Watched (most of) Claic's video about the summon fest issues in JP and I finally understand what the issue is. On its face, it looks like basically what has been a thing in Puzzle and Dragons for years with their Godfests and "Godfest Exclusive" units, meaning it was a special pool that could only be summoned from when a godfest happened (twice a month) and it was kind of an ever growing pool.
There are a ton of big differences between these systems in PAD and FFBE tho, the biggest of which is the fact that in FFBE, getting 1 of any unit is practically useless. You NEED 2 at a minimum, and it's desirable to get as many as 4 or 6 of said units.
I would agree that SummonFest is pretty much a carbon copy of PAD Godfests, but I think you're slightly off target.
I agree with your logic regard in dupes in PAD v/ FFBE, if you are strictly talking about leader units. After all, there can only be one player chosen team leader, so dupe meta leader units are near pointless. On the other hand, if we are talking about sub units, the more dupes of a meta sub for a given team build, the better. Similar to FFBE, nothing synergizes better with a meta sub than a dupe of that meta sub unit.
The problem here is not so much that FFBE is shifting over to a Godfest-like system. Strictly speaking, a banner like the Lunafreya banner happens during every single Godfest (and even during Super and Player's Choice Godfests). That's actually quite fine, in a vacuum. But....
-- Strike 1: FFBE is switching it's primary gacha mechanics in mid-life. That's a **huge** no-no. For better or worse, for all of the reinventions of PAD's Godfests over time, the core gacha mechanic has stayed the same for seven years. That gives consistency to the player base and assists players in accepting modifications to that system over time. FFBE (in JP) is actively changing their primary gacha model in the middle of the game's life.
-- Strike 2: If you're going to swallow the poison pill of changing your primary gacha model, go all the way. Go full stupid. Don't half ass it. What did Alim do? Make the SummonFest pool of units **start** at Year 4 and ignore the first 3 years of units. Fabulous. Now you have dual gacha systems competing with each other.
-- Strike 3: It's apparent that the adoption of the SummonFest system is an attempt to fix epic screwups regarding decisions made with the UoC system there that Alim is very deeply regretting (far, far too many UoC tickets given out). The players know this; they aren't stupid. In the end, the players are angry because they are perceiving that Alim is punishing their success at the game. This isn't accurate, but as any PR person will tell you.... it's not what you say or mean, it's all about how the audience of a communication perceives your message. And given that Reddit has been constantly burning for nearly 3 days now over this, with the inferno actually still intensifying, it's a really safe bet to say that players are royally pissed off.
Yeah.... without some sort of mea culpa from Alim, JP is semi screwed.
Now, looking at Global, it's obvious at this point that Gumi is trying to steer the Titanic away from the ice fields to prevent history from repeating itself. Not bringing the Whalerena to Global to avoid the largest potential long-term source of UoC tickets is clearly a move to avoid needing to evoke "emergency measures" that are resulting in the current disaster on JP. The Mog King revamp will probably happen on GL, with maybe a more regular progression table instead of the famine-mode prize tiers on JP.
Although some new monetization ideas are originating in Global (such as direct purchases of older units for $25 USD each), at this point JP is really the beta server for all the kinks to be worked out monetization models launched on JP before being released to the Global server. I feel bad for all the suffering that the JP is going through right now so that the culture shock won't be so intense when and if some version of this comes to Global in the future.