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Easy-ish fix. SQuare should encrypt the account ID with a private key, held on the server account. A one-way encryption.
Thank you for covering that.
Besides SE and (the most guilty) the plugin dev I actually see another guilty party in this. Discord.
This "site" has become far too much a wild west zone with servers existing that have illegal content (like the one of this dev) or even worse.
How can it be that Discord completely ignores all the shit that is happening in it?
It has become such a monster of data for this game so that no one knows how often their character is even to be found there in screenshots or mentions.
Regarding this topic here:
Don't give that psycho dev of this plugin even more data like your Discord account or your mail-address people.
He will probably NOT whitelist you and also your character data is already out there somewhere being sold to stalkers as we speak. It is too late.
All we can hope now is that SE stops their silence and does something. But given their track record I wouldn't hold my breath for that…
What I would add, the best place to actually tell Square Enix, is to file a Bug Report. That way, no one else except Square Enix will know about it and spread the potential danger.
I have filed quite a few in my time and they all got addressed in a fast and flawless manner.
Going to be very sad if they end modding possibilities bc of this
More than that, SE deals with stalking the way police deal with SA. Maybe 3% get justice.
I've had two stalkers, they did jack. I know others with stalkers, they did jack. I've seen entire free companies change their name and tag to slut shame someone. Some of it's been bad enough to get restraining orders outside of FF, and yet their accounts remain active. So ya know what, nah I'm not afraid they'll end modding. They haven't done jack about the worst offenders, why start now.
The dude that made the mod… you are the biggest clown and idiot of all of us
In typical CBU3 fashion they release a new "feature" thats broken.
Not even suprised
If Square Enix made it so that we disappear from the friends list and the screen of our harassers when we blacklist them, it would avoid this need too!! I can understand that some people come to this when the victims have so few means to protect themselves. For 1 year, a girl and her friends made alts to embed themselves in my group to stalk us and turn people against me. To the point that we became paranoid when we met a new player.
It's very trying, tiring, and when you try to defend yourself, to run aways from them, to blacklist them with their entire group, they say that you are the problem. Good gashlighting in power! Please Square Enix, if you want to solve the problem.
– Make sure the blacklist is applied to ALL our characters.
– That we can also block someone who is disconnected when we remove them from our friends list.
– That when we blacklist someone, we also disappear from their screen and they can't screen everything we say in the chat!
– And that we disappear from their friends list
– And that even if we're not in our accommodation, they're banned!
Since I blacklisted her, I don't see her anymore and it's a relief but often my friends ask me to team up all at once because someone caught her next to us spying!!
This is not normal! This is not acceptable! We're in a role play zone where everyone talks about interactions! Why do I have to hide all the time because of this person?
Personally, if I had such an add-on, I would use it to stop getting scammed and run away. But if it falls into the hands of harassers, it can become problematic, SE absolutely must improve the blacklist system in favor of victims!
I think the source of this problem is the way SE designed the MB – by letting you see seller retainer names and also forcing signatures on crafted items
One thing that they would let us is that they let at least Player search available, but not useable
Because when mutual blocks happen, whoever blocked first has the power
Me and my friend had a fight and we just never wanted to see eachother again, i went to block him in FFXIV and…he blocked me , but now he has the power of keeping me blocked, i can't look for his character name to block him myself.
I know they dont want people stalking but i dont want to know if they're online or their location just let me find in game the name ''Bingus'' so i can right click, block, any other option would ''fail'' since they blocked me.
its not that big of a deal, this information wasnt exactly encrypted by Squeenix
It's also not hard to avoid harassment or stalking, just stop being interesting
I use plugins for general application for convenience as well as using things for gposing such as brio and ktisis. Rping in xiv is way more enjoyable while using mare, seeing others unique characters… but seeing this plugin being able to stalk accounts makes me incredibly worried about losing most of the things I resub for in the downtime. Why are there these bad actors wanting to ruin it for the rest of us x.x
Honestly, people are so dumb and so bad most of the time in savage i need more than 200 people
And since we have a community of weak people, we can't say anything even when you try to not be toxic because they will cry like a bitch, it's probably my biggest grip with the game right now, the community
people always say " We have the best community" Oh it's been 20 years i'm playing mmo religiously, and we have one of the worst community i've ever seen
We just need to compare ourselves to other PVE games communities and you'll see that we're bad
Toxic positivity is still toxicity
as a pretty well known girl in my data center i do NOT want anyone to find out my 10 male'ra and bunboy alts
Opt-Out is a legal loophole a lot of old Doxxing websites used back in the early 2010s. All they did was scrape every bit of information about you that they could that was publicly accessible via websites like Facebook and Google, compile that into a database, and then offer a subscription service that allows people to look into every personal detail you've ever had including name, online aliases, IP address, physical address, and a laundry list of other things.
But they could "legally" do that, because you can "opt out" of their service, so long as you even knew the website existed and had your information, which is total bullshit.
Question: What about those systems that show players parse data without their permission, yes it helps those that wants to get better, but what about the tracking on that?
Fixing out the code base is one thing they need to do but they also need to enforce more social moderation. This kind of anti-social behaviour needs to lead to way more dire consequences for the offending player.
theres a bigger issue even if SE stopped this mess.
