A recent post on the subreddit has sparked a big discussion within the community. Is FFXIV in need of better tools to protect players from harassment? Or could such tools be used against their purpose? That’s the great discussion in this episode. Also; Belts are going away, and this is your final warning to get your affairs in order.
Post on the /r/FFXIV subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/ptspr6/every_social_feature_in_xiv_is_enabling_stalking/
Belts post: https://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/topics/detail/6648785e31423c6b65c97e6f6940119adcd9c1bc
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:27 Welcome & Updates
3:15 Recent Events: Stephen Critchlow Has Passed Away
4:40 Recent Events: Maintenance (September 28)
6:30 Recent Events: Tales from the Twilight Final Story
7:40 Recent Events: TGS 2021
9:24 Recent Events: The Belts are going awayyy
21:48 Recent Events: Online Store Emote (Pantomime)
23:29 Recent Events: FFXIV the fastest growing category on Twitch
32:37 MogMail
48:39 The Great Discussion: Are FFXIV’s Social Features enabling stalking?
1:16:32 Minimum Ilvl Pull & Wheel of Doom
source
Hey speakers 🔊 love your podcast and always look forward to seeing you bois at it again. On the discussion of privacy in ff14, I would love to see a offline feature because sometimes I just want to log in and solo quest and not be bothered by friends. I think making other characters disappear from your screen is a bit much tho.
TLDR; old FC's leader had a stalker who afk-d 24/7 outside the FC house, stalker eventually gets invited back to FC after months and months of wearing down the victim & takes over, toxicity ensues and most people who might have been able to help the leader leave or were kicked.
So, there's an FC that I got invited to as a sprout, one of those that's always at max capacity and inviting new people/kicking inactives, there was this guy who would afk outside the FC mansion literally 24/7. We were specifically instructed to never interact with him because he was stalking the FC leader.
It was one of the first things we'd say to new recruits, too, they'd get a o/ "welcome! don't talk to the lalafell by the aethernet shard at the house!"
One day he vanished and didn't come back, we all celebrated and it felt much safer going to the house not having to worry about some creepy guy just *watching*, y'know?
Turned out that stalker got re-invited into the FC under a different name (unsure if alt or name change) & is now one of the leads, I've checked the FC profile when I see randoms in the field out of curiosity and lead bounces between the stalker and the old FC lead pretty regularly.
Needless to say after this guy joined up again we started getting just the worst sort of people in the FC, actively and intentionally giving bad and outright incorrect advice to new players, maliciously shouting down people trying to give genuine advice, i could go on for a long time.
Zero moderation or oversight meant that the toxic assholes ran rampant and got bold since they knew they wouldn't get kicked or corrected or anything.
I am still kinda salty about this time a player who'd just started playing 2 hours ago asked how best to level from 1-15 & i mentioned leves being excellent early exp along with FATEs & such.
I got shouted at by some random asshole for 20 minutes because he, in his own words, personally hated leves . That sprout left the FC somewhere in the middle of all of it and that was the day I turned off FC chat entirely and never once turned it back on.
It culminated in a bunch of the long time members all leaving and as far as we can tell the FC is just a huge revolving door with none of the older members still involved and it's gotten kinda….cult-y? Like, we heard from someone who left a few months after we did that they'd been kicked for joining a savage static and how they went on & on about how that was taking them away from FC activities or something. There's this old reddit post about something called the "Dreadwyrm Academy", their account read kinda like what that FC evidently did.
I think about it sometimes wondering if there were better features/reporting systems in place if it would've happened like it did.
Afaik the leader did try multiple times to report the stalker and nothing was ever done because it wasn't like he was standing there yelling obscenities at us.
I know there was probably a lot of stuff behind the scenes on discord & whatnot since I'm about 95% certain they'd dated for a while at some point in the past and from what I can tell he just sorta wore her down with the months and months of endless stalking.
Did not mean for it to get that long and if any of the whole 20 people who read the comments know the FC I'm talking about please don't bother them, if just for your own safety.
kupo
Also you should be able to blacklist someone to keep them out of your house.
The mutual friend list thing was a concern of mine from launch day. It was nice to have to confirm that you want to be friends, but I've seen things go poorly if a couple breaks up and one takes to stalking the other through the friend list.
The limited capabilities of /blacklist was also a problem when I was sitting at a table with other roleplayers. A Lalafell wearing only a subligar hopped up on the table and spammed emotes to rub their butt on evereryone's faces or moan. A lot. We asked them to stop and reported them for spamming and harassment, but even blacklisting didn't stop the shouting and moaning sounds. We went back some days later and they were still there, harassing anyone who stopped to socialize. It would have been lovely if /blacklist blocked more than just text since it deprives trolls of the attention they crave.
I know that talk of mods are frowned upon around here, but this is another case in which modders stepped in and did a better job than Square has, or have stepped up to fill in a necessity. With there being plugins with the QuickLauncher that can auto-block gil seller messages and also a voidlist that removes selected characters from the game; model, emotes, sounds, everything.
At the BARE minimum, it should prevent you from grouping with someone ever again if you add them to the blacklist. Also yeah, the damn wedding ring. That shouldn't be a thing if you divorce someone in game. That's beyond gross. And reporting people in ffxiv is so convoluted. It makes you want to just rip your hair out.
As a victim being stalked constantly and gm hasn't done much, I begin to lose faith to this game. It's hard to continue playing ffxiv knowing some psycho is watching your every moves since they're able to go into your house too….and gm still offering general response sadly…
Hence why I hope they can provide players the ability to protect ourselves. I don't see how self protection by making blacklist player invisible can be abused honestly. Mostly people get blacklist for advertising, spamming emotes and any poor behaviors. It's dumb for those people blacklist sprouts not knowing mechanics, but it's a choice we deserve for privacy. Harassment is serious and currently it's being abused and bypass thanks to the loopholes of blacklist. Please help protect our community by improving blacklist 🙏
The 1-way friends list removal isn't so bad for those who break past the friends list limit. It allows for people to keep in touch even if they can't keep room on someone's friends list.
But yeah, all the other stuff makes sense. I have personally experienced one particularly awful bully in FFXIV, and I wish I could just remove their player from my vision in the overworld so I never have to see them again. While the player is no longer doing anything against ToS against me, I still feel extremely uncomfortable seeing them looming around.