Final Fantasy 14 promises crackdown on stalking exploits with actual solutions now, rather than politely asking the plugin creator to stop

Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki Yoshida has commented yet again on the controversial plugin that surfaced earlier this year, which exploited Dawntrail's new-and-improved blacklist system, allowing users to read an account ID and therefore stalk a character and all of its alts.

Thankfully, what Yoshi-P has to say this time is a lot less nothingburger than the forum post he penned a couple weeks ago, essentially saying the team was considering taking drastic measures such as… asking the plugin users to stop. This time, speaking during the latest Letter from the Producer livestream, Yoshida revealed counter-measures would be introduced, starting in Patch 7.2 releasing in late March.

Community producer Toshio "Foxclon" Murouchi provided a rare English translation, which I've edited for clarity, reassuring players that the plugin's exploit begins and ends at character information. "The one thing we want you to feel safe about is, whenever you read that internal ID, you will never reach personal information or billing information, so please do not be concerned about it," he said. "However, we are taking it seriously because it is not good to read that internal connection … we are not very comfortable with it."

Murouchi clarified that the team wants to "keep the same level of the blacklist function," but it seems like additional steps are being taken to try and keep account IDs away from prying hands in the future.

Translations courtesy of the Final Fantasy 14 Discord server offer a little more insight into Yoshi-P's thoughts, with him telling viewers: "I am very disappointed that this kind of tool exists, but we will be improving the system going forward," while later adding "Obviously we as a dev team are not ignoring this, I cannot say how far we're going but with Patch 7.2 we are taking steps to counteract this."

As always, both Yoshi-P and Moruichi ended the discussion with their usual pledge for people to stop fiddling around with plugins and mods, not that it's ever swayed anyone away before.

It's nice to see that the team is paying more attention, beyond how it initially came across in last month's forum post. While fear around the plugin has largely died down now—thanks in part to time and also more reasonable all-knowing plugin folk (who had nothing to do with the controversial one in question) trying to snuff out some of the larger concerns. That doesn't mean there aren't a few bad apples ready to ruin the bunch though, and any extra measures to make life more difficult for would-be stalkers is good in my book.