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

[Cynric]

It was both camps complaining, competitive and casual players complained about different things that led to the same result.

Many competitive players complained when things didn't line up with Trick attack or other buffs. Many casual players complained the game was too hard. (this usually led to dungeons getting quickly nerfed like Pharos Sirius on release) This caused Square to attempt to deal with both things at once and try to please all players at once. It's also the same reason why pvp has been different nearly every expansion, trying to appeal to competitive + casual players at the same time.

People complained a lot from both camps, the game got more and more homogenized over time. This was just the end result of it.

People also often say "Why does X job have this skill, Y Job should also have a version of this skill". This of course leads to problems.

The game has always had varying levels of homogenization, this is just the worst it's been.

That being said, Shadowbringers saw a large increase in the playerbase, so the community now isn't even necessarily the exact same community that complained.

[Kaedys]

Adhering to buff alignment was never an issue for midcore or casual content and it only really mattered once you hit Savage. The 2 minute meta was just the start of a concerted effort to do the exact opposite of what I said, and trying to cater to everyone rather than just saying 'Hey, it's okay that you're not good at buff alignment, you don't really need it for the type of content that you are doing anyway and it's something you can just work on getting better at.'

Why would people in midcore and casual content care about buff alignment? For that matter, shifting to a 2-minute meta means even more of our total damage output is fundamentally dependent on buff alignment, and more specifically on not drifting CDs. If the 2-minute meta did anything, it hurt less hardcore players that aren't as solid on their rotation and/or don't pay as much attention to their CDs and avoiding drift.

The 2-minute meta was very VERY clearly for the hardcore crowd. Casual content, half the time people just fire off their CDs whenever they feel like it, or forget about them altogether. The 2-minute meta in casual content is functionally the "on pull" meta, and nothing about CD usage on the pull changed in EW (the cooldown of a skill doesn't matter in the slightest when it's the first usage of it in that boss fight). The net effect of the 2-minute meta change was rewarding hardcore players that focus heavily on buff alignment and avoiding drift, punishing midcore players they aren't quite as good at doing that, and doing basically nothing at all to casual players that didn't and still don't pay attention to alignment or drift.

[Aravell]

The 2-minute meta was very VERY clearly for the hardcore crowd.

I keep seeing people say this, but it's wrong.

Hardcore players were the very first to speak out about the problems brought by the homogenisation of timers to 2 minutes back in Asphodelos, then in Abyssos, things got much worse. The end part of P8S featured a double damage phase, which greatly exacerbated the problems brought by the 2 minute homogenisation, this is when a lot more people started speaking out about it. The hardcore playerbase was already dissatisfied with crit fishing when there were only 2 (or 3, depending on fight length) full alignment burst windows to care about, why on earth would they ask SE to multiply the amount of full alignment burst windows by 3?

Just ask yourself this: "What would a subsection of playerbase that is already capable of aligning in the old system gain from this homogenisation?". The actual people who benefit from this change are the midcore people who want to break into hardcore. Some of that subsection would probably find it difficult to align all the different timers as they're not used to it, but instead of learning and adapting, they call for homogenisation. If you understood how the hardcore and the casuals play, you would see that the 2 minute homogenisation benefits neither.

[ThaCa]

Easiest way to deal with 2 minute is just remove the raid buffs. If all DPS are greedy they have full freedom one whatever internal timers they have. This would also solve the subrole issue that BLM and MCH face where either pure damage or buffs rule.

[Supersnow845]

Alongside buff alignment now being so easy you can do it in your sleep (regardless of who you blame for that change) absolutely nobody asked for a meta where so many buffs are stacked and crit is so strong that your actual performance is more determined by how many times you are lucky enough to crit dumb overpowered skills like hyosha ryarnru or revelation when in the burst window than it is based on things you can actually control and show skill expression in such as kill timers

[kaynide]

Just my ignorant humble opinion: had they not rebalanced for a 2 minute meta, I would have said not to bother with it. But now that they have, ideally it should make future jobs/job development/new abilities and ideally boss fights easier to balance if they are working within a strict 2 minute cycle. Things like calculating dps, timing for monster “big attacks” etc, etc, etc. So if having this meta helps shave off development time, great- spend that time developing elsewhere.

Again, I’m assuming a lot here, but I can’t believe the devs would invest a lot of time into something this “big” without it benefiting them.

[Gemina]

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?

Taylor Swift has surpassed Elvis in terms of sales and popularity. Does that make her a good musician? The Twilight series each grossed near or above 1 billion dollars in total revenue, while Bram Stoker's Dracula didn't even make half that (adjusted for inflation) despite having legends like Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman in the cast. Does that make it good writing and superior movies? I enjoyed Zenos in EW. Does that make him a good villain?

The answer to all these questions is no. Taylor Swift's music is horrendous, the Twilight books are some of the worst written works of fiction and screenplays to ever exist. And a villain is only as good as his motive, which makes Zenos poorly constructed at best. However, what these all share is a high entertainment value. We live in an era where style is valued more than substance.

This is an elaborated view of the two-minute meta. It lacks substance. It's a cash grabbing ploy that requires very little effort to implement while sucking in consumers who can't be bothered to learn how to play jobs correctly with intricate and individual design philosophies.

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"?

The two minute burst window is more of a gimmick than a role concept. IOW, its design would be fine for how a particular job plays. It should not be used as an overall design concept for nearly every job in the game. It's not about balance. It's about setting the bar so low that minimal effort is required to clear the game's content. This frustrates players who want to play chess, but are forced to group with players who want to play checkers. Yes, the more difficult content is out there starting at EX/Unreal. While this is fantastic for encounter design, it does not include job design. That's the problem.

I hope this makes sense.

[Kaedys]

I keep seeing people say this, but it's wrong.

Hardcore players were the very first to speak out about the problems brought by the homogenisation of timers to 2 minutes back in Asphodelos, then in Abyssos, things got much worse.

That doesn't mean they weren't also the ones asking for it in the first place, prior to seeing how it'd play out.

Seriously, please explain to me why casual players would ask for this. Or even know that buff alignment was an issue to start with. Literally the defining characteristic of casual players is that they do not put that much emphasis on optimization. The changes to the 2-minute meta did literally nothing, positive or negative, for casual players, because they weren't and still aren't inclined to pay attention to alignment. What does it matter if the cooldown of an ability is 60s or 90s or 120s if a person uses it 45 seconds into the fight and then whenever they think about it thereafter, or never uses it at all?

As for the midcore crowd, I stand by my prior statement that the 2-minute meta harmed them far more than it helped them, and that's entirely aside from any fight timing issues in the raids. Shifting everything to a single joint buff windows means any drift is incredibly punished, and midcore players are much much more likely to drift than hardcore players. I wouldn't be surprised if some in the midcore crowd were in fact asking for this alignment, but I also strongly stand by my assertion that the hardcore crowd was driving this as well, even if they've now come to regret its inclusion.

That said, I agree with some other posters in this thread. I think the solution may simply be to scale back and/or remove many of the raid buffs. Perhaps not all of them, some peeps like playing "support" type characters, but cut the maximum delta between being under aligned raid buffs and not. Prior to FFXIV, I played WoW for many years, and the only forms of raid buffs that game had were static buffs (ie. you buff the group and it's just a flat stat buff that lasts for an hour), plus a single shared-cooldown raid amp called Bloodlust that filled a role similar as Limit Break does in FFXIV (though less theatric and flexible by malms). And at least as of the last time I played WoW, cooldowns were all over the place, (45, 60, 90, 120, and 180 were all common, but 2.5m and 5m were also a thing), and often times a single class would have multiple cooldowns that didn't even align with each other. The net was that each person was responsible for managing their own CDs, and really the only planning that went into it at a group level was if there was a fight-specific burst phase or aligning with Bloodlust.

So perhaps the solution to the 2-minute meta is to make raid amps just wildly less significant, and emphasize optimizing personal cooldowns instead.

[Aravell]

That doesn't mean they weren't also the ones asking for it in the first place, prior to seeing how it'd play out.

Seriously, please explain to me why casual players would ask for this. Or even know that buff alignment was an issue to start with. Literally the defining characteristic of casual players is that they do not put that much emphasis on optimization. The changes to the 2-minute meta did literally nothing, positive or negative, for casual players, because they weren't and still aren't inclined to pay attention to alignment. What does it matter if the cooldown of an ability is 60s or 90s or 120s if a person uses it 45 seconds into the fight and then whenever they think about it thereafter, or never uses it at all?

As for the midcore crowd, I stand by my prior statement that the 2-minute meta harmed them far more than it helped them, and that's entirely aside from any fight timing issues in the raids. Shifting everything to a single joint buff windows means any drift is incredibly punished, and midcore players are much much more likely to drift than hardcore players. I wouldn't be surprised if some in the midcore crowd were in fact asking for this alignment, but I also strongly stand by my assertion that the hardcore crowd was driving this as well, even if they've now come to regret its inclusion.

I feel like you didn't actually read a single word I said. I literally said, in my post, that casual players didn't benefit from this. Why do I need to explain why they asked for this? I also said it's the midcore players who want to get into the hardcore scene that benefits from this, nowhere in my post did I say regular midcore and casual players benefit in any way.

You've also not proven your assertions that the hardcore playerbase wanted or cared for this change, you're just painting them out to be the bad guys because it's convenient. I personally know a lot of hardcore players that spoke out about the 2 minute homogenisation the moment we heard the news, yet you're saying they wanted this?

I suspect there's a huge disconnect between what people think hardcore players are and what they actually are.

[Jojoya]

I keep seeing people say this, but it's wrong.

Hardcore players were the very first to speak out about the problems brought by the homogenisation of timers to 2 minutes back in Asphodelos, then in Abyssos, things got much worse.

We know they were complaining after it was implemented and got to see the results.

The question is what feedback were the developers getting in Stormblood and Shadowbringers that prompted them to create the 2 minute meta for Endwalker.

Casual players don't care about lining up buff windows as a rule. How much damage they're doing doesn't matter to them as long as things end up dead.

Those going after parse rankings do and it's extremely rare for a casual player to care about where they are in parse rankings.