Final Fantasy 14 communities panic as it turns out change to blacklisting, meant to help reduce stalking, also lets players use mods to track their alts

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(Image credit: Square Enix)

Alisaie, a side character in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, folds her arms with a confident smirk on her face.

Final Fantasy 14 communities have been in a bit of a commotion lately—as a recent mod stepping into the limelight has exposed a vulnerability in the way Square Enix has handled itsnew-and-‘improved’ blacklist feature. In essence, this solution to the game’s stalker problem has inadvertently made it very easy for ToS-violating (but currently untraceable) players to uncover all of their target’s alternate characters.

A fuller explanation requires context. Firstly, while mods in Final Fantasy 14 areagainst the terms of service, a ton of players use ‘em anyway. This is because Square, at present, operates on a sort of ‘don’t be an idiot’ policy.

The official stance is that mods are forbidden and you should not use them under any circumstances. Under the table, however, Square has stated that it can’t spy on your computer to see what you’re using. Instead, it will simply punish you if you’re either obviously cheating, which is detectable through common sense,orif you’re reported for it. For example, if you use an addon that tracks DPS numbers, you’re fine, but if you flame someone for their DPS sucking? They can report you, and you’ll be banned.

This has led to a thriving modding community that Square can’t bring the hammer down on, exactly, even if it’s led tocontroversies and disappointments before. Doing so would basically nuke the entire roleplay community, for instance, where the use of cosmetic mods is commonplace for harmless visual tweaks (like, say, playing a hyur with pointy ears) to Second Life-tier monstrosities of wobbling flesh. That’s to say nothing of the accessibility and quality of life functions mods can offer—not that I’d know—like basic fixes and ping corrections to FF14’s netcode.

Why are people worried?

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Gaia and Ryne hold hands and stare into each others eyes as part of Final Fantasy 14’s latest Ultimate, Futures Rewritten.

PlayerScope, to put it simply, scrapes an “account ID” (one which FF14 saves locally from things like the in-game search function) and uploads it to a server—allowing anyone with the plugin to see every single character attached to that ID. Put simply, a player with PlayerScope installed can see every single alt you have.

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Dalamud, a popular launcher for addons—which isn’t associated with PlayerScope, to be clear—also had some players in an understandable panic flocking to its Discord to ask questions. In response, a mod from the server corroborates the above information: “AccountID was introduced with Dawntrail, but you can’t hide that information from a plugin because the game already knows it/receives it in plugins. Should [Square Enix] have devised a better system to resolve that server-side instead of client-side? Yeah. Probably.”

An extra point of controversy comes from the PlayerScope plugin’s author itself who, in an attempt to mitigate accusations of being a stalking enabler and the like, has created an opt-outsystem. In an announcement to their Discord, they write: “You won’t need to install the plugin to hide your characters. You’ll be able to set your character’s visibility to private through the ⁠set-profile-private channel.” As for why it’s not opt-in, Generall states that if this were the case, “[the mod] wouldn’t work effectively, because the data pool would be too limited”.

(Image credit: Square Enix)

Koana, a main character in Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, stares thoughtfully at a book in his hands.

Who’s in the wrong here? Well, it’s sort of an ethical quagmire. This tool does, in theory, enable stalking—something Final Fantasy 14 has unfortunately had a long history of troubles with, due to some arcane and strange attitudes to its friend list function (blacklisting doesn’t remove you fromtheirfriend’s list in turn, for some reason). The new blacklist features render you blissfully unaware of this fact, mind, erasing the blocked character and their alts from your client under most circumstances.

Even with these improvements, though, the only way to fully vanish off your stalker’s radar is to make an alt character, something which this mod circumvents. Having to give your account ID to its author just to stop it tracking you is no comfort, either, asking victims to essentially place their fate in the hands of a stranger.

If you were to ask me, I’d say Square ought to’ve kept addons in mind when designing the functionality of its new blacklisting system—it feels like it’s somehow severely underestimated the technological savviness of a modding community it’s largely, and even understandably, ignored. But knowing howdramatic these mod disputes tend to be, I have to wonder how long we’ll stay under the rule of live and let live.

TOPICSSquare Enix

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Why are people worried?#

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Why are people worried?

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