the addon situation…
Hello everyone I am Jmulls of Jmulls Gaming and welcome to my little corner of the internet!
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In today’s video, I talk about the issues with an upcoming mod for Final Fantasy 14 and how and why Square Enix should react in my opinion.
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To add, the way they "solved" the blacklist issue is the easiest way possible. They attach an account ID to characters, and then let the client itself handle the hiding. To do it "correctly", they'd need to handle it server-side so that the client has no concept of what is an account ID and what to do with it, which would mean you'd need to make it so whatever generates text knows about account IDs and also knows about blacklists AND handles them individually for each player so that no one sees blacklisted accounts. If they have a single place that handles text, this is… not easy, but it's doable, if they made a mess (and they always make a mess), then it's going to be very, very bad, and it'll get prohibitively expensive to scour every line of code to figure out where blacklisted messages might "leak".
And even then that's just chat! There's so many other systems you'd have to handle. imo I don't think their solution is bad, I'd rather have public alt links than being unable to block entire accounts. Let's see what they decide to prioritize now.
You know, I want to be optimistic, but thats becoming more and more difficult everyday since 7.15. Like that recent harassment policy they implemented is WAY too severe in my eyes to protect someone who, in all honesty, has been awful to the customers for the smallest of things (she called players racist for not liking Smile on Twitter. I might as well be a KKK member since I hate stuff resembling Disney by her logic) and now we have this.
Dawntrail is proving to be a PR disaster for SE. Someone must've stolen King Ramsey's slab over there, because they're suffering from a major curse this expansion
The "player characters get invisible near quest NPCs" is most likely a client-side thing. The server still lets you know about each other, the characters are just invisible on your screen, but for the server you are still both there. The big question is how to resolve it so blacklisting one character blacklists all alts on the same account, without the blocking player being able to know the blocked persons account id:
1) If blacklisting a single character automatically also adds all other characters of that account in your blacklist (you block BadMain then BadAlt and BadAlt2 also shows up in your blacklist), then you essentially have the same issue (being able to probe for alts by attempting to add to blacklist), even though the account ID is not known.
2) Even if you simply don't display the characters BadAlt and BadAlt2 in the blacklist and only store it internally on the client, mods could still parse it out
3) If on the other hand you make the filtering server-side (server does not even send you that the blocked player is near you on their alt so you wouldn't notice them) it would add a lot of overhead to the server, as the server would have to cross-reference every blacklist of every player's in range to figure out whom to send data to and wo is blocked by whom. Probably easy to implement, but lot of additional CPU work for the server. That's why most MMOs simply broadcast the data and let each client handle blacklisted people locally (which goes back to problems 1 and 2).
I guess what could be done is the server not only having a "blacklist"-list, but also at the same time a reversed version of it, a "blacklistedBy"-list, which indicates by whom a player is blocked. Having a list of that kind would make point 3. muss less stressful on the server. (instead of checking 100 player's blacklists around a player, just check that one players "blacklistededBy"-list and use it to filter out those players who are in the list, which should be much faster… but still, additional work, which might be bad).
I really think they should stop working on the story, let the writers take a break and get new ideas, and instead fix the backbone of this poor game.
There's a lot that SE should do with this game, but my experience so far has led me to believe that they're going to do the bare minimum or nothing at all.
Mr. Happy said this is a few vids and streams, so take with a grain of salt, but it may be that modding is illegal in Japan, not as a matter of company policy, but national law. If that's the case, SE wouldn't be able to acknowledge modding. We should take into account they may have actual reasons behind some of their attitudes
oopi love modding
Pleasepleaseplease do not call plugins mods. The community refers to mods as cosmetic/texture/animation/sound overrides and plugins as things that add functionality to the game or give/overlay information in some way
I think an issue that people are either ignorant of or simply refusing to acknowledge when it comes to saying Squenix should accept modding is that MODDING IN JAPAN IS ILLEGAL. This is not hyperbole, this is covered by both the Japanese Copyright Law and the Unfair Competition Prevention Act, where with both puts Squenix in a bind. Although the laws are more designed to combat people modding hardware like consoles or hardcore modding of software, to Squenix it doesn't matter. To acknowledge the modding community at all would be in direct violation of the law. However, the FF14 team clearly also understands that modding is a core component of a lot of mmos, and FF14 is no different. This has led to their "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, and there's a pretty much a 0% chance they'll ever change it because of this.
As the situation builds, there has been those who went and checked out the plugin and found out that you don't even need to blacklist or block the person. the plugin just immediately scrapes the information. So anyone can just go onto a popular city zone like limsa and suddenly everyone's accountIDs are there. IT doesn't matter if its on the dev's server as well. Why? anyone can make the plugin respond to their own custom server meaning even if you ask the dev, going to the discord and such, someone else can just grab it anyways. Vanilla or not, this plugin just makes that no one is safe, thanks to CBU3 making that incompetent (putting it lightly) choice.
Who cares if they allow or don’t allow mods. They don’t allow hacking either yet they take a lot of steps to make sure you don’t get hacked. The friend list has always been a point of contention. It is absolutely absurd that you remain on a person’s friend list even after you have blocked them.
Yoshi-P doesn't want to install third party security programs. However I swear with each mod drama and ultimate release, I swear he is rubbing his forehead, going "Maybe I was wrong."
with how long it took for them to do something about the blacklist feature i just don't think they take stalking all that seriously to begin with. i don't think they understand how bad it can get. Got a secret erp alt? better hope your stalker doesn't send that shit to your employer
Jmulls, the issue with alts and needing to know if a character is an alt of someone else is the fact that some people warrant a block. Entitled blocked individuals will absolutely, absolutely roll up a new character, on a new account, and try to smooze into your good graces again if they're obsessed with you. Happens a lot in the eRP scene. Someone who was a yes, who became a no, feels entitled to what fun they had been having previously.
Alts are extremely common in the raiding community, specially amongst w1 raiders and world raiders, they are commonly used for what is known as "Splits" which is a tactic used to ensure all 8 players of the static get gear every single week.
So for raiders is common to have 1 or 2 alts all at max level and they sometimes use them to sell stuff on the marketplace, or go incognito into pfs, like a streamer would be less likely to be spotted if he just wants to remain incognitop in the game on an alt than they would on their main account, so yeah, alts are a common sight at end game ff14
Who remembers a video of Yoshi P was trying to hype the community for DT have ACT on his PC, he got caught in 4k or it was a short or pic point being mods might be against TOS but when your director uses them, that’s the definition of a hypocrite. Do as I say not as I do mentally. It’s total crap
Tbh, if the Dev-Team doesnt want the playerbase to use mods, why is taht a problem? If you dont like it, just dont play it~
Dont force them your Ideals. There is a reason why players are able to submit "suggestions" and "improvements" in the support section.
Besides that, the game will lose characters/uniqueness if you mess up with it, simple as that.
Furthermore, asfar as I watched the "modded characters in the discord picture channels", players doesnt have a good taste..
Another point against mods in first place is, you can abuse cosmetic mods, for example copying the clothes from the mogry shop, which can be identified as digital theft partways.
I am really tired of the excuse of "The code is spaghetti code." They're a multi billion dollar/yen game publisher; fix your game.
dont touch my mods /cry
FFXIV is still based on spaghetti code. I agree, we have the technology to erase someones existance ingame in someones eye, if you wish to do so, but its not that simple if the game cant support certain codings.
Its easy to complain if you dont know the whole background.
IF they can see account names its a deeper issue as now accounts can be hacked specially if they don't have 2fa
Rather than fix that first, I rather they make whole regional data center oriented queue. It is just stupid this is not happen when we need to queue to other data center just for ranked crystaline conflct. What the fuck…. (and let alone when this ranked rotated to logical data center which almost always full in the future). After that, then tackle this issue.
This is easy to solve. Use the Nintendo Ninja method : court electric slice adventure.
ngl the thought of having this plugin purely only for finding out who is YOUR stalker seems great to me cuz i have ppl hopping on alts and constantly surrounding me in a weird way and finding out who these alts are attached to would help me so much.
Instead of this mod, they should make a mod that tracks all your friends name changes so when you take a break from a dead patch you don’t come back and you are like who da hell are you? Oh… Bob… my bad! 🤣
all of you are very stupid it seems, if you go to square to complain about mods and plug ins, their only solution is to shut all of it down. they been turning a blind eye to mods but if you put it up front and center, what do you think they will do? remove all of it. i dont know why you all think its squares job to police what mods goes into their game IF YOU WANT MODS, but you are effectivly shooting yourself in the foot if you go on like this. if you want mods, modders need to POLICE THEMSELVES, if you want zero mods then go ahead and complain to square about mods. MODS ARE AGINST THE TOS so square will not shut down some of it, either all of it or none of it.
Please just double weave Flight or Flight and Imperator already 😭
Perma ban for anyone using this mod.
Once again CBU3 just showing everyone that they are clowns
From what I've read on several threads, the person who made it did so because he's mad about being undercut. Like okay, what the hell is the point?
I don't see an issue with it. People use mod to keep harassing you using alt? Easy report for 3rd party tool usage + harassing, get them banned for life, they should have remained in the blacklist 🙂
I mod some QoL stuff like Hrothgar and Viera hats because they are too cheap to even attempt fixing it (one guy doing it for free vs company making easily millions with sub fees)
They absolutely need to b held accountable for doing the bare minimum and IT catastrophies like these. The modding scene is the backbone of the game, if they like it or they don't. But given SE, who knows if they even want to fix their noodle code and probably let the mod and it's functionality run rampant.