The Databases are already done. effectively anyone who has access to it can atleast grab very recent data from it.
this game need an anti cheat tool asap
It's time to implement anti-cheat. The main people doing stuff like this are the degenerate horny modbeasts that plague this game. I have seen unimaginable horrors created by modders. I would love nothing more than for mods to be banned so that these secondlife and imvu refugees can go back to where they came from.
I agree with the sentiment here in the comments. I think it’s time for anticheat, screw anyone using third party tools. I’m a console pleb, if I can clear savage and ultimates, anyone can too. Enough is enough.
There's no reason for the IDs used in the black list system to be usable by modders like this, why isn't that data obfuscated/encrypted so that its useless with out putting in time and resources? oversight by SQE.
They could easily encrypt the data, and have the decryption key be created based on hashs generated from the user's email, password, and/or the time they logged in.
thank you for the video and your opinion etc about that. def 100% agree to what you said.
keep it up happy
great community btw
Like yes this is a problem but everyone blaming SE is wild since this is all bc of a third party plug in using this for malicious ends.
Play FFXI like an adult.
If Modders continue to make malicious mods like these, and people continue to cheat using certain advantageous add-ons, and it continues to get this kind of visibility, I really do see a world in which Creative Business Unit 3 goes scorched earth. The community has been playing with fire for a very long time now. I'm not sure how they'll create a blacklist feature that is account wide, without using account information which could potentially be scraped by those that try hard enough.
I really don't get how this thing is blowing out of proportions, as if everyone and their friends were constantly being stalked by hordes of deranged people that are lurking everywhere. I've been playing since Shadowbringers, so almost 5 years now, and haven't had to blacklist more than a few goldsellers and the random toxic guy in PF that started being rude before leaving. That's the extent of my experience with "bad apples" in the community, and yet reading this article you'd expect I'd have at least had ONE case of a nutjob harassing me, but no.
This is strictly a case of rp venues / erpers / social fc drama turned sour, and thus affects an EXTREME minority of vocal people, that are somehow asking for the removal of all mods (cars can be used to kill people, should we ban all cars?) and most don't even take a split second to think/read and realize the main problem lies with SE's bad implementation of a blacklist system in the first place.
100% agree with you, Brother, SE absolutely needs to fix this ASAP because this is a massive cybersecurity issue. Like, we’re talking serious privacy concerns here stuff that could straight up lead to a possible class action lawsuit if they’re not careful. Not protecting player data like this could easily violate their own Terms of Service, and it’s wild they’d let something this risky happen in the first place. Hopefully, calling attention to this puts the heat on them to actually do something before it spirals out of control. Appreciate you using your platform to break this down for everyone!
I don't actually have any faith that Square Enix will take this as very valid criticism of their game and systems. This is likely the thing that will finally make them try do something about mods.
Tysm for talking about this stuff Mrhappy, as a woman ffxiv raider seeing more prominent creators in the community talk about the issues within the game itself with stalking & other such things. Obviously this isn’t an exclusively women issue, but in this game women are often the ones thrown under the bus with these outdated blacklisting & lack of social features due to misogyny. Stalking in this game is scary and should never happen to anyone, so ty for making a video about it so we can have a conversation about this.
It is because of their block system. It is like how alts don't exist if you aren't playing them. It is dumb. A played should be able to use their alts in all homes that they might own without needing someone else to invite them. Like how you can't send gil to an alt via mail. It is dumb. The entire alt system, friendlist, block list, all of that is connected and needs to be completely redone.
If you are the mod creator reading this: please, go to therapy
Just that
People still play XIV?
On lots of platforms, blocking someone doesnt actually block them. They can still see you, follow you, comment to you. But you cant see them. It needs to go both ways. They should never be able to find you again
I have have genuine stalkers in XIV in my many years of playing. The people that do it are so scary ):
The worst thing that bothers me about the way SE handles the Blacklist is – as far as i know – that you don't even need that Plugin to gather those informations, other programs outside of FFXIV are likely to be able to achieve the same thing.
I know they said the current block system was supposed to be a stepping stone to a larger rework later, but honestly with the way it's implemented, it needs to be sooner. I also recall that the custom launcher framework that makes this and other plugins work, while it does have systems in place to prevent malicious plugins from entering the official repository, they have no power over plugins that are installed via unofficial repositories. And even if they did, they have no way of stopping it from working without also breaking plugins that aren't malicious.
I think covering this is a good thing, because the more people that are aware of it, the more likely it is to be fixed.
"making mod ass-ets"
Who thought allowing ur stalker to see u is normal, they still follow u lmao.shouldnt it be they can’t see u at all
blocked people staying friended is super weird.
Great, 1 idiot messing up the whole thing and having SE change the API again, good job
#deadgame
Give me an explanation as to why such bad behavior could ever be a smart move from the stalkers ? This is the easiest way to get stalker people banned ? Fair, you want to stalk me, have your way. Creating an alt, waiting a few minutes to get a PM or anything, record done, report sent, byebye. How dumb would you be to stalk and harass people using that thinking you wouldn't get instantly reported and banned for using plugins, doing yourself the favor of handing proofs to the person you're stalking.