What I think could help Make Gameplay More enjoyable.

[Boblawblah]

Pretty much everyone considering 2 minute meta is a more bigger issue then it seems on paper.
It Limits Job design to be fully around burst, Paladin? is a great example of a job that was perfectly fine on paper but because 2 minute existed it had to be changed for every type of content

While I dislike 2 minute meta as a concept and gameplay design, it does far more damage by limiting all job design, to be "burst only" Theirs literally never going to be room for a sustained job or a job with a powerful/meaningful offensive cooldown on a 90 second CD.

Job design should be balanced around high end duties (and does get balanced around them), so getting rid of it would benefit high end players but also have positive effects of allowing more designs for even casual players, who may want a job that feels strong throughout a encounter not only super strong in short bursts

So basically, due to high end balancing, we're sort of forced into more bland job design? That seems..sucky. But if they got rid of it completely, I assume some jobs would become more important than others for high end content and those that were a bit too far out of the meta would get ignored. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is happening already for the elite players.

[Amarande]

So basically, due to high end balancing, we're sort of forced into more bland job design? That seems..sucky. But if they got rid of it completely, I assume some jobs would become more important than others for high end content and those that were a bit too far out of the meta would get ignored. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is happening already for the elite players.

Pretty much. It's actually a universal disease in multiplayer gaming these days so you can't even really get away from it anymore aside from retreating completely into the loneliness of single player games.

Used to be that games were built and balanced around the bulk of the playerbase, and top players were simply exceptional heroes to be looked up to.

Nowadays, you're expected to be exceptional as a baseline, culture lambasts you for being average or even above-average (a stark example: if you ever look at That Site We Don't Name, and check rankings on casual content vs. Savage, many players that routinely get roasted in Discord for being "bads" when they go in for tougher challenges are actually VERY above average when compared to the max level playerbase at large!). Basically everything is to be built and balanced around the needs of the elite and their content slice, and if you have any kind of a problem with how the gameplay runs for anything and you aren't one of their crowd, you don't have a right to express it. "You're just complaining because you're not good enough is all. If you were better, you wouldn't have that problem."

I think I've played one MP game in recent times where that noticeably wasn't the case. It was a mobile game that was very chill, very accessible even to a decent-but-not-like-it's-your-job player, didn't even cost that much (I think I spent about the price of a regular AAA game all told on it). OF COURSE it shut down after I'd been playing for a few months, because why wouldn't it? LOL

I'm also at a loss as to how to "repair" the culture at scale because it seems to be a pervasive thing about mainstream humanity as a whole lately. IE. Everything must be a go big or go home hustle. It might help if we had more communities that focused around the average working adult gamer, perhaps? But even that is a big ask because the requirements that modern social media puts on running a community on their platform heavily select for nearly everything public to ultimately be run by the hyper-hardcore crowd, and for more laid-back communities to be private invite-only affairs (which in turn become impossible-to-find - which I expect is part of also why MP games give off the vibe they do, as in most of the people you actually want to play with no longer come to the visible watering holes).

And yes, elite players are already starting to be more heavily impacted by the meta. Not sure how well 6.4 handled it but apparently 6.2 was a nightmare ...

[Rychu]

So basically, due to high end balancing, we're sort of forced into more bland job design? That seems..sucky. But if they got rid of it completely, I assume some jobs would become more important than others for high end content and those that were a bit too far out of the meta would get ignored. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is happening already for the elite players.

Unfortunately Rithy is almost exactly right. the 2 minute meta was originally pitched so that "casual" players had an easier time getting into how to play their jobs optimally. The fallacy in this proposition is that casual players do not give a shit about pressing things on cooldown. They play how they want and will press their 2 minute burst skills when they feel like it.

This creates a huge disconnect between developers and players because the devs thinks that this is helping the community, but really it just made everything worse. Hardcore players are mad because their jobs who were good at damage output different than the 2 minute meta (paladin, ninja, dragoon) are either gutted to fit into the meta or will be changing to fit the meta. Casual players are upset because they don't care to do a 2 minute burst on cooldown, so all they see is that the jobs they play are getting more restrictive and have less variety because every job is fitting into this same mold.

The average amount of time in a burst window is roughly 15-20 seconds. We are eventually going to hit an expansion where the amount of skills added will have burst windows longer than that, gunbreaker is already there and we just got this meta.

I hope the developers see this problem sooner rather than later because I want cool skills and I don't want everyone else to have to fit into my mold just for them to have cool stuff too