are the game designers and developers --> then design the game. Make it interesting. And everything else will fall into place.

You cannot just sit around and wait, and say we are waiting for players to tell us what to do next.

[Boblawblah]

His statement was referring to the two minute meta. He was basically saying "we did this because you asked for it and we're not going to flip flop back and forth on it every expansion so make up your minds." You can't have a different set of job abilities for every type of player so your post doesn't make any sense in the context of what he was talking about.

This, just like he's going to say in about 3 years "Well, you DID ask for field content in DT, so why is everyone hating on it now?". They try their best to get a read on the overall feeling of the community and often get it wrong, or overestimate just how big voices are. I'm fine with it.

[MsMisato]

His statement was referring to the two minute meta. He was basically saying "we did this because you asked for it and we're not going to flip flop back and forth on it every expansion so make up your minds." You can't have a different set of job abilities for every type of player so your post doesn't make any sense in the context of what he was talking about.

looking back at all the interviews and such, his biggest complaint was the community always literally complained how hard content was with the skills and such. This is how we ended up with the 2 minute meta because thats the major reason we don't see hard content beyond savage and ultimates.

[Jojoya]

I also don't think Yoshi-p should be throwing this back to the players.

You guys are the game designers and developers --> then design the game. Make it interesting. And everything else will fall into place.

You cannot just sit around and wait, and say we are waiting for players to tell us what to do next.

They were designing the game. Players complained.

They would make changes to try to keep things interesting. Players complained.

They then made changes based on player request. Players complained.

It sounds like they've finally learned that you can't please everyone. YoshiP has effectively said they're going to stop making changes requested by players unless all players have agreed on what they want. That's never going to happen, of course. That leaves the developers free to do what they want going forward.

Sometimes that might align with what players think want, sometimes it won't.

[CidHeiral]

This, just like he's going to say in about 3 years "Well, you DID ask for field content in DT, so why is everyone hating on it now?". They try their best to get a read on the overall feeling of the community and often get it wrong, or overestimate just how big voices are. I'm fine with it.

Even during the JP Fanfest keynote he made a comment along the lines of "funny you're all asking for field content now when you complained about the last ones but oh well please look forward to it!"

But what if I think the two minute meta is genuinely good and helps the game? What if I'm happy they added it and hope it stays?

Well you're certainly entitled to your opinion but it's difficult to see how the current design is a net positive. Others summed it up pretty succinctly before I checked the thread again, see below.

With this one change they've made it infinitely harder to maintain job balance, annihilated the possibility of job identity, greatly exacerbated punishments for death or rotational errors, caused crit variance to become a much more prevalent issue, and also made the game a million times easier for people that want a challenge and a million times harder for mechanically dis-inclined players. All of this just to make pressing a series of buttons easier for people that don't want to learn the most efficient order to push said buttons in.

So it's worse than just increasing the difficulty of designing jobs with personality.

It's not just an assumption or a possibility that there's no room to make jobs unique. Look at PLD, easily the most unique tank at the start of EW, forced to be reworked because it wasn't meshing with burst windows.