While I love the game and the community, a few bad apples make the whole bunch look rotten. It seems like the Final Fantasy XIV team is getting ready to crack down on players, from suggesting legal action against those threatening voice actors and other community members to using mods to cyber-stalk other players. Maybe, just maybe, we can all be normal for a few days or something. That’d be great.
We’re Never Going To Beat the ‘Not Normal’ Allegations, Are We? Especially if We Keep Doing Things Like This
Originally reported by PC Gamer, players have begun using Mods to skirt around the officially implemented Blacklisting feature that Square Enix added to Final Fantasy XIV. While my experiences in the world of FFXIV have been nothing but positive up to this point, a few of my friends have mentioned some more… nefarious happenings that are going on in other servers. Players tend to forget that while these digital avatars may just be characters in a video game, real people are controlling them behind the screen.
To avoid giving this nasty mod any additional screen time, I won’t be mentioning it by name. But, it scrapes a player’s account ID to find not only that original character that banned them, but any alternative accounts that they may have, commonly referred to as an “Alt”. With this information, the harasser can continue stalking players. With Account IDs being formally introduced in Dawntrail, this information is incredibly easy to find. Especially when you consider how modders are already altering the code of the game to allow people to do whatever they’d like with it.
Bad actors are around in every type of game, but MMOs tend to bring out the weirdest, wildest, and most interesting parts of a person’s psyche. There are times I’ve been roaming around the world, watching the Novice Network fill up with some of the most depraved things I’ve ever seen. Other people are trauma-dumping to players they’ve known for under 5 minutes. And some are hitting the MSN Messenger special of “A/S/L?” on the regular.
Square Enix Needs To Find a Way To Circumvent This From Happening Further in ‘Final Fantasy XIV’
While the aforementioned Blacklist feature is helpful, the account-wide Player ID system seems to be more of an issue than we could have ever imagined. Some players join these games with nothing more than the intention of acting in bad faith. And at this point, as mentioned in the PC Gamer article written by Harvey Randall, it seems like an egregious oversite by Square Enix not to anticipate that some folks would take this account-wide ID as an invitation to cause some issues.
As I mentioned before, I’ve had nothing but positive experiences in Final Fantasy XIV. I actually even ran into someone during a Dungeon who had read one of my articles, causing our group to stop and chat for a while afterward. It was a surreal moment and helped me identify even further with the game. But for those who are just looking for a way to escape the harsh realities of the real world and slip into a comfortable digital space, things like this can have troubling real-world after effects.
If someone is willing to stalk you in the world of Final Fantasy XIV, what’s to stop them from going that extra step? It’s an unfortunate reality of the world we live in today and something that Square Enix really needs to consider changing. And even if this particular mod does go away, someone is bound to make a newer, more terrifying version of it before the end of the week.
Just… be normal, people. Let folks run around Eorzea without needing to worry about being creeped out.
The post Hey! So Maybe Don’t Cyberstalk People in “Final Fantasy XIV” Using Mods, Thanks! appeared first on VICE.